In the opening lines of his State of the Union address a few days ago when talking about his accomplishments, Barrack Obama says, "For the first time in two decades, Osama Bin Laden is not a threat to this country."
There are many different ways he could've brought up the killing of Bin Laden and many different words he could've chosen to describe this action, yet he chose to simply say it this way. I say "simply" because the words he uses don't have very strong connotations, he is just passively announcing that Bin Laden will no longer be bothering us no more.
This is the beginning of a crucial speech in an election year, so obviously he wants to remind people of his accomplishments to prove his worthiness of being reelected. So why not say something like, "I killed Osama Bin Laden, the man responsible for millions of American deaths"?
Saying it that way would certainly would help to prove he's not soft and scared of war, as many republicans frame him, as it explicitly points out his ability to do what Bush failed to do.
However, in America, it is common to avoid words like "killed" that could have a very negative connotation. It is much safer to take Obama's approach and passively explain military operations with words that tell a more positive story. For example, that is why we use the term "collateral damage" when referring to innocent foreign civilians we killed when performing military operations. This word "collateral" in this term makes it seem as though it was just something that had to happen.
So, in the line mentioned above in his speech, Obama is really just bragging to prove he's capable of being president, but he says it indirectly by simply saying the positive outcome that came out of his actions, which was that we are not a safer nation.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Wikipedia Takes A Stand
On Wednesday January 18th, Wikipedia will shut down its website to protest the SOPA and PIPA Acts that are currently going through congress. These acts, if you don't know much about them, would give the government more control over the Internet and limit online freedoms for the people.
We spent a lot of time earlier this year discussing when civil liberties, if ever, should be limited, and I, along with most everybody else, believe these acts are an unjust restriction on online freedoms. Despite all the opposition to these acts, they still have not gone away because there has not been enough attention devoted to stop them. There are not many ways to raise awareness against a bill effectively (OC once discussed ways this can be done), but I believe blacking out a tremendously popular site like Wikipedia for a day and instead informing readers about the acts and telling them how to voice their opinions to lawmakers is one of them.
Editors of Wikipedia, however, have questioned the decision to stage this protest. "My main concern is that it puts the organization in the role of advocacy, and that's a slippery slope," said editor Robert Lawton, who would prefer that the encyclopedia stay neutral. "Before we know it, we're blacked out because we want to save the whales."
This is a legitimate concern. One of Wikipedia's five fundamental principles is that it "is written from a neutral point of view" so it can simply be an easy way for people to access correct information. This blackout, however, is not meant to change their stance on neutrality at all. Executive Director of Wikipedia Sue Gardner said their overall purpose is still just to be "helpful".
In response to the concern of losing neutrality, Gardner said, "Although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not." She believes the site can maintain its credibility while staging this protest because they are only doing it because they "support everyone’s right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression" and "want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone."
Although Wikipedia is not used as a source that anybody is supposed to cite or quote, it is still used by nearly everybody as a cite to gather general factual information about a topic, and therefore has maintained a good reputation as a "reliable" source.
After staging this protest, do you think Wikipedia will lose credibility because it is now in a "role of advocacy"? Or will it maintain its reputation as a useful source for general information because its overall purpose has stayed the same?
We spent a lot of time earlier this year discussing when civil liberties, if ever, should be limited, and I, along with most everybody else, believe these acts are an unjust restriction on online freedoms. Despite all the opposition to these acts, they still have not gone away because there has not been enough attention devoted to stop them. There are not many ways to raise awareness against a bill effectively (OC once discussed ways this can be done), but I believe blacking out a tremendously popular site like Wikipedia for a day and instead informing readers about the acts and telling them how to voice their opinions to lawmakers is one of them.
Editors of Wikipedia, however, have questioned the decision to stage this protest. "My main concern is that it puts the organization in the role of advocacy, and that's a slippery slope," said editor Robert Lawton, who would prefer that the encyclopedia stay neutral. "Before we know it, we're blacked out because we want to save the whales."
This is a legitimate concern. One of Wikipedia's five fundamental principles is that it "is written from a neutral point of view" so it can simply be an easy way for people to access correct information. This blackout, however, is not meant to change their stance on neutrality at all. Executive Director of Wikipedia Sue Gardner said their overall purpose is still just to be "helpful".
In response to the concern of losing neutrality, Gardner said, "Although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not." She believes the site can maintain its credibility while staging this protest because they are only doing it because they "support everyone’s right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression" and "want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone."
Although Wikipedia is not used as a source that anybody is supposed to cite or quote, it is still used by nearly everybody as a cite to gather general factual information about a topic, and therefore has maintained a good reputation as a "reliable" source.
After staging this protest, do you think Wikipedia will lose credibility because it is now in a "role of advocacy"? Or will it maintain its reputation as a useful source for general information because its overall purpose has stayed the same?
Thursday, January 12, 2012
The Meta-Post
I've been blogging for just about 4 months now and I just now took the time to critically read through all my blogs to see the progressions that I've been making.
To be able to truly reflect and analyze my work, I decided to look up the word "blog" in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. It is defined as "an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer."
So when critiquing my posts, I decided to make the main criteria personal opinionated reflection, how well it comments on (and not just reports) events, and the presence of strong links that connect it to a real issue. Based on this criteria, I'm going to attempt to construct a narrative arc, since we've talked about this a lot in class, of my blog throughout this semester.
What I noticed when reading through my blogs was that--although the arc wasn't a "perfect" and infinitely increasing line where every post is better than the one before--I can certainly see a general improvement in the three aforementioned categories through the first three months. However, after reading my last few posts, I was displeased because I was unable to find the same type of improvement. I still feel as though they are better than the early posts, but I think I actually regressed in terms of adding in personal reflecting and comments that would make it my own.
