post 11 knightly

After finishing The Shallows by Carr, I disagreed with many of his arguments but I did agree with some.  One argument I agree with was when Carr talked about google.  He talked about how when google was created it jumped across many copyright laws.  He said they played by their own rules and everyone there bought into googles system.  They thought they were above everybody in society.  I also believe he is saying this because it goes along with some of his arguments.  It correlates to how we use google almost every day and it is making us lazy.  It may get things done faster but it is still making us lazy.  Instead of doing things on our own we rely on google to give us the answer.  My last statement goes with how are Carr talks about how are brains are wired.  Since we use google so much, when we have a question, instead of looking it up our brain immediately thinks to google it.  The part of the argument I don’t agree with is that we can’t change it.  Carr believes that this generation is so influenced on technology that we rely on it.  I don’t believe this is true because I believe if a person really wants to change their ways then they can.  This was a interesting booked filled with many arguments by Carr some which I agreed with and some which I didn’t.   

post 10 knightly

The last time I got really immersed in a book was in high school when I read a book called Playing with Fire by Theo Fluery.  This is a book about the life of Theo Fluery from his childhood to his death.  HE was a professional hockey player who made a lot of bad decisions in his life.  In this book he looks back on those decisions and shares the mistakes he made.  The reason I got really immersed in the book was because it was a real story of someone who had it all in life and just threw it all down the drain so to speak.  Whenever I picked up the book it was so hard to stop reading because I felt like I was walking right beside him in the book.  I have read the book multiple times and I get the same feeling every single time.  This book is not fake witch I like, I hate to read books that are fake stories where authors are trying to portray characters that are completely unrealistic, I just don’t see the point of those stories.  I was truly amazed that he literally told the reader everything including the many illegal things he did and it was good to see a person like him open up to the reader.  I don’t know if I could get into a book like I was into this one.  I feel like I have known Theo his whole life.

post 9 knightly.

So far I haven’t enjoyed Carr’s arguments in the Shallows.  I mainly disagree with them for the most part.  Although one quote stuck out to me.  It’s on page 32, “It’s not just repeated physical actions that can rewire are brains.  Purely mental activity can also alter our neural circuitry, sometimes in far-reaching ways.”  So going on the fact that Carr believes the internet is altering our brains, what he is trying to say is that our brains our depending on the internet way too much.  An example of this is if we have a question, most of the time I would just google the answer instead of trying to figure it out on my own.  By doing this over and over again my brain is wired to go to google and look up the answer whenever I have a question.  This can be bad because when I google a question I am not solving it myself.  Since I am not solving it myself I have no way of being able to do that question again.  If I solved it myself I would know exactly how to do it myself.  So this is one instance where I agree with Carr because I believe the internet is making us lazy and is rewiring our brains to just look questions up instead of solving them ourselves.  I hope for more arguments like this one later in the book. 

post 8 knightly

http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4f6a2f40ecad045336000070-1200/this-old-ad-took-the-whole-walking-all-over-women-thing-to-the-next-level.jpg

The add that I have chosen to analyze is a very old ad for men’s slacks.  The ad shows a man standing on a women’s head and the women has no body and instead her body is a tiger skin carpet on the floor.  This is a very sexist ad because it is trying to imply that when women see these slacks they will do anything for the man.  This ad goes exactly with Kilbourne’s ideas.  It objectifies women and makes them look they are very vulnerable.  The ad uses ethos by playing on a man’s emotions. When a man sees this he feels like when a girl sees them in these slacks that they will want him.  Again this goes along with what Kilborn was saying because she showed many sexist ads that will have a male wanting that product from how it portrays women or shows how women will act when they see that product.  This ad also uses logos because it is logical for the company to think that when men see this ad they will want to buy the product.  Again back to Kilbourne, she showed many ads where when men see them and see what the ad is portraying they will want to buy whatever product it is.  This is just one of many examples of very sexist ads.

Post 13 Deegan

After finishing Maus, I realized the rhetoric used throughout the book is highly engaged with the reader’s pathos. Hearing the horrible stories about how the Jews were treated and what they had to endure during the Holocaust makes you feel incredibly sad and depressed. It is absolutely insane that the incredible number of people felt that much physical and emotional pain for as long as they did. Relating this to Eating Animals, I also think Jonathon Safran Foer used pathos to make his book most effective. When reading, you felt guilty for the innocent animals that get tortured, beaten, abused and worse during the course of their life. Like Vladek, their quality of life is incredibly low because of how other people treat them, and for the most part there’s nothing they could do about it.

