Memory v. Memory

     BECAME 

In 1994, when I graduated High School, I could recite all important phone numbers in my life at the time. Currently as I sit here writing this blog, it occurred to me I don't know my son's phone number without looking at my phone. Technology, in its ever increasing involvement in our lives, is there for the purpose of freeing up easier tasks to allow us to focus on more important things. As a consequence of this though, the average citizen of a developed country has developed a strong dependency on this technology. This has become the theme for many current television shows, showing us exactly how traumatic it would be to wake up one morning to find all out technology gone. In a psychology class last semester, we discussed nomophobia, which is the fear of not having your mobile device, aka phone. In a recent study 66% of people suffer from this phobia. (http://www.securenvoy.com/blog/2012/02/16/) This fear extends to having your phone but not having service as well. The ever increasing dependency on technology is apparent in ever expanding aspects in our lives. An example of this is my recent training for 5k runs, the first thing I did after buying new running shoes was to download a good running app to track my progress in training for me. We use primarily our phones for a majority of our activities in our day to day lives. By these and many other examples I'm sure all of us can relate that technology has drastically changed us as people and as a society. 

Is Big Brother Watching Me, or Am I Just Paranoid?

It's almost like a thought from a Sci-Fi novel that we are being watched and tracked and our actions are being recorded for future use, but this has become the case in our day and age. This innocuous action is reminiscent of the movie The Matrix. In the story it wasn't the development of a robot race that could take over the world, but rather a helper to make our lives easier. These helpers evolved and more were produced to help with other things until the point they surpassed the human race. Through the development of the "filter bubble" and online trackers we are edging ever closer to the realization of this story. I appreciate the usefulness of tracking our online activity and searches to help in our future searches, but at the same time, I find it hard not to be conservative about what information is left online for other to find and use. I think the question we have to each ask ourselves is how much is too much. As respecting the video involving Mrs. Turkle, a year ago I would have been shock and astounded by the information she provided. I was fortunate enough last year though to have had someone point this out to me, involving my children and how technology takes away from the quality in quality time with the family. After realizing how much time I spent with my children that we were all alone in our own activities, I have made huge leaps and bounds in trying to fix this situation. I realize adolescents need their own time and space, but I also feel they need the unity of a family as well.

The Proper Design of a Research Paper

Our third writing assignment is a research paper. This is quite different from our previous writing assignment. Unlike previous papers, we aren't suppose to try and persuade people about the information we are sharing with them. The first step in this assignment is finding a topic that interests us. After selecting a topic along these lines, we then do research into the topic. We should not include all the information we find. As our professor referred to this as an "info dump" it will more than likely be a unorganized mess rather than a cohesive source of information. The purpose of a research paper is to collect information and after digesting this, we then synthesize a report covering the important points of our research. The purpose of this paper is to inform our audience rather than persuade them towards one side or another of the argument. An important fact to keep in mind is that this topic will be used for our next writing assignment as well so choose wisely. Also keep in mind that your topic should be narrow enough for a short paper. Choosing too broad of a topic will either make our paper considerably too long or leave our points underdeveloped.   Remember the basic requirements of this assignment, 1500 words, MLA format, and 5 or more sources. Aside from these basic requirements, personally I feel I am focusing on my thesis statement being clear and straight forward, clear and concise supporting information, and a short but complete conclusion. I feel I have come up short on our last two writing assignments and hope to raise the bar for my writing with this one. Aside from a few select topic not allowed, the sky is the limit when it comes to choosing our topic for writing. I have been going over this for a few days now and want to be sure I made the right choice before starting my research. Realizing in our next writing assignment I am going to have to provide a persuasive argument for this topic, I want to be sure this is a topic I want to learn more about and feel strongly towards. This will make sure that I am interested in both writing assignments and motivate me to provide the best papers I am capable of. 

A Map to Finding the Droids You Are Looking For

Finding information on the internet is entirely too easy these days. An example of this was when I entered "Kent library" in Google to get the above graphic, I received About 86,800,000 results. The primary problem with this inundation of information is what is its actual source? Any person with a general idea of web design or any of hundreds of web design programs can create a web site stating whatever they want about any subject. The internet is not restrictive about the truthfulness of the information posted there, so finding information that is reliable is difficult to say the least. Through the use of the Kent Library web sight, this problem can be easily avoided. All information we find through this path is completely reliable enough to be used in our research. 

In itself this is a huge help to us in our research. We don't have to check and double check to avoid providing erroneous information. This is just the tip of the iceberg so to speak for this avenue to information. Through the use of the keyword search, we can take a topic and distill it down into a precise thesis for our paper. We can then also find addition supporting points for our topic as well as variation of the directions to go with our discussion and development of our supporting thoughts. 

