Abstracts and simulations

There's a funny thing about abstracts: they make doing the reading really easy, or not even necessary in some cases. Abstracts are great at giving the nitty gritty of the research and evidence so that the reader can easily tell what is happening in the research and the rest of the article. While abstracts are a great source of information for readers, and give them a quick snapshot of the information within the article that will tell the reader whether or not they want to read the piece, abstracts also tend to replace the reading for many people. More often than not, after reading the abstract, readers will not actually take the time to read the article because the abstract presented them with every piece of information they feel they need. Even better than an abstract that simply outlines and quickly details the main points of the article is an abstract that draws it out for you. When an abstract includes a graph, chart, or some other form of illustration, a lazy reader is really in for a treat! When the main points and main evidence in support of those points are plainly spelled out for the reader, with a visual aid, the reader can usually get enough information to make or support an argument from just the abstract, and they don't even have to turn any pages.

The interesting thing about abstracts is that we tend to think of them more as the text and not the illustration associated with the text. They say that pictures say a thousand words, and while I am more inclined to use words to say what I think and feel, pictures seem to be a highly under-rated medium through which we can present information to a reader. It is also interesting to note that the way a reader interprets writing can be altered by an image. If a reader is given an illustration, their perception of what is being stated could be totally altered by their understanding of the text in relation to their understanding of the illustration.

I think that in the same way an illustration in an abstract has the capacity to give a reader a new way of understanding a text, so can computer simulations. In fact, I think that computer simulations and computer imaging are even cooler than just simple illustrations. These types of illustrations give the viewer/reader a way of seeing something in the depth of detail that their own minds may not automatically take them to. Computer imaging and simulations have the potential of showing the reader/viewer a radical idea rather than simply trying to tell it to them. The only big negative I see here is that the reader is only being given the CGI artist's idea of what is true or real, and if that person doesn't get it right, then the reader is not presented with an accurate image of the situation.

Also, sorry this post might be super ramble-y and disjointed. I am writing at 3:15 in the morning after a night of just 4 hours of sleep so my brain probably isn't quite functioning at it's best! Maybe someday I will get some sleep and write something brilliant and coherent . . . I don't believe that today is that day.

Comics

Out of the McCloud reading, I would have to say my favorite chapter was Chapter 3, that is not to say that i necessarily disliked the other chapters, but rather to say that Chapter 3 resonated with me more than the others did. I've never been the biggest comic reader, therefore it is sort of a foreign world for me. I really enjoyed reading the third chapter, however, because it gave me some insight into what my brain is actually doing when I read a comic. And I thought that was pretty damn cool. McCloud introduces this whole idea of closure, and blood in the gutters.

Closure is where the reader actively fills in the blanks with their own imagination in order to make sense of the two panels through which they are navigating. It is a chance for the reader to actively decide what has happened between the first panel they see and the one that follows it. The gutters give the reader a sense of authorship, and some responsibility in forming the story. I particularly like the way that McCloud puts it on page 68, "Every act committed to paper by the comic artist is aided and abetted by a silent accomplice. An equal partner in crime known as the reader. I may have drawn and ace being raised in this example, but I'm not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime, each of you committing it in your own style." This concept, that the reader is an active participant in the writing and understanding of the story is essential to understanding this medium and how it is read and comprehended by readers. Each person may read the same text, but they will have read a different story because no two people will fill the gutters in the exact same way--no two people will interact with the text in the same fashion. This is best demonstrated by a series of panels on pages 84 and 85, in which McCloud shows the difference between what is put on paper by the comic artist, and what a person's brain might actually read the text as. It beautifully illustrates the way in which the reader takes what is given to them by the artist and embellishes it (closes it) to fit whatever story their mind has formulated.

It’s all hyper to me.

The idea that everything is “hyper” is quite prevalent in these texts, and an interesting one for me to ponder. As I type away right now, it is to be noted that this is going to be a decently long text that will only be available on screen (it’s a hypertext, if you will). It is also to be noted that I have taken all three of the readings for this evening and printed them out, for who wants to read a cumulative 27 pages on an entirely non-interactive pdf when, as a reader, I need to be highlighting and making notes on the texts in order to write my own hypertext on the readings about hypertexts? What an odd predicament, right?

