Ambivalence: Self-Doubting and Suicidal Table

In today’s media news, it is hard to see an article that only contains texts, and it indicates that there is a huge impact of images for an article. Images usually attract readers firsthand at the front page of the news sites, and are used within the articles to emphasize the importance of the subject of the article and to communicate with readers. Those images can be illustrated as graphs or charts that provide readers some detailed information of subject; pictures of the aftermaths of wars or disasters that evoke readers’ pity for victims; abstractions or unclear images that contain hidden meanings, which readers have to think further; and so on. On the Opinion Pages of the New York Times, Phillip Lopate’s article “The Essay, an Exercise in Doubt” can be found as an example of the third case of use of images as a visual rhetoric that uses an interesting image to support the argument.

Why do we write an essay? What is its purpose? How does it affect its writers and readers? An essay is a very familiar tool that people develop since they are young, but old enough to write, and it becomes one of the essential duties as they grow up. Maybe everyone in this world has written an essay at least once for their lives. Or, it becomes a career path for some of them.

Phillip Lopate, an essayist, illustrates that the essay is an exercise in doubt in his article. This article is fairly straight forward and states that even though an essay is not as popular as fictions or poetry, and it has been anticipated to have lower sales, he still values the writing of an essay as a “feast on doubt” or a way of “second-guessing [oneself]”. He keeps questioning himself and taking risks as a “soundtrack” of his life and career in order to improve his writing process. Therefore, he is disappointed by the change of the use of essays that its characteristic of self-doubting or ambivalence is dramatically lost due to the high competition among the colleges, because essays have become a tool of self-advertisement for students to get into good colleges. He stresses that as an essayist, he is always “monitoring [himself] for traces of folly, insensitivity, arrogance, false humility, cruelty, stupidity, immaturity…” to think more critically and write more intelligently. He also believes that this exercise of doubt is what people have to “cultivate on [their] own, in private…in an essay” because it not only impacts one’s writing skills, but also the daily life, which is more complex than writing.  

One unique takeaway from this article, other than further thinking or debates on the topic of this article, is that there is an animation of a table with an axe on one of its legs chopping the other side of its leg off. Unlike other articles containing one or more straight forward, simple pictures of objects that are discussed in the article, a random animation of a table appears as a rhetorical image in the middle of the article, and it is strange and odd enough for the readers to think about for a moment. As a rhetorical image of the article, the animation of a table communicates and expresses its own meaning to readers. The animation is given without any specific caption to readers, and this can lead each reader to different reactions. One may be stunned when one encounters it, or one may be appreciated by its hidden meaning that one has to figure out like a puzzle. In other words, the crazy table hurting itself has more things to say other than its colors or motion. The motion of the animation not only easily attracts readers’ attention immediately, but it also stops readers reading for a moment and takes them into further thought process, such as questioning why the table has an axe on it, or why it is chopping its leg off.

The animation of self-chopping table is well used in this article along with author’s argument of exercise in doubt, but the best place to put the animation down is very vague for this particular article. Because this article is an essay that contains some personal experiences, examples, and argument, it is not ideal to place the image at the top of the article like other articles do, because readers are not yet ready to examine for the suicidal table without any warnings. Thus, depict it is not so perfectly fit for the flow of the article, the placement of the animation is fairly adequate as a division of the article to keep readers’ attention.

If we think simply, it is easy to catch the author’s intention with his all of his argument that is demonstrated previous paragraphs in the animation: the ambivalence. Like the author is self-doubting which can lead him to confusion or disorder, the table holds an axe, a weapon which can destroy itself. However, at the same time, these potential harms can be flipped into the benefits that can sculpt a masterful writing, or an artful table, if they are well organized.

So then, would you want to write an essay or sculpt a status that is commonly found in public area? Or, a masterpiece that is exclusively unique and bore from self-conflicts?

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/the-essay-an-exercise-in-doubt/

What do you see in the picture?

“Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire”: such an odd title for this kind of article, and I still do not understand what he means by that (at least for me). Well, anyways, I really enjoyed reading this article because this type of articles makes me reread and think about what I just have read. Yes, I totally agree with Morris that pictures contain thousands of words and meanings in them, and I also believe that people never know what they are telling us, who are the third persons to the picture forever. It can be anything, or just nothing. Maybe a little caption under the picture does not really tell anything about itself. When I first read this article, I thought of these words, “I (only) believe what I see”, which are probably spoken by anyone in this world. I want to add more onto that quote that people only believe what they believe. What I mean by this is that, like everyone thinks differently, she/he would interpret a picture in various ways. Morris in this article tells us that he believes many things in a picture, in his own way of beliefs, and raises some question for his audiences and himself if a picture tells the truth or not. But here, I rather want to ask if there is really truth in our world? Who defines truth or falsity? Or, does truth of a picture really matter for us? I think the relationship between images and beliefs is really about how people interpret the picture; in other words, there is no one proven answer for that. At the end of his article, Morris repeats himself from the introduction but at this time with “answer” that “pictures may be worth a thousand words, but there are two words that you can never apply to them: “true” and “false,”” which I believe it is the “truth”. Morris's article mainly talks about the truth of photograph’s story, but I think it contains more than that. Maybe he is trying to tell us that there is always more meaning or story in anything we face, like I believe he says more than photograph in this article.

Interpreting one picture from different points of views, if I understand this right, I think Kevin Carter’s photo can be a good example for this idea. Carter’s “Vulture stalking a child” is world widely famous photo not only because it won Pulitzer Prize, but also due to what it contains in the picture. This is a pretty simple picture: there is a child lying on the ground and a vulture staring at her. Many people were shocked by this picture when it first appeared, and he came under criticism for not helping the girl. He was described as that ”the man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene,” but ironically the photo was introduced as “metaphor for Africa’s despair” on the New York Times, and won the prize for it. This one picture contains lots of things even though there are only two figures in it, and it is truly shown differently from people to people. But seriously, there is nothing can be defined as truth or falsity by us. I mean, do any of us have the right to judge?

http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/vulture-stalking-a-child/

The Magic Number That Helps Renew Your Life

The original article “Relax! You’ll Be More Productive” is an opinion post written by Tony Schwartz on the New York Times that talks about effects of the amount of time people sleep and take rest on their work efficiency. Tony Schwartz is the president, founder, and CEO of The Energy Project a company that helps individuals organizations perform better and more sustainably. He started his career as a journalist, and published several books about work and productivity. In this short essay, or rewritten article, I am mostly forwarding Schwartz’s idea of the relationship between people’s work efficiency and their lifestyle. His article is mostly written on the manner of professionals, and I tried to rewrite this on the casual level of college students’ lifestyle with some extra personal voice. I used some school related examples so that we easily understand, and are able to aware of the usefulness and importance of the relaxation in our lives. This essay (or blog post) is written to be sounded more casual and relatable to my blog’s audiences such as my classmates, but I also kept and adapted some lines, examples and studies Schwartz used in his article to support the essay more intelligently.  

The Magic Number That Helps Renew Your Life:

By Joo Young Kim

THINK for a moment about your typical school day. Is it hard to get up and go to your 8-am class? Can’t you remember anything after reading 10 pages of text book? Do you drink gallons of coffee and energy drinks every day? Did you fail your mid-term after 10 hours of studying?

Then, you must have done something wrong. You may look diligent and smart when you are studying for hours, but that does not mean you are the most productive. The result would only be burning out. I mean, do you even have time for yourself at all?

In today’s society, we value and emphasize on the ability of multitasking, which means we should be able to achieve more in less time. This kind of mind has been set since we were young, and we always have believed “More is better.” We try to stay awake for a longer time during day and night, and sleep less so that we can work more, study more, and play more. However, this type of lifestyle in fact lowers our work efficiency, and harms our health. In other words, you will fail the test, feel very stressed, and blame everything for it. In contrary, people who work for a short period of time, take rest and play in between work, and sleep more are able to achieve more than other type of people, which sounds unfair for us.

As we grow up, the world requires more and more to make us fit into our society. The amount of work we deal with every day increases constantly. Unlike finishing 10 problems of math homework in your second grade of school, we are working for two majors, one minor, different school organizations, future employers, and so on. We are trying to deal with unlimited work in a limited time. Nonetheless, many studies suggest it is better for both our body and work to shorten work hours and extend rest hours. Professor K. Anders Erisson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied and found that the best of ELITE performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes, and rarely work for more than four and a half hours in a day. In simple words, they only work about four hours, and eat, play, and sleep for about twenty hours per day. That sounds fantastic. It sounds like if we study for four hours, and eat, play, and sleep for twenty hours per day, then we all would be super geniuses!

However, that is not so true; we should not miss a very scientific, important aspect on this. The only reason these “elite” performers are able to work well is that they are well balancing their ability of body energy. There is such a thing called Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC named by researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman in the 1950s. BRAC was initially indicating a cycle of roughly 90 minutes during our sleep, but a decade later, Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates during the waking lives as well. During the day, our body gets physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes, and body tells us to take a break within each 90 minutes. See, 90 is a magic number.