The reason for the improvement I made in the first few months is simple: I stopped viewing my blog as an assignment and started viewing it as simply a way I could express my opinion about topics I felt strongly about.
The reason for the regression in the last few posts was a bit harder to wrap my mind around. I thought at first it could be just kind of a fluke because it was only a few posts, and not every post was going to be better than the one before. Then, however, I realized that it can be almost certainly attributed to the fact that after I got ahead in blogs with posts I was very happy about, I got lazy, and it certainly showed.
Let's start at the beginning. I remember, during the first few weeks of my blog, feeling pressured to find something to blog about and then forcing myself to make a post even if I couldn't find the right topic. This is evident in two of my earlier posts (We Will Never Forget Your Money and It's All About the Money). I was linking my posts to an issue well, but before even reading a single word of the posts, I could tell that I couldn't possibly doing much reflection and was most definitely just ranting about stupid facts because of the immense paragraph size. This makes it nearly impossible to not only advance the argument but also to make it interesting enough so that the reader actually wants to finish reading it all (even I didn't want to read through my writing again again). The giant paragraph size is surely a direct cause of me feeling like I needed to blog even if I didn't know what to say, so I wanted to feel and make it look like I did my assignment without actually saying anything meaningful.
Then, however, I started to view my blog a bit differently. It was no longer something I had to do; it was something I wanted to do. I started to write about topics I felt passionately about, and all the sudden my arguments were a lot more clear and I felt as if I was actually "blogging". One great example of this is my favorite post, Penn State Cheats Joe Paterno. This was a topic that was very much talked about, and I was in the minority for this debate, so I was able to find an article to link it to that I completely disagreed with. Since I didn't agree with what most other people were saying, it was very easy for me to insert my opinion, which is what made this post an actual "blog" rather than just an article. This wasn't the only post I felt great about, from the end of October and all the way through November, I was publishing posts rapidly and felt very good about them all.
At this time, I started to become a little lazy. I was ahead in my blogging, and I never really felt the need to publish much. In the just over five week period between October 23rd and December 1st, I published eight posts, and in the six weeks since then, I've put out a grand total of two. Not only has the frequency been down, but they have been lacking real personal reflection that would be required to make it a "blog". Instead, my last three posts, especially Occupy Movement Causes Disruptions, have simply been reports of events and unarguable facts.
I'm glad I took this time to critique my blogs because it made me realize what I was doing right and what I need to do to get that narrative arc of my posts to go upward again in terms of the level of reflection, comments, and links.
To be able to truly reflect and analyze my work, I decided to look up the word "blog" in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. It is defined as "an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer."
So when critiquing my posts, I decided to make the main criteria personal opinionated reflection, how well it comments on (and not just reports) events, and the presence of strong links that connect it to a real issue. Based on this criteria, I'm going to attempt to construct a narrative arc, since we've talked about this a lot in class, of my blog throughout this semester.
What I noticed when reading through my blogs was that--although the arc wasn't a "perfect" and infinitely increasing line where every post is better than the one before--I can certainly see a general improvement in the three aforementioned categories through the first three months. However, after reading my last few posts, I was displeased because I was unable to find the same type of improvement. I still feel as though they are better than the early posts, but I think I actually regressed in terms of adding in personal reflecting and comments that would make it my own.
The reason for the improvement I made in the first few months is simple: I stopped viewing my blog as an assignment and started viewing it as simply a way I could express my opinion about topics I felt strongly about.
The reason for the regression in the last few posts was a bit harder to wrap my mind around. I thought at first it could be just kind of a fluke because it was only a few posts, and not every post was going to be better than the one before. Then, however, I realized that it can be almost certainly attributed to the fact that after I got ahead in blogs with posts I was very happy about, I got lazy, and it certainly showed.
Let's start at the beginning. I remember, during the first few weeks of my blog, feeling pressured to find something to blog about and then forcing myself to make a post even if I couldn't find the right topic. This is evident in two of my earlier posts (We Will Never Forget Your Money and It's All About the Money). I was linking my posts to an issue well, but before even reading a single word of the posts, I could tell that I couldn't possibly doing much reflection and was most definitely just ranting about stupid facts because of the immense paragraph size. This makes it nearly impossible to not only advance the argument but also to make it interesting enough so that the reader actually wants to finish reading it all (even I didn't want to read through my writing again again). The giant paragraph size is surely a direct cause of me feeling like I needed to blog even if I didn't know what to say, so I wanted to feel and make it look like I did my assignment without actually saying anything meaningful.
Then, however, I started to view my blog a bit differently. It was no longer something I had to do; it was something I wanted to do. I started to write about topics I felt passionately about, and all the sudden my arguments were a lot more clear and I felt as if I was actually "blogging". One great example of this is my favorite post, Penn State Cheats Joe Paterno. This was a topic that was very much talked about, and I was in the minority for this debate, so I was able to find an article to link it to that I completely disagreed with. Since I didn't agree with what most other people were saying, it was very easy for me to insert my opinion, which is what made this post an actual "blog" rather than just an article. This wasn't the only post I felt great about, from the end of October and all the way through November, I was publishing posts rapidly and felt very good about them all.
At this time, I started to become a little lazy. I was ahead in my blogging, and I never really felt the need to publish much. In the just over five week period between October 23rd and December 1st, I published eight posts, and in the six weeks since then, I've put out a grand total of two. Not only has the frequency been down, but they have been lacking real personal reflection that would be required to make it a "blog". Instead, my last three posts, especially Occupy Movement Causes Disruptions, have simply been reports of events and unarguable facts.
I'm glad I took this time to critique my blogs because it made me realize what I was doing right and what I need to do to get that narrative arc of my posts to go upward again in terms of the level of reflection, comments, and links.
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