         Safran Foer uses this pathos to try and change the reader’s mind about what they buy and eat, and make the problem stop. Spiegelman uses pathos as a way to keep survivor’s tales alive. Both make a huge impact. Carr also uses pathos throughout his story, but I personally did not feel as inclined to change because of how the writing style. When reading The Shallows, I felt more attacked than understood. I also felt that he had a generational bias against the people currently growing up with technology, and I still don’t think it’s a bad thing. All three writers use the same rhetoric style in their work, but it is much more effective for Jonathon Safran Foer and Art Spiegelman.

         

Post #13-Dani Reed

            I find the book Maus by Art Spiegelman more similar to Eating Animals by Safran Foer than The Shallows by Carr. I think that even though Eating Animals does not directly have pictures on the pages like the comic strips in the book Maus does, they still both use images to create pathos. In Spiegelman’s book he provoked emotions from me as a reader through some somewhat gruesome images about events in the holocaust. He also used the facials on Vladek’s face to portray different emotions whether his eyebrows were furrowed when he was tense or if they were softened as he remembered emotional times back in the holocaust. This book was neat because the rhetoric was portrayed through mostly visual images. In Foer’s book, he described images that made me just as queasy as the images in Maus about the holocaust. Foer used words to piece together disturbing images in his readers minds to show how wrong it is what people do to animals in order to make money by selling them as food. The way they treat them and abuse them is sickening and I know this from the way Foer explained it in his book. He used pathos as well to provoke the sad emotion from his readers because after reading certain things many people in our class said they felt sympathy for the animals being tortured. Both of these books are shedding light on terrible situations that some people may not know all of the truth on. They each use pathos to make you upset for the humans and or animals being tortured through imagery, just in different ways.

Post #12-Dani Reed

            There are many different moments in the first volume of Maus that exemplifies extraordinary pathos. One example is on page 201. This is something we talked about in class but I feel that it really represents something bigger to the author and something he tried to portray to his readers. The comic shows Artie distraught at his desk having to work and deal with all sorts of emotions. Below him is a pile of dead bodies that look extremely withered away. One body at the top has his or her mouth open as if they were screaming for mercy when dying. All of the bodies are so skinny you can see their ribs. I think that the author put this here for multiple reasons but one because he wanted to show that even though this is a survivor’s tale, it does not mean every one survived the holocaust. He wanted to portray how many victims were killed in awful ways and make sure that we always remember that. It also says on this page in a bubble from Artie, “Lately I’ve been feeling depressed.” I think this shows the toll that the holocaust took on some survivors and their family members. It is an awful thing to hear about and makes even someone like me who has no personal involvement in it queasy. This moment has extraordinary pathos because it really sets off emotions in the readers with their sad and depressed side. This is one part that really hit me showing that this is not just a cartoon comic strip of mice with this story, it was real and many people suffered serious consequences from it. It triggers a shocking emotion to see dead bodies on the ground piled high.

Blog #11-Dani Reed

         In the book, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, there are many things that I do not agree with and some things I do agree with. In chapter ten Carr talked about how tools numb whatever part of the body they replace. I can see what he is saying with this argument and somewhat agree with it because the internet, for example, can easily give us information on command and I know many students such as I who have not checked out a library book in years. The internet has replaced human beings physically going to check out books, read them, and collect knowledge from there. I also somewhat agree with Carr when he says that by externalizing problem solving we reduce our brains ability to build knowledge that we could later apply. I find easy shortcuts to complete things all the time and when I have to go back and use that information again, it is not stored in my brain. I then have to use the same resource I used before to find out the answer again instead of having it in my head.

         Something I do not agree with in Carr’s book is how he thinks that in order for society to advance we need the ability to have a quiet environment with books and deep thinking. I completely disagree with this considering many different and miraculous inventions have come a high speed and busy world. It takes combinations of different people who connect to come up with new inventions. This is done through the internet world mostly.

Cooper Post 11

It was pretty clear that Carr doesn’t like how our society is becoming totally reliable on technology and he thinks that it’s affecting us negatively, which I would have to disagree with. I think that Carr just can’t wrap his head around the fact that our generation is different from his generation. Since he is older than us he obviously hasn’t grown up with the technology that we have had around us our entire life. I think that Carr just needs to realize that our generation is going to be learning information much more differently than him. Back in the day doing research for a project would take much longer since you would have to sit there and read numerous amounts of books just to get some information. Nowadays technology allows for us to get everything we need to get done that much faster. Even though Carr says that technology is affecting our learning capability the point is we are still learning even though it may not be the same as we use to. Overall Carr does make good points on how fast technology has been expanding and how it has been affecting us but once I again I don’t believe that it is affecting us negatively. I believe that the ever improving technology we have around us allows us to be much more productive and is very beneficial to what our society has now come to.