TallDrinkofWater

2004-03-08T09:07:00.000-08:00

"It is finished"

My E-Rhetorics quest is rapidly drawing to a close. My website is as finished as it's gonna be (go there), and this is my last blog. It's a liberated feeling, being done with PWR forever. But I'm going to miss our class; we had some really awesome people in section 5 with very creative ways of entertaining the class during their presentations. And next quarter, my life will be devoid of all writing save IHUM, which is a depressing thought. I'm thinking about starting up my own blog just to keep the writing juices flowing. That way I can just further isolating myself using the internet... j/k.

I'm not sure if my project changed my views of the internet that much. We knew to expect it: too much of a good thing is a bad thing; the common addage even applies to social internet use. But never, of course, to PWR; we could never have too much PWR. Alas, it is finished. And we're DONE! Woot!

2004-03-08T02:16:00.000-08:00

Socratic Slap-Down

In IHUM, we've been reading Plato's Symposium, which, I can't lie, isn't my favorite bit of the classics. But our discussions in section has it's ups and downs. There was a great lull in the conversation when our TA asked "What is rhetoric?." As an almost-graduate of Stanford's illustrious Program in Writing and Rhetoric, I felt inclined to add my bit to deafening void, saying something about how it's the way frame an argument to be most persuasive. The conversation picked back up and we got to hear Socrates's view on the matter.

In sarcasm that has echoed down through the ages, Socrates criticizes his host for the party in the Symposium, a Sophist by the name of Agathon. The Sophists were a relatively new group of rhetoricians that felt the merit was in winning the argument, and not necessarily arguing the truth. They would make outrageous claims, and then argue so beautiful as to prove the impossible. Socrates refuses to follow Agathon in a sort of round-robin eulogy of Eros after the Sophist finish his speech in an artistic flurry of metaphors and balanced phrases.

"That bit at the end," Socrates exclaims. "Who would not be thunderstruck on hearing the beauty of its words and phrases? I for my part, on reflecting that I myself should be unable to saying nearly as beautiful, almost ran off and was gone in shame... I know nothing of the matter, nor how one is to eulogize anything. For in my stupidity I believed the truth had to be told about anything that was given a eulogy."

Agathon: 0 Socrates: everlasting props

Even as Socrates was giving the slap-down, I was thinking how one must balance the rhetorical with the true. It was a nice little reminder in the middle of IHUM that your credibility is significantly upped if you stick to the truth and don't embellish too much with rhetorical devices.

2004-03-07T19:04:00.000-08:00

Facebooking

Defintion:
face-book (v) trans. or intrans.
1. to spent endless hours browsing profiles of friends or of friends of friends or of friends of friends of friends
i.e. I was facebooking into the wee hours instead of doing my PWR project
2. to look someone up in the facebook and possibly
a) send them a message
b) poke them
i.e. I facebooked Josh Childress and he only has 4 friends after last game.

If figured it needed a textbook definition after expanding from 3 to over 3,000 Stanford students in less than one week. Read all about it in Friday's Daily, which was a little late on the uptake. I was on it by Wednesday. Now I've got.... (insert 25 lost minutes of facebooking (see def.)) 52 registered friends and 1,291 social contacts as a result of those friends. Jebus.

An interesting side now, Josh Childress's profile does not belong on to Josh Childress. It gives his email address as "jchildress@zonker.stanford.edu", which is not a Stanford email address (nor the one Stanford lists for him on Stanford Who). Someone has beat me to the punch and made up his profile (probably due to popular demand). Just goes to show how easy it is to forge your identity on the internet. Which is why you might like to visit my polished website on that, and similar issues: Isolation and the Internet.

Yeah for shameless plugs.

2004-03-07T18:57:00.000-08:00

Blog Onslaught

Are we grading one the number of blogs total, or being more picky about actually when they were posted? Because we've got three coming right up in the next 24 hours. Get ready... get ready...