Therefore, sitting and staring at your screen on chair for hours and hours do not help your essay done at all. However, you may want to go back to your dorm room and take a nap for a while, because instead of wasting finite time of your life, you are recharging energy of your body for the next set of work. According to a sleep researcher, Sara C. Mednick, a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep. Again, the magic number. And don’t forget to have a healthy meal, which also recharges your energy. If you see your peers are sitting and eating something so ambitiously, don’t judge them. They are just saving some energy and joy for later the day. Their downtime is not wasted time, and so neither is yours.

Now, stop working on your homework. Go to your room. Take a rest. You will find out you do not have to rely on caffeine anymore, but still achieve more, because “when you’re renewing, you’re truly renewing, so when you’re working, you can really work.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/relax-youll-be-more-productive.html

Taking an approach

Harris has talked about some types of rewriting techniques so far, and the technique he introduces in this chapter seems pretty different from previous ones. He tells that previous ones are” ways of marking out [our] words and ideas from those of the texts [we] are working with“, and by doing so we create a dialogue shape in our writing. For most academic essay, he says, we are merely applying “the idea of a writer to a certain subjects, with the aim not so much of testing those ideas but if proving their validity”, or providing more examples of what already had been argued by others. However, taking an approach is different. It seemed so similar with forwarding when I first read Harris’s description in this chapter, but he makes clear of his point about it. Simply, whatever he talked in previous chapters are rewriting others’ ideas or arguments while taking an approach is rewriting their style. We need to transform others’ writing into our own, which is not merely replaced or rebutted. He gives the easiest example for us, music. We have seen so many songs were rewritten into different styles by different singers, and they should be creative and original while keeping the same message to their audience. That is the same for films, paintings, and writings. Any types of “text” can be taken an approach and the audiences can decide which is good or bad. Harris gives three ways of taking an approach in this chapter, acknowledging influences, turning an approach on itself, and reflexivity, and these help us, writers to rethink and rewrite others’ work, and make stronger bond between the two. 

Countering: there is no right or wrong answer, but...

I found this chapter really interesting because countering others’ argument in order to make my own better is always the hardest part of writing asserting essays for me. I always found that there are many good argument made by the opponent, and I can hardly be against it. However, Harris here tells his readers that it is okay not to be against their opponents’ rather, there are other ways to counter the arguments. Unlike forwarding, countering is a tool of creating argument in the writing. Harris describes that it is not necessarily to prove who is smarter to make a right argument; rather, it is the process of reviewing what has been there, and therefore, leading to another direction of the conversation. He says that countering is a technique of Yes, but… while forwarding is simply the continuous Yes, and… in conversation. Countering is not exactly pushing down one’s weak argument (because there is no right or wrong in the arguments), but to add other perspective or alternative on opponent’s incomplete and partial argument so that the criticism we have can be seen as useful and fair. He introduces three ways of countering in this chapter: arguing the other side, uncovering values, and dissenting. He shows some examples how effective it is used as countering in others’ work, but also gives some advice that we have to think before we counter the argument. We should not guess at the intent, and should focus on position than phrasing, be careful with modifiers, and stress what we bring to the discussion, because this type of writing is more than just criticizing one’s work, which means we have to have our own idea in the writing. 

Fowarding: creating something new

I guess most people today find this word Forward when they check their emails. We check our emails every minute of every single day; we delete some emails even without reading them, mark some stars to indicate the importance of the emails, respond to make comments on the messages we received, and forward some interesting, important or whatever kind of emails to others. Harris describes forwarding as a tool of creating something new, and extending conversation. He clearly shows that we never win a conversation, but add something onto it to keep the conversation going. This is that simple, but there are many ways to forward something to someone. Harris demonstrates four ways of forwarding in this chapter: illustrating, authorizing, borrowing, and extending. Each has different degrees of extending the “conversation”, and what we have to understand while using forwarding in our writing is that we are not exactly forwarding to the author of what we talk about, but to the third person. In academic writings, our purpose of writing is not necessarily to respond to the authors we use; rather, we want to create new ideas to demonstrate to others, and so on. In the process of forwarding, we have to be aware of the fact that we lose control of its use in public sphere. For example, when you speak one specific word for interview, and it can be understood in different way for the listener, because forward is also the process of one’s thinking, and it is definitely different from people to people.

Press-sphere? What?!

