Professor, I believe you are taking a great risk.
A lot of the power that authority has comes from ritual and symbols. And in this class, you are most definitely the authority. By allowing us to post on our blogs in lieu of a more traditional 8 1/2" by 11", you run the risk of the degradation of many, many longstanding conventions in collegiate writing. For example, a student might dare to address you personally in his blog entry. The internet is the medium of the kids, their toys, their games, their blogs and all bad poetry that accompanies them. Allowing us to publish in such a soft, amorphous format invites informality and syntactical lapses. I can hear the walls of the institution crumbling already.
I had a blog for about two weeks back in high school. It contained very little about my day-to-day activities, and its subject matter tended to be too crude to mention here. I eventually closed the blog and fed it to a goat, once I realized that I had nothing to say to the world. I believe that the average high school blog is a simple cry for attention. I can see the seduction of seeing one's name in print, projecting one's life into the ocean of cyberspace like a spotlight into the clouds. It's a very obvious appeal.
Mature blogs serve a very different purpose. They are accessible, varied, colorful, subjective, and fun--all things that traditional news sources lack (not that blogs are simply a replacement for CNN). They are often very focused, allowed a weary web-surfer to find a large amount of information in a very specific topic of interest. I believe that its specificity is the strongest feature of any blog. Although, links to funny Youtube videos are a close second.
Cordially,
Arnold Kemp
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Bullshit
I'm a Biotech major. This means that my cardiac tissue abounds with respect for empirical science. I've gotten excited after reading a paper about hypermutationality in antibody genes. And a novel protein modeled via X-ray crystallography is--honestly--something of a turn-on.
Unfortunately, my cherubic love for the hard sciences often translates into persistent skepticism of the soft ones. Without large-scale, repeatable observations, testable hypotheses, and empirical results, I often find myself doubting the things that are being taught to me, even though the information presented comes from the mouth of a person who is much, much smarter than me. My social science and political science classes were the first victims of my scientific dissatisfaction, but they aren't the most recent.
The fact that you are reading this makes it very likely that you are in my UWP class with me, and that you quite possibly gave your opinions voice in that very forum a few hours ago. And I'm sorry to say this, but everything you said was wrong. In fact, I disagreed with just about everything that anyone said. And the things I did agree with seemed like they could benefit from some closer examination of their lines of reasoning.
At first, I wasn't saying anything because it was my first day in a class that I might not even be enrolled in. But then, I stopped myself from disagreeing with you, Dear Reader, for a much more noble reason. In what an alcoholic calls a moment of clarity, I understood why we were talking about casinos and Blackberrys, and why I hadn't lapsed into a catatonic ennui from all the grammar that Professor Thompson was teaching us. That reason is bullshit.
Don't take this the wrong way. Bullshit isn't lying, or active deception. In its most positive definition, bullshit is simply proceeding with minimal concern for the truth. Now, all sorts of ideas were flying in that classroom with only scarce qualifications before we moved on to the next ideas. Data were sparse when it came to Native Americans. I now believe that, in this particular instance, this was a good thing. It allowed us to cover an enormous breadth of topics without any copious amounts of semantics to slow us down, and because of that, I was exposed to some new ideas--things that had simply never occurred to me.
I am of the opinion that all of the good ideas out there have already been expounded by writers much more deftly than I ever could. For example, I've never been happy with an essay I've written covering incestuous overtones in Hamlet when I know that there are fifty better books on the subject in the Shields Library. No one is going to seek out my essay for their thesis on Bill Shakespeare. A tired theme is just that--tired. An essay arguing that Hamlet was an autobiographical account of Shakespeare's experimentation with cocaine and cross-dressing would be much more in demand, even with the admittedly shaky premise. A novel, dynamic idea simply contributes more information to the world, as well as being more interesting to read. And sometimes, the least-likely things end up being right.
Therefore, I hereby resolve to listen attentively to the things that are discussed, their silliness notwithstanding. I will take the alien ideas of my classmates, miniprep, autoclave, and emulsify, until I have a new, transgenic metaphor.
I look forward to bullshitting my way through this class.
Unfortunately, my cherubic love for the hard sciences often translates into persistent skepticism of the soft ones. Without large-scale, repeatable observations, testable hypotheses, and empirical results, I often find myself doubting the things that are being taught to me, even though the information presented comes from the mouth of a person who is much, much smarter than me. My social science and political science classes were the first victims of my scientific dissatisfaction, but they aren't the most recent.
The fact that you are reading this makes it very likely that you are in my UWP class with me, and that you quite possibly gave your opinions voice in that very forum a few hours ago. And I'm sorry to say this, but everything you said was wrong. In fact, I disagreed with just about everything that anyone said. And the things I did agree with seemed like they could benefit from some closer examination of their lines of reasoning.
At first, I wasn't saying anything because it was my first day in a class that I might not even be enrolled in. But then, I stopped myself from disagreeing with you, Dear Reader, for a much more noble reason. In what an alcoholic calls a moment of clarity, I understood why we were talking about casinos and Blackberrys, and why I hadn't lapsed into a catatonic ennui from all the grammar that Professor Thompson was teaching us. That reason is bullshit.
Don't take this the wrong way. Bullshit isn't lying, or active deception. In its most positive definition, bullshit is simply proceeding with minimal concern for the truth. Now, all sorts of ideas were flying in that classroom with only scarce qualifications before we moved on to the next ideas. Data were sparse when it came to Native Americans. I now believe that, in this particular instance, this was a good thing. It allowed us to cover an enormous breadth of topics without any copious amounts of semantics to slow us down, and because of that, I was exposed to some new ideas--things that had simply never occurred to me.
I am of the opinion that all of the good ideas out there have already been expounded by writers much more deftly than I ever could. For example, I've never been happy with an essay I've written covering incestuous overtones in Hamlet when I know that there are fifty better books on the subject in the Shields Library. No one is going to seek out my essay for their thesis on Bill Shakespeare. A tired theme is just that--tired. An essay arguing that Hamlet was an autobiographical account of Shakespeare's experimentation with cocaine and cross-dressing would be much more in demand, even with the admittedly shaky premise. A novel, dynamic idea simply contributes more information to the world, as well as being more interesting to read. And sometimes, the least-likely things end up being right.
Therefore, I hereby resolve to listen attentively to the things that are discussed, their silliness notwithstanding. I will take the alien ideas of my classmates, miniprep, autoclave, and emulsify, until I have a new, transgenic metaphor.
I look forward to bullshitting my way through this class.
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