To better learn the tricks and tools associated with the Kent Library site, I highly suggest the brief searchpath tutorial found on the library's page. This tutorial helps us to learn how to search for topics and ideas as well as how to narrow or expand our search to obtain the correct amount of information.  By improving our search, this shortens the amount of time it takes to find our source information and greatly simplifies our research part of writing.  

The Treatment of American Indians and Resulting AIM (American Indian Movement) Siege of Wounded Knee

In 1973 The American Indian Movement entered the township of Wounded Knee, South Dakota and began a 71 day standoff with FBI agents and U.S. Marshals. Stories vary as to how the actual siege came about. AIM only asked for three demands to end the siege. They were  (1) restore and honor 371 broken treaties made by the U.S. Government with Indians; (2) reform the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA); and (3) conduct an investigation of the corruption at Wounded Knee. (Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices) 

The article I chose to do my rhetorical analysis on is the speech given by Sacheen Littlefeather in lieu of Marlon Brando at the Oscars in 1973. Marlon Brando took this opportunity to focus American attention on the mistreatment of Native Americans by the U.S. Government and it's agencies. Brando refused to attend the ceremony and the Oscar to instead go to Wounded Knee to help with the siege. In my research about the siege of Wounded Knee I was surprised to find little information on it in the Kent Library Collection. I found a few small encyclopedia entries giving the general details of the siege and a reference to a small section in a book on culture wars. Although the internet provided considerably more information about the siege and the people involved with it, it was obvious much of the writings found were bias and leaned heavily one direction or the other on the right or wrong of each side. Although I found a much larger collection of information on the internet, in the scope of a research paper, much of it was not creditable enough to cite. Knowing what I found on the Kent library site was all eligible to be cited was reassuring when it came to some of the information conflicting others.  

Marlon Brando speaking out on the treatment of American Indians

This speech given by Sacheen Littlefeather, representing Marlon Brando at the academy awards in 1973. Brando had recently received the Best Actor Academy Award for his role in the Godfather. This speech was written during the American Indian Movement siege of Wounded Knee in 1973, and Marlon did not attend the event himself and refused the Oscar. In this abbreviated speech, as she was not allowed to give it in entirety, Littlefeather discussed the centuries of mistreatment of the collective American Indians by people of European decent, but predominately by the American government. She goes on to relate how the motion picture industry was heavily responsible for this by making a mockery of the American Indian, depicting them as savage, hostile and evil. A particularly moving statement made during this speech by Mrs. Littlefeather was, " What kind of moral schizophrenia is it that allows us to shout at the top of our national voice for all the world to hear that we live up to our commitment when every page of history and when all the thirsty, starving, humiliating days and nights of the last 100 years in the lives of the American Indian contradict that voice?" This clearly points out the hypocrisy of the American government by making empty promises to these people and feeling no obligation to follow through afterwards. 

In my analysis of this speech, I plan to show how Brando and Littlefeather, used Pathos to appeal to the emotions of their audience to stand up against the atrocities still being inflicted on the Indian people, Ethos to show the blatant disregard of moral ethics in the treatment of the American Indians, and Logos in a step by step leading argument to show how so much of their treatment to date was wrong and still continues to be wrong. Brando felt very strongly about this area of American history, even refusing to attend the Oscars in lieu of going to wounded knee himself to help in whatever way he could. Hopefully in my rhetorical analysis of this speech I can help infect others with his fiery spirit to want to right this wrong. 

Brandon, Marlin. "Letters." AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT GRAND GOVERNING COUNCIL . 30 March 1973.  American Indian Movement. 4 Oct 2013. <http://www.aimovement.org/moipr/letters.html>.

Doctor! We need the paramedic method. Stat!

Long sentences are harder to read and can distract from the thesis of your writing. Although long sentences can sound intelligent they can be confusing and may need to be reread numerous times to gather the though they were suppose to share. A method used to help shorten sentences, yet still share the information it was suppose to share is called the paramedic method. This method breaks sentences down into small parts and reforms them with the basic information still contained. Below is an example of the paramedic method in action.

The first step is to find a long sentence that is in need of attention:

The large red book sitting on the hall table was a dictionary published by an encyclopedia company in the United States.

There we go, this one should do. The next step is to break this down into smaller parts. This is done simply by dividing the sentence at prepositions and forms of the verb "is".

The large red book sitting
on the hall table
was a dictionary published
by an encyclopedia company
in the United States.

Now we need to find the action in the sentence or sometimes hidden action and restate it in a simple action verb. Now we can state the subject and the action quickly and early in the sentence.

The red book is a dictionary.

Here we are using 6 words instead of 21 words for a  71% more efficient sentence.