English 245

1) Write about something that interests you, no matter how weird you think it is. Weird is what makes things interesting.

2) Chances are, you can’t mess up a blog post so bad the teacher won’t know what to do with it. Say what you think, there will be something he’ll be interested in.

3) Talk. Also, read the news so you have things to relate to the things you talk about. You are the tech generation, prove that we have something to show for it other than facebook.

4) Don’t freak out about Bartholomae. He is by far the hardest thing you’ll have to deal with.

5) Read all the readings. Honestly you don’t need them all the time, but they really do help, and it makes you look crazy smart when you can quote the thing.

6) Be funny. Don’t be afraid of offending people. Everything you say is going to offend someone, so go out guns blazing.

7) Don’t, for the love of whoever you believe in, procrastinate.

Good luck.

Sorry if the previous post is wonky, I had to post it from my phone.

“What worries me about blogs is this: If students just write their own blog, there’s no review. You can post anything. It’s not really getting published. It’s like going outside and yelling. Maybe the squirrels hear you, but its not going to help you train your voice and get you to Carnegie Hall.”
Is that really so bad though? In the instance of this class, we’re not trying to get published. We’re talking amongst ourselves and our professor. Just that fact that the students are talking and speaking their minds is interesting. Writing in a paper and writing for a blog are different, but that doesn’t mean one is bad and the other is scholarly. Also, because one is less formal, I can say more closely what I feel. If i had to write a paper in response to everything, I feel like my voice would seem very different to those who actually care about this specific class and its musings. In “Blogging in the Classroom” they state “Some instructors have found that students are enthusiastic about the opportunity to use and develop their information technology skills and thus might be more likely to engage with the assignment (DiBiase, 2002). Other benefits instructors might experience from e-portfolios include more substantive student advising, easier management of student products, and clearer evidence of teaching effectiveness and change over time (DiBi- ase, 2002).” Teens and 20-somethings are a difficult audience to reach. If its not going to be incredibly formal, go with whatever you’ve found that works and gives you the desired effect.

As far as I can tell, blogging has always been a form of networking that doesn’t have one specific purpose, and can thus include all of them. You can blog about politics, you can blog one word sentences, you can blog pictures, random thoughts, or even gibberish. It doesn’t really matter what you post because for the most part it is probably for you.

In the day and age of saying everything about yourself online, I’m not surprised an unlimited expressive platform became popular. It can even be a popular thing you share with friends or something secret to keep to yourself because the point isn’t to show who you are, its to say what you feel, and I feel like because of that they apply to a larger audience.

They’re also much less complicated when it comes to set up, upkeep, and social cues.

“At first, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I was trying to write down my thoughts, except I was still afraid to express myself, because I still felt like I was going to be judged. By writing down what I was thinking, it was kind of accepting the fact that I played for team gay. Admitting that one day I was going to date, and eventually marry someone of the same-sex kind of freaked me out, which was also part of the reason why I had so much trouble starting my blog in the first place. However, this total freak out of being intimate with a dude was directly fueled by the judgement of my peers and society.”

The reason I got a tumblr was because a friend of mine wanted to. We followed each other, and because of him telling people to follow him, they eventually found and followed me. By the end of this phase of my blog, at least a good chunk of my followers were people I knew in real life.
I figured tumblr would just be another social networking site, but as cliche as it sounds, it ended up being like coming home. At school I was friends with a lot of people who weren’t good for me. I felt more stifled and uneasy around them than happy, but I wouldn’t leave them because they were all I’d ever known. When I got a tumblr and finally saw so many people who had the same thoughts as me, my heart broke a little. I finally felt like I belonged, but I still had to watch what I said and reblogged because of the people following me that I knew in real life.
Some things happened, and I ended up, rather violently, falling out with my “friends”, and it was actually liberating. I un followed all of them, blocked some, changed my URL, and basically disappeared. Now the only people who could see my thoughts were the strangers who had the same problems, and I just let the flood gates break open.
Because of this, I’m even more comfortable with myself than I was before, because I know I’m not alone. I’ve come to terms with some things about myself that I don’t know if I ever would have been able to if I hadn’t found all these people like me.

It makes me sad, though, that the only place that I felt completely comfortable was an online site that prides itself for being for outcasts and the people that don’t quite fit in. I’ll admit that I’m not entirely normal, but normal is so relative. I don’t understand why some people are so nice to each other when they find people different than them, and others end up giving kids like me high school experiences that make me want to take a scrub brush to my brain. Why is the internet so much safer than the real world?

So I’m thinking this post is going to be kind of short, considering we have to talk about the what carried over from Myspace to Facebook and what didn’t, and it seems like the only thing that didn’t was the style. On Facebook you talk to the person, you post way too much personal information, and everyone has one. You creep. You go on at 2 in the morning. You waste time in general.

Maybe the age group changed? I know people who are friends with their grandparents, and if I remember Myspace correctly, that would never have happened there. Also, didn’t everyone use fake names on Myspace? But I’m straying. Because we are the kids raised in the tech generation, we’ll always be connected through some sort of social networking site or another, its just sometimes the platform changes.

In 1950, Dr. Seuss wrote a book titled “If I Ran the Zoo.” Gerald McGrew, the stories narrator, states that he would go around collecting animals for his imaginary zoo. One of the animals he collects is a nerd.

At some point, the word took on a negative connotation for no apparent reason. 

Hooray language.

Anywho, now it means a studious or intelligent person that really likes something. It’s not extremely powerful anymore, but I suppose its still a word that, at its core, means something undesirable. The stereotypical nerd has glasses, braces, acne, knobby knees, and a bad haircut, regardless of gender. These people aren’t popular, they don’t get asked to dances (unless its by another nerd) and they would probably rather stay at home and read Tolkien than go to a dance anyway. They’re awkward. They get swirleys.

Whether its mean or not anymore depends on the person saying it and the person being called it.

After spending a good amount of time on these sites, I feel like I need to go at my brain with a scrub brush. Not only are they both incredibly offensive and discriminatory (if you couldn’t already guess), they are also incredibly hard to read, seeing as they’re either written in text-speak so teenage even I can’t read them, or with such bad grammar I have now developed a twitch whenever I see a sentence that uses the wrong form of “your.”

On UNL haters I went as far back as the site would let me, to August 22, and on NoHomophobes I paused the stream when I saw a tweet stating “im gonna stop saying ‘faggot’ its offensive.” and looked at the tweets around it.

Seeing as the Grammys are on tonight, most of the tweets on NoHomo, being live, are about celebrities, and people either saying how much they suck or how they want to do them, some are about the tweeters friends, and one is about McDonald’s. Most have the “N” word in them for no reason other than to have the “N” word in them.

On UNLHaters, most are kids complaining about what they didn’t have to deal with at home, but now have to deal with because they’re back on campus. It look about 50/50, half being posts simply saying “So. Many. Asians.”, and the other half being jokes, like “S/O to the Asian who ran into me with your bike. OPEN YOUR EYES! Oh wait…”

Mostly it looks like UNLHaters is more intentionally mean, while NoHomo is just children using the words because they know they’re not suppose to. Honestly I’m not sure which is worse. Also I’m not really sure the sites are doing anything to help the causes they focus on. It makes people like me, who already don’t use words like that, cry for my generation, and the people who don’t care about that kind of thing, well, they don’t go looking for sites like this. It’s not even shocking, because I know how easily people say racist or discriminatory things, not thinking anything of it. I’m a teenager, this stuff is pretty much par for the course.

And how depressing is that?