2004-02-13T00:03:00.000-08:00

When VR crashes into RL

Just finished reading Julian Dibbell's "A Rape in Cyberspace." Though I was initially throw by superficial distractions (i.e. when was this written? who still uses MOOs?), the questions raised by this '93 article are still provocative today. The underlying theme pushes us to ask ourselves how much our mind affects our body when our mind is engaged on the internet. Of course, that issue will invariably bring up the always-entertaining notion of cybersex.

But this theme is a more general one, applicable to all media. For example, have you ever cried reading a book? I have, on many occasions. It's a far cry from seeing images on a movie screen, but the mind is a powerful thing that can create its own realities. For the internet, it's the same thing. Words we read on the screen can move us to laughing, crying, sexual arousal, intense anger, etc. I cried the other day reading an email dedicated to our troops overseas. I laughed five minutes ago over a friend's instant message.

As such, our virtual reality becomes not-so-virtual. When ephermeral things start affecting concrete reality, we can no longer rely on boundaries to separate online crimes and real-life ones. If they're all committed by the same mind, which in some schools of thought defines an entire person, how can we differentiate between online rape and real-life rape?

2004-02-06T01:55:00.000-08:00

AIM proudly presents.... "Isolation" or "Announcing Your Wedding Online"

My friend from back home IMs me today and starts the usual hey, what's going on, things are fine (insert emoticon here), etc. etc. Nothing worth blogging about, right? Then comes the tackle from nowhere: "What are you doing on Aug. 28th?" (insert my inane response here) "Because I'm getting married"

Naturally, I begin to freak out in my chair. I try to convey this with a very large-fonted "Oh My God!". After her LOL, I figure she's not getting the full force of my feelings. So I tell her to call my cell. Yet, since I'm in the blackhole of Verizon coverage, all I can get, minutes later, is her voice message where she's a little confused as to why I want to speak to her "when we were just speaking online". I leave her a voice message, in which I exclaim loudly about the situation. And then I go back to my computer, and restart our IM conversation. She assures me that she's a very fast typer.

So I spent the next hour probing her for the details of her fiance, the proposal, and the wedding plans by typing into a computer. She LOLs a lot and I use lots of exclamations. But it strikes me over and over again that this conversation should be carried out through lots of squeals of excitement and dreamy-voiced descriptions. The Instant Messenger interface has taken all the emotion out of our conversation and tries to replace it with smilie faces and punctuation.

I felt so far away from her.

2004-01-26T02:02:00.000-08:00

OK, so, I haven't attempted to figure out PowerPoint yet. Instead, I'm posting my presentation prompts for PWR on my blog. Pedestrian material for a post, I know. Deal with it.

Questions for PWR 2, Section 5:

> Are blogs a good substitute for talking to old friends?
> Are IMs a good substitute for chatting, face-to-face, with friends?
> Have you ever IMed someone in the same building? Do you do it often?
> If you have a blog, do you write with the audience in mind?
> If you were a hot dog, and you were starving, would you eat yourself?

Thanks for you participation in this super-scientific survey. Have a wonderful day :)

2004-01-12T17:20:00.000-08:00

You know something is seriously wrong when you IM the phrase "lol" and your friend responses, "yeah, I know, I can hear you down the hall."

The majority of my friends in the dorm are present on my AOL Buddy list in either their active, idle, or away status. If I feel like eating dinner, I see who's online and IM them an invitation to dine. If I have a question about class, I can IM my friend who's in my section. If I want to hear the new CD my dormmate bought, I can IM a request for an MP3 version via a direct connection. It's all so much easier than walking the maximum of 100 feet that separates me from these friends, and talking to them in person.

Instant Messenger, while creating a sense of community, also isolates each individual from face-to-face contact. Sure, we can send pictures, music files, and little smilie faces to express ourselves. But it's all a parody of actual reality conversations.

Luckily enough, the members of our dorm community get enough face time at dinner, and maybe more than enough at dorm bonding activies, like ski trips. The IM conversations don't dominate our social scene, showing we're not the lazy introverts our unwillingness to walk that 100 feet shows us to be.

Of course, it's not all about laziness. My roommate and I sit back to back at our desks and IM comments to each other about whatever poor person is standing in our room. The delightful dings of new messages and the ensuing laughter usually makes them uncomfortable enough to leave.