To be honest, I seriously have no idea what Jarvis talks about, or what his main point is on his blog, although there are some charts that he uses to make this easier. The terms he uses and the language he speaks seem so different that nothing really makes sense. I think he is trying to say that the news is not merely published by the press, but anything and anyone today in high-technology age. I think it is true that data or archives are not enough to press news nowadays. It not only cannot attract readers anymore, but also simply it is not enough. News indeed is “story” about our society; if there is no story, so is not the news. The involvement of commenters, companies, and other things makes news more interesting and relatable for readers, as the same as if we are surrounded by various “atoms” (the me-sphere chart). I kind of agree with his point (if my understanding is right) that “story never begins and it never ends.” I mean, the story must have started at least once ever since there was the beginning of living species history, but it just never ends. One story brings another one and on and on and on. I believe it is the same for the news process. It should be a circular figure rather than the linear chart which ends by “followup.” I do agree that the involvement of readers can affect the actual news really bad because I have seen many poor quality articles online, and I think that is why many people sometimes choose particular press instead of reading local small press.

Everything should be pros and cons, and whether Jarvis is for or against this system, I think it is important to accept this new change, because there is no end point here as well as the news and story.

The ways to get news

As the generations keep changing, the way of getting news also gets changed. Many decades ago, people could hear news only from other people after many days of the actual incident happened, or even after it was solved. Later, the development of society and technology brought us convenient ways of getting information such as printed newspaper, radio, etc. However, nowadays those are already considered as old ways of getting news. People, especially young adults, get their news from Internet every single minute. I have noticed that most of people in our class and university use their smartphones to check newest news by using different kinds of apps. We do not even need to go to their websites to check once we subscribe it to emails or apps because the news will be simply “delivered” to us. I found it interesting that many classmates mentioned social networking system as one of the sources that they have, because I never thought of Facebook or Twitter as a source of news. But soon I understood because, for example from last weekend, people were able to know what was happening during the Super Bowl even though they were not watching.

I assume that Carr and Hedges would not be happy with this phenomenon because they think the SNS is constantly decreasing civic literacy. They believe that the more time we spend on Internet, the more stupid we are becoming. However, as a blogger, Sullivan would see this more optimistically because the Internet makes people to spend more time on Internet reading articles or any other words, and interact with others. There are more opportunities opened for people to participate in literacy. 

What am I getting from the NYT

Reading the New York Times is still a hard thing to do for me as an international student, because there are so many hard words that I have to pause for a couple of seconds to understand, and it distracts the flow of reading, which makes me hard to focus on what I was reading just a few seconds ago. Despite of this, I am enjoying reading the articles from NYT because it is one way of looking at the world at one time. As I mentioned before, honestly I do not really care about what is going on in our world, because none of these issues directly affects me, therefore, I ignore mostly. I do not watch TV or listen to the radio anymore, and it does really drive me out of communication. However, since reading the NYT was assigned as daily homework-ish task, now I automatically go to the website at least once a day even if I am just checking the headlines, and get at least some kind of information that has been considered important.

I have noticed that there is a lot of news about politics at the home page, especially about the gun policies recently, and other political issues from all over the world. Many of these are posted as the headlines so once it is easily noticed by and attracts the readers. I like how the titles are in bold so they easily catch people’s attention, but at the same time, I do not like how all the most important news are related to politics, or something unpleasant. I know it is not as important as the political articles, but for many times I like to read other articles about technology, lifestyle, or even small local issues, so these are the ones that I usually miss to read when I am busy. 

Honestly, I do not really care what is going on in today’s society. I know it is important, and I do read news online, but really, I do not care. Only reason I get news is that I think I have to know it anyway in order to communicate with others, and share new ideas to make myself a better thinker. I know this does not really make sense, but that is really what I think.

When i went to high school, the best way to get news was on the way to school every morning, because my uncle loves to hear news, especially sports news, from radio on the way to work. On radio, I could hear lots of news about sports, accidents, or any issues happened the day before, and we could develop discussion based off one topic we just heard. In that way, I could learn more than I thought inside my brain and became more understanding.

Now, I do not ride his car anymore so there is less time I hear from radio; rather, I get news lots from people. I work at the front desk of Driscoll Information Center, therefore, there are many chance that I hear various things from people who just walk by or work together. It is true that I can get just a few segments of news they share, but there are more chance to get much more diverse news about small concert of local band to social justice issues in the Middle East. And if I am interested in the topic I hear by, then I can simply search online. I also read news online from New York Times, or Wall Street Journal. I started to read them only because of class discussion, but it became more habitual reading recently that I go to the websites, and read some top news on my free time, so that I am more aware of what is going on in this world. But it is still kind of hard to follow up with news that I am not that interested, and often times I need longer time to figure out what is really going on for those kinds of topics.