Analysis: Google - Smart or Stupid and Tweet Numbers

Is Google Making Us Stupid?  - Guy Billout

I feel smarter using Google than I do this article.  

The organization was clean cut and clear.  The vocabulary was easily understood and the principle was coherent.  I'm just not sure I understand why the author wrote this piece, especially being titled the way it was...

Question: Is Google making us stupid?  

Answer: Well, yes because I have a hard time doing this, but then maybe not because I can now do this, but most likely not because our brains adapt and slowly become reformatted to the new medias throughout history.  

Does this mean we are stupid, now, but further generations will grow to adapt to Google, so they will be smarter?  

Just as the author had noted in the beginning I lost interest and started skimming (just kidding professor, I read the entire thing all the way through: highlighted, notes in the margin and all.)   Maybe Google isn't to blame for readers not staying interested - maybe its the content being published that isn't interesting enough to keep reading!

Oh and I'm very confused about the first paragraph - HAL the supercomputer?  I can't even picture or recall the scene he is trying to portray.  Is A Space Odyssey a movie?  I wouldn't know without Googling it... how ironic.

On the article on CNN.com by Madison Park - simply put yet again, this article made me feel less intelligent just reading it.  (Short Essay was written on this article - handed in for grade 13 February).  Shame on you CNN for publishing such an article!

Teens Just Don't Blog or Tweet [STATS]

I'm not a fan of statistics.  They are a major turn off in just about every way.  Unless it is on a smaller scope that I can relate to, I just can't conceptualize what 30% of the 82% in the 65% of the whole really means.   

They are a bad idea too, I'm going to question every single figure thrown at me - there are so many factors and an endless amount of variables that come into play when you are speaking of a percent of a whole or a percent of any part.  

And they are conflicting.  One survey may conclude this because it asked these questions, but forgot what the next survey may have asked instead and resulted in completely different numbers - which one is correct?

Why the Shirelles Mattered

Susan Douglas Story Telling Goddess

Douglas takes us on a journey, one all women can relate to.  She tells us the story of women becoming women, individually and as a gender in whole, that is timeless and one we all know.

She is able to take something so simple as music, and tell us how it revolutionized being women in the day in age, and how it continues to do so.  With her chronological format, we are able to depict map out our history as women and put together a geniological map (if you will) that creates claims as to why we are they way we are and how we became that way. 

She begins with her short sentence, it captures the audience "Ok - here's a test."  It's very conversational, we all speak this way at times.  "Ok" she's saying, lets talk.  I have something I want to share with you - you should listen. 

A second "attention getter" right up front and in the beginning... the test.  A test?  The reader asks him/herself.  I love tests!  Douglas is able to draw the reader in with an unconscious psychological (biological?) ingrained human behaviour.   We love to be challenged.  Conversationally asking us to take her up on her offer is just begging to be read further on. 

Douglas carries on with her conversational piece.  She paints the pictures gorgeously, nonchalantly, casually, informally:

Get some women

throw them in a room

find a stereo

play some music...

These are all images we can picture clearly.  Douglas is saying we know women, we know music.  Now put them together and see if they enjoy it. 

She's also creating a recipe with her pictured words.  Mid-age women + Older music = baby boomers.  As humans we know how to add, we are good with solid-formulas-plug-in-the-answer-and-hand-in-your-homework types of work.  Its easy.  Its simple.  Its enticing.  We feel like we are accomplishing something, like we get it. 

Douglas is humorous!  She enters the small little pokes and jabs without meaning any harm, but just to get her point across.  "... Any less, and the group has been infiltrated by imposters, pod people, Venusian..."   POD PEOPLE?!  Oh silly baby boomers, thinking they are the first and only non-foreigners on the planet.  

However, she gets serious and lets the reader know that even if you aren't a baby-boomer, Douglas would classify you as "adoring" this music as well.  And why do we do this?  Because its music like this that created music for women at all - and we all love knowing where we came from.  She uses metaphors like "... cling to the lyrics like a life raft..." to help us understand.  Why would we hold on to old, outdated music?  Its because its how our life began... and it shouldn't ever be let go of. 

The DASHES my goodness the dashes!!  It's my kind of reading.  I love matter-of-fact, listen to me riiiiiiight now kind of talk.  "First of all, girl group music was really about us - girls."  The entire article is about women becoming women and the struggle we've had to pursue to get where we are even in the avenue of music!  Why the dash and then tell us who its about again?  It's like she's saying... here let me remind you.  Let me tell you.  Let me give it to frankly.  If you didn't know. 