Sosnoski remarks that most people feel an aversion to reading long texts on-screen, yet everything in the world seems to be quickly moving from paper to screen as the main medium. Hayles is in agreement on this. As technology continues to advance, the prevalence of on-screen reading increases more and more. In fact, most of us wouldn’t even think of some of our digital reading as reading because we encounter it so frequently that it doesn’t feel like an oddity anymore. We scan Facebook and Twitter, we read Cosmo articles online, we do our research for our classes on websites like JSTOR and the MSU Library Website. In classes such as this one, we read each other’s blog posts and write responses, both of which we do online. Our world is quickly moving toward (if it hasn’t already reached) an entirely digital reading environment. We are so desensitized to onscreen reading that it almost feels second nature to us, yet when it comes to texts longer than 4, maybe 5, pages, we feel more inclined to read the text in print. This is an interesting way for me to start a discussion on hyper-reading and hypertext.

Sosnoski also states that “future advances in technology are likely to bring us pocket computers with the look and feel of books and to provide for us not only the text but also loads of complementary materials” (161). What’s the most mind-boggling thing about this statement is the reality of it. We have Nooks, Kindles, iPads, and other forms of “pocket computers” on which we can not only keep electronic copies of books but also easily access any sort of complementary material we may need. It is amazing that while the world seems to be pushing more and more toward technology, and advancing further and further into the hyper world, we readers resist the urge to accept and use the technology at our fingertips. We literally have ways of holding hundreds of thousands of pages of texts in our hands and at the swipe of a finger we can view a whole new text in a matter of seconds. We have the capability of accessing all of these texts and their supplementary materials at the blink of an eye, and yet we resist this movement (or at least I resist it). My internship, editing novels for a small Bozeman-based publishing company, is entirely comprised of editing and reading work done from my computer screen, and regularly I am tempted to print the manuscript out for myself, edit it, and then type in my changes. Unfortunately, I know that this would make the process far lengthier than it needs to be, so I do all of the work digitally. Yet I cannot help but feel that ever-present tug to take the hyper out of the text and make it print. I can appreciate the advances in technology, and I can accept the convenience of being able to hold all of my necessary texts on one small tablet, yet I cannot bring myself to convert to a full-blown user of hypertext. For me, nothing will beat having paper and a pen in my hands and really getting at the text—hands on.

Additionally, Sosnoski essentially calls us lazy readers. This, I could not agree with more. Due to the vast accessibility of hypertexts we readers have become prone to hyper-reading which is essentially characterized by filtering and skimming. Instead of doing a detailed and close reading of the text, we mentally break the texts down and search for the things that we find useful. I’m not even going to attempt to lie and tell you that I am not guilty of this. I am. In fact, if you’ve mystically convinced yourself that you are not a hyper reader—you are lying to yourself. As someone who has mass amounts of reading each night, I think there is no way I would get through all of them without hyper-reading on occasion. And honestly, if a text doesn’t interest or intrigue me, of course I am going to be prone to hyper-reading it. But I think that this is all a part of the hypertext conversation. With text literally at our fingertips, are we more inclined to hyper-read? I think yes. And are we really giving the texts that we are reading the respect that they deserve when we hyper-read them? No, I don’t think we are. 

Narrative Rationality, Rational Narrativity

In reading Fisher's piece on the narrative paradigm and the real world paradigm I was struck by how my I saw the intertextuality between those two concepts and the idea of homo seriosus and homo rhetoricus. With the theory of homo seriosus and homo rhetoricus, I feel that the concept of having two different types of people ignores the fact that we are inherently creatures of many different sides, therefore, I find it impossible for a person to be fully one thing or another. In that same fashion, with the two proposed paradigms, I think that Fisher ignores that humans cannot simply be one thing or another. The real world paradigm suggests that all human communication is sparked by man's need to rationalize and argue everything in his environment, while the narrative paradigm suggests that all human communication is sparked by the need to tell a story (no matter whether that story is one of the living or one of the imagination).

