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Levinson Chapter 7

January 30, 2012

myrvikcas Uncategorized #en3177 3 Comments

I at least found Levinson to be more interesting than Rettberg. In chapter 7, there were three sections that stuck out to me. These included “Myspace Vs. Facebook; Subjective Differences”, “Reconnecting with Old Friends Online”, and “Photos of Breastfeeding Being Banned on Facebook”.

Myspace Vs. Facebook; Subjective Differences

In this section Levinson discusses which he thinks is better myspace or facebook. He never really states which is better in his opinion since he uses both for very different reasons. The main reason I like facebook better than myspace is because facebook has a cleaner look. Myspace was always filled with useless random pictures and stupid backgrounds on a person’s profile. Half the time no one filled out the information that they were supposed to fill out. Instead they posted pictures of their interests or pictures of favorite movies. It just ended up being a mass of chaos. The Facebook profile is clean and not cluttered. It is more organized and you can find old status updates faster. It has your profile picture and you can read about interests and things in a much better fashion than you can on myspace.

Reconnecting with Old Friends Online

Even though I have to admit that myspace made it so much easier to find people online than facebook does, I kind of like it that way. I’ve had several friend requests from people who I do not ever want to be friends with on facebook or in real life and I try to keep my facebook clean of people who I don’t really want anything to do with. I tend to clean out my facebook friends about once month. I have never gotten the idea of having 600 some odd friends online and never taking to pretty much anyone of them. If a person doesn’t interact with me, or I don’t interact with them by the time I do a facebook cleaning I dump them. It’s so much easier than trying to sort through friends that you don’t really want to pay attention to. Most of the friends I had in High School for instance never really have anything interesting to talk about. Instead they seem to think that facebook is a place to vent their problems. That is why I tend to have very few people from my high school as my friends on facebook.

Photos of Breastfeeding Being Banned on Facebook

I can agree with facebook banning these pictures. I know that a lot of moms would disagree with me and Levinson does too, but breastfeeding should not be pictured on a social media site. I have no problem with it being discussed, or posting articles of it online. I agree that mothers should be able to feed their babies in public whenever and wherever they want, but posting a picture online of your child at your breast is not a very flattering picture. I mean think about it… Your children are going to grow up and someday they might have a facebook account. Do you think your teenage son or daughter wants to have a picture of themselves attached to your breast for the whole world to see posted online? I know I wouldn’t.

Rettberg Chapter 2

January 24, 2012

myrvikcas Uncategorized #en3177, blogs, faith, Rettburg 2 Comments

While reading chapter 2 I had only a few of the sections stick out to me, so this is why I only chose to comment on these sections.

Orality and Literacy

In this section Rettberg focuses on Plato’s view of writing versus speaking. I was a bit zoned out for the first half of the section until it started talkin about Jesus’ “Parable of the Sower”. This section stuck out to me in a big way. As a Christian I’m kind of skeptical when a secular books mentions a Bible passage. However the more I read, the more interested I became. You see Plato had a point when he said that speaking personally with someone, and talking to them face to face has more of an impact on someone, but the disadvantage of this is that we only speak to people who are willing to listen to us. If they don’t like it they ignore us or walk away and we don’t get to finish what we are saying. However, when someone reads something they usually read it to the end if you can make it interesting enough. Even if you read something you have no interest in, it can put a spark of curiosity inside you. That means you will look up more things on it, and thus you will get a better understanding on the subject- A seed has been planted. Some of those seeds will die, but maybe, just maybe one of those seeds will grow. If that seed that you planted is what you believe in, well you may just have had a chance at witnessing to someone you may have never been able to witness to in the first place.

The Introduction of Print/ Print blogging and reading/ Printed precedents of blogs

Here we learn about when print was invented and were it was used. As I was reading these sections my mind was still on my faith. I can’t help it. Here’s what I personally think about this; Most books that people write are there to make money or just get a person’s name out there so they can make money someday, but the Bible has a different agenda. The Bible was created to spread the message of Jesus, and before the invention of print this couldn’t be done as easily. Instead people had to write things out by hand which could be quite tedious. The other way would be to memorize the stories of the Bible and then tell them to anyone you could find who would listen. You weren’t reaching a very wide audience. As soon as you get the invention of the printing press you get more Bibles printed and more people reading them. You’re able to spread the Word to a wider audience. The Bible is one of the only books I can think of that you can read the entire thing online in many, many languages for free. It is the number 1 best selling book in the entire world. That means that people are reading the words on the page. If someone has a question about something, they ask someone who knows, or if they have access to the internet they look it up online and find out what the heck it means. They can even compare this information to other sources to find out exactly what it means. In other words, the internet has become the Christian’s best friend in regards to witnessing to people.

The Late Age of print

Okay so, honestly even though this chapter stated that the internet is a great tool, I personally think it starting to mess the art of writing, and words. All you have to do to figure this out is look on Facebook. People don’t use punctuation, they don’t capitalize the beginning of a sentence, let alone nouns, and the worst of it?

wen u c stuff like dis bcuz ppl dnt wanna write out a wrds so dey save demslvs time by comin’ up wit shortened wrds dat make brly any sense an giv u a hedache wen ur tryin’ 2 read it bcuz ur mind has 2 sort through all these random letters an figure out wat in da wrld dey mean.

It’s stupid really to expect a person to read something like that in a normal way. Save yourself some time. If you want people to read the things you say and actually understand you write so it can be read!