Douglas uses recognition and relativity for comparison all throughout her article.  Even if we don't really know who she is talking about, or even if we haven't ever heard the song she just mentioned... you still know of it.  We can all recognize the name faintly, we can all recall the song vaguely, we know it is/was relative to the time, that it made a huge stamp in the music world, and we can compare it to other who were big in their own time, or our own.  

... ooooh so THAT's who she is, she DID sing that song, she WAS as big of a star as ____.  

Douglas uses strong, descriptive, powerful word choices.  She also creates lists continuously.  If you don't understand with the first word, here's another, and yet another.  This just confirms, reconfirms, and repeats the points she is trying to make.  She wants to understand, she wants you to get it.  She wants the picture in your head, she wants the feeling to surround you, she wants you to remember. 

"... haunting, earthy, and provacative..."

"...Insistent, pulsing rhythm..."

"...teen girl angst and desire, grounding the song in fleshly reality, violin arpeggios fluttered through like birds..."

The Fate of the Earth

This post is to analyze the written work The Effects of a Nuclear Explosion, and its excerpt "The Fate of the Earth".


His Own Devices:


The author uses a number of devices to build his written work.  I am able to identify the following devices, however he uses them constantly and repetitively throughout the excerpt.


1. He uses very well known historical events and familiar places for the audience to relate to and be able to use as reference points.  He uses the Japan bombings and the German Holocaust as well known historical events which most people are familiar with, to express the magnitude of the proposed attacks he feels are quite possible.  To go with this, though most of us are familiar with the bombings that took place in Japan, the majority of us haven't ever been there.  This is when the author brings in New York as a familiar place for us to be able to relate to.  Even if we haven't ever been to New York, we understand its massive size in population, buildings, and space on the map.  We come to understand how devastating it may be if our own New York was attacked as Hiroshima was in the past.


2.  The author uses droll language such as "The hiroshima people's experience, accordingly, is of much more than historical interest..." to express how far away and distant the happenings were from us personally, in time and space.  The attacks were long ago, we can't feel the emotional attachment to them anymore, thus he brings into light the fact that we are basically complacent.  He calls this part of our "backdrop" now.  We no-longer feel the fear that emulates from a possible attack.  which is when he brings in the possibility of the "inescapable truth about our lives today that at every single moment each one of us may suddenly become the deranged mother looking for her burned child..."he also speaks that at any moment we could turn around, be burning to death ourselves, and seeing another man holding his eyeball in his hand screaming for help.  His point - you never know.  The fear should be present all of the time.  
This contrast between the tired worn out discussion of the Japanese attacks is suddenly startled and awaked with the eye opening understanding that it could be us at any moment with his vivid, scary, detailed and excited language of the very opposite and extreme.  That it shouldn't just be history... it should be present at all times. 


3.  He also shares with us this notion of specific and detailed information ("... for ten seconds, it would broil the city below..."), step by step events that would occur at every millisecond following the attack.  He uses painful, agonizing words "... burned, battered, crushed, and irradiated..." to make the reader cringe and feel the pain.  He uses these vivid pictures, step by step accounts, and harsh language to move the audience and make the audience squirm in their seats, to make them feel the anguish that history as felt and that we could possibly feel.  He wants to the reader to understand that complacency shouldn't be an option, understanding, seeing, feeling, hearing, and relating is power in this case.  
As a side note, the writer accounts for step by step events which take place during these attacks - however, one must note it is all in speculation and assumption, his perspective, and how he thinks it would take place; "... If it were possible for someone to stand at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second street without being instantly killed, he would see the following sequence of events..." here he accounts for very specific, detailed. step-by-step events which would go on at every microsecond following the attack by the first person view of a man being able to see what was going on and what was about to happen.  Conversely he also admits it all in assumption with this line, "Very little is known about what would happen to a city that was inside a fireball, but one would expect...".


What's with the long paragraphs? 


I believe the author is basically trying to paint a picture, he is trying to tell a story.  He wants us to envision what it would have been like to be in Japan, Germany, and then envision our own demise.  With short, informational paragraphs one really isn't able to detail accounts, be specific, exaggerate and massage ideas into the readers minds.
Though they are long - I will say, they don't seem to be too long winded.  The author does an amazing job at catching the reader's attention, saying everything he has to say, then gliding right into the next thought (paragraph) painting a new idea, or going off of the last one just in a new frame of mind.  He has made his point, and I believe his reader's would say it has stuck.