Now, I am the type of person that heavily believes in grey areas, and that things simply cannot always be black and white. Therefore, it is easy for me to say that I cannot fully agree with Fisher in the complete separation of these two proposed paradigms. I do not believe that all conversation is sparked by the need to rationalize and argue, nor do I believe that all conversation is sparked by the need to tell a story. I think that people can very easily differentiate when they want to or need to rationalize from when they want or need to tell a story. I think that in some situations we need to do one and not the other, yet at the same time I believe that in some situations we need to both rationalize and story-tell at the same time. I think that these two paradigms cannot be totally separate and that one cannot exist without the other--hence the grey area. I personally believe that no story is complete without rationalization, otherwise the story would make absolutely no sense (think about living in a world like that of Alice in Wonderland)

and no rationalization is complete without a story (think about living in a world where everything is strictly fact driven and there is no imagination).

A world without stories is a place in which no one really lived, and a world without rationale is a place in which nothing can be made sense of. I believe that the two paradigms are co-dependent and must coexist in this world. Hence the title of this post--Narrative Rationality, Rational Narrativity--either way I look at it, narrative needs logic, and rationale needs the human element of a story.

Now, I've gone on and on about what I think about Fisher's piece, which means I've neglected the Wysocki piece, and in all honesty, that is simply due to the fact that the Wysocki piece really didn't strike me. I may have some different thoughts on that front after discussion tomorrow, in which case I can add those in, but for now, the piece really didn't spark any sort of super cool, share-worthy thoughts for you all.

Rhetorical Situations and Intertextuality

First, I'd like to say that I loved having to read the Grant-Davie piece. For one thing, we often throw around words like "exigence" and "rhetorical situation" before we define them, and frankly it gets a little confusing! So I was glad to read this piece and have things broken down a little better than I've seen them broken down previously. So what on earth does "rhetorical situation" actually mean? Well according to this piece, it is "a situation where a speaker or writer sees a need to change reality and sees that the changes may be effected through rhetorical discourse" (pg 265). I was hesitant to accept this definition at first, because it sounds as if a rhetorical situation may only arise from a standing problem that needs fixing; however, as the piece went on it also addressed that a rhetorical situation could arise from happy events as well--that's where exigence comes in. I also think that this piece is interesting because it takes the standard three points that we focus on--exigence, audience, and constraints-- and challenges them. This piece says that the rhetor is as equally important as the audience, and I couldn't agree more. One would not write simply for the purpose of being read, if that was the case, half of us would never write! I think no truer statement is laid out there (in this piece) as when Grant-Davie says, "situations do not exist without rhetors, and that rhetors create rather than discover rhetorical situations" (265).

Now, I am no stranger to the idea of intertextuality. I am also the first to admit that I once had a very difficult time accepting intertextuality. The idea that no piece of writing can be produced without the influence of every other word that a person has heard or read or written before me was not only baffling but a little painful. I always felt that what was so amazing about writing was that I could create something unique that came out of my mind and my mind alone. For me it was impossible to believe that what I found magical about writing could be stripped by the word intertextuality. Now, however, I've come to accept and appreciate the concept. I can accept that each writer draws on the work of the past. In fact, writing would not be what it is today without those who broke the old conventions and created the ones that we use today. Without intertextuality writing would never evolve, and we as writers would never evolve. I can totally appreciate this, but I cannot fully buy that writers are not the romantic image that has been created for us; I cannot fully accept that we do not each live upon our own island, in our own world, writing the things that flow from our own minds. Let me explain. You see, each writer only knows what they have previously experienced for themselves. No two writers have read or written or spoken all of the same things, therefore each writer lives on their own island with their own knowledge base to work with. All of these islands are located in what I am calling the Sea of All Writers. We can each migrate from one island to another, exploring what our peers know and learning from them, but in the end we can only take so much information back to our own island. There is no way we will explore every single piece of information that has come before us, and the future writers will never be able to explore all of the writing that has come before them, but I do believe that we draw on everything that we know in order to write whatever it is that needs to be written.

Intro Video

Okay, so this video is super awkward, so pardon my weirdness everyone. More fun facts about me: I'm from Seattle, I am in a sorority, and I am a member of more fandoms than I think should be healthy. :)