Intertextuality

In Porter's piece, i really liked the idea about how all texts are interdependent. We understand something we read in light of what we have read before hand. People write what they write in light of what they have read and how they understood it. This definitely reminded me of T.S. Eliot and Tradition, which i learned about in my lit crit class last year and probably one of the only things i really understood in that class. does this mean all writing is unoriginal though? i don't think so.
I thought the part about texts containing other texts was really interesting. Hearing someone tell someone else to 'open the door' contains the assumption that that person is more capable of opening the door at that moment. Hearing the phrase "once upon a time" automatically indicates the beginning of a fictitious tale.
With the Johnson-Eilola piece...that was a rough one. I basically never want to have to worry about copywriting in my life because it seems very complicated and there seemed to be a lot of court cases described. One thing i found interesting was the discussion of search engines in the piece...i never really thought of those as writing...

Digitalized Text

So, what i got out of Lanham was some of the pros and cons of digitalized text. First off, the author issue. It is so much easier to be able to hold a copyright and claim authorship when your work is in print. It just seems much more official, to me anyway, and one cannot change it. On the internet, however, texts can be changed, and i think it is harder to find the original author of something too. I think that when something is published on the web, writers may not follow citation rules quite as strictly as they might for books and other printed texts.
However, one of the pros to digitalized text is that you can change it...if a text is too small, you can make it bigger. If you don't like the font or color, you can change that too. You can search terms instead of reading the whole piece. You can copy and paste passages you find important into a Word doc to come back to later instead of having to copy them  by hand. It is definitely more convenient that printed text in a lot of ways.
I still find print better though. If i need to search a key term, i will go to the digital version of the text, but as far as reading and highlighting goes, i like to have the paper or book in my hand.
I did find some of the things he describes in this article kind of amusing. Like the After Dark program...isn't that just the average screen  saver? And a lot of the other things that he describes. He says that some people may call them "futuristic," but he argues that they are very much in the present. Yet to us, they are old news and new and more exciting things have been developed. Its always interesting to read articles from the past that talk about technology, whether present technology or "futuristic."
As far as the Kohl article goes...i have nothing to say. I did not find anything interesting in it and i enjoyed the Lanham one more.

Mini Project 2

The other day in class, I believe it was Angie, mentioned something about how you can see one picture in a bunch of different lights depending on how you are told to look at it. So I decided to do my project using different pictures and different ways to look at them.

Design in Writing

When i read this week's readings, i just asked myself, why are me taught in school to simply do MLA formatting when learning how to design your writing can be so useful?
In the Bernhardt article, he wrote how the design and image of his paper helped it be noticed and read. That is what we need to know as students and especially as writing majors. We are going to depend on our writing getting noticed and sometimes, at least it sounds like it anyway, words just won't cut it. I think we need to be taught how to add more style to our writing, even if it is subtle.
Now the Wysocki article i found really helpful at first...but once she went off on beauty, i kind of lost the connection to design and writing. But when she was first writing, she was talking about how our eyes travel and what they land on and how certain elements of design can really draw a reader in. I liked how she used a lot of different fonts and styles. It doesn't have to be just picture images that we use to stylize our writing. It helped me get through each paragraph and onto the next one when i saw that there was a new subtitle and new font. It helped me see, not necessarily that she was moving on to a different subject, but that she was at least moving on to a different point of view or focus. There were times that one paragraph was talking about art giving pleasure and then her next point was that it doesn't necessarily have to be art to give pleasure. This subtitle, while connecting to the previous paragraphs, was in a different font and style. I don't know if this works for everybody, but i think it honestly made it a more interesting read. Style does a lot. This article reminded me of a magazine because it did not just stick to one writing style and format. It experimented and it always kept me interested to see what she said next, if not how she was going to use design and style on the next page. 

Web Identity

Ok, first the "Inter-Activity" article. When i read the first scenario in this article, i thought "this girl is multi-tasking. that may not be all that unusual for people today, but she seems to be taking it to an extreme." But then i got farther down and the author says that this is not multi-tasking. For one, most of what she is doing on the computer is not exactly "work." She is chatting and listening to music and while doing homework.  They were not really tasks, and i didn't exactly get the impression that she was being very productive, something which multi-tasking is supposed to be. The fact that you can do so much over the computer at the same time was very interesting. And i thought it was really interesting when you compare face-to-face conversations and online ones. How rude would it be to being doing a million different things when a friend is trying to tell you something that is really bothering them and making them sad.
I by far liked the Williams article better though. Because i have not been on MySpace for who knows how long and i being on Facebook, i don't really see as much of the "profile identity" that so many people had on myspace. I no longer have pictures of my celebrity crushes and favorite movies pasted on my profile like i did on MySpace when i was in junior high and high school. And it is not just because Facebook does not quite offer those kinds of things like MySpace did. Even when i look at other people's profiles, i do not go searching for the pop-culture kind of information. I think the pictures one chooses to post tells a lot about them. And of course, the status posts tells a lot about someone, sometimes more than i wanted to know. But most importantly and something i did not notice Williams discussing is what others post on the profile. I think that tells a lot about a person too, which is interesting because it is not necessarily something that one chooses to post on their own profile.