Cochran

The internet is a powerful thing and on one hand it creates ways for people to fight and stand up for movements that they believe in more than they ever could, while on the same hand it helps us to pat ourselves on the back for "contributing" to something worth while. I personally thought that it was really interesting when we talked in class about someone can feel so involved in a movement, while not doing anything at all. I see it all the time on Facebook, one of my friends has liked a photo now claiming to have made a difference by simply clicking a button. First what runs through my head is, don't these people understand that literally nothing is going to happen by them liking a picture (except for me shamelessly judging them)? But this isn't just on Facebook, its all over the web. Signing petitions that might never get sent off to the right person and if it does they may never see it.
Do you think that the reason so many people do this is because we want to feel involved and to make ourselves seem better than we really are to ourselves and others? Or is it because society has placed this stigma that youths are naïve and can't make a difference at such a young age, so they do what they can while falling into that category, even if that means simply "liking" a photo. I wouldn't be surprised if even just a small amount of people have believed that lie.

yep.

Project 1-rough draft

THIS IS A ROUGH ROUGH ROUGH ROUGH DRAFT- just warning you. I just kind of wrote little paragraphs of what I am wanting to include possibly. Still trying to figure out the flow and what exactly I'm going to say. 

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When I heard about what had happened in Newtown, CT. on December 16, 2012 my heart broke. 28 people died that day, 18 of them being children. Not only did this hit home because I want to be an elementary teacher one day, but I just thought of my niece and nephews and the innocent families. I chose to look into #Sandyhook on Twitter because I wanted to see who was saying what, what points they were trying to get across or if this was a “24 hour news” type of situation.

I looked at 40 random tweets on Twitter looking up “#Sandyhook”. I chose 40 because I thought that it would be an appropriate sample of tweets and am using them to generalize all of the tweets attached to Sandy Hook. To my surprise there have been far too many tweets for me to look up what was said on the day that this had happened, so I picked tweets that were tweeted in the range from just a couple of minutes ago to a few days ago.

I had expected the tweets to be focused on the families and the grievances that were still taking place, but out of these tweets the most common hashtag that went along with the “#sandyhook” was #guncontrol, #conspiracy, and #fakesandyhook. I had never seen the supposed “conspiracy” video over the Sandy Hook shooting nor did I hear about it, so this shocked me when I was looking over my sample. The most linked media is the Sandy Hook conspiracy video attached with some version of “I can’t believe the government would do this just for stricter gun control. Watch this video and see for yourself”. Out of the 40 tweets that I randomly selected only five of them did not have to do with the conspiracy video. I think sometimes people get angry in these situations and keep looking for answers and can’t accept the fact that some people are just sick and wrong. A lot of the blame has been put on the government because its something still around that we can put the blame on, rather than the shooter who shot himself at the scene.

Although I am not for sure, it seems that more and more conspiracy theorist are joining in the conversation and are the backbone to this movement. It seems to be getting a lot of support from uneducated

All I can really relate this back to is the KONY 2012 video that was launched by an organization called Invisible Children. The days following the launch of this video to make Kony famous, Invisible Children did a really good job of convincing people that they needed to join this movement and so people did. It was a video that was shared to thousands of people and was backed up by them too. After a week or so however, the support for KONY 2012 declined significantly. The moment someone pointed out some flaws in their research was the same moment that everyone who had quickly stood up for what this organization stood for backed down. These people who chose to follow and un-follow the Kony movement so quickly are the ones who didn’t think for them and just did what seemed “right” or the popular thing to do. I feel like that is what people are doing with this video that has come out. They don’t really know what the facts are but they are jumping on the bandwagon and acting like they do.

I noticed that over half of the selected tweets have mentioned “@andersoncooper” in them, and I am very interested in looking more into that and seeing if he has responded to anyone and what the conversation looks like.

I’m not too sure what my two sources are going to be yet. I looked up articles that dealt with conspiracy theories and school shootings but didn’t find anything that looked promising. So I am still working on that part. Because I wasn’t anticipating this to be so focused around the conspiracy theory, I kind of feel like I’m at a loss and not really sure what I’m doing. 

Identity Kit

In the articles What Is Literacy and Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics by James Paul Gee, Gee defines discourse as "a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group of 'social network". Gee elaborates that discourses are intertwined with a term he coined an "identity kit".
One identity kit that I do no belong to is the sorority/greek world.

Now, don't get me wrong. A lot of my good friends are a part of sororities and this video is a bit of an exaggeration, but regardless this is definitely not my type of lifestyle. Not even close. Girls and guys who are involved with greek life can be easily defined and pointed out by the characteristics that Gee mentions. Gee says that this identity kit isn't just about the language a person or group uses, but that they are "forms of life which integrate words, actions, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes." These things such as clothes with printed greek letters on them define who is in and who is out. Only the elite, chose ones (who decided to rush), are a part of this Discourse. There are expectations that are to be held up by the pledge classes and a set of standards and rules that they have to meet (grades, philanthropy work, and dues). 

Conflicting communities

I would say that my two conflicting communities are my family and my close friends. It is really hard for my parents to understand that I am in college now and that I have more freedom, especially because I am not living at home anymore. This conflicts because I am trying to gain my independence and spend time with friends on the weekends and go out and have a good times but my parents are still expecting me to come home on the weekends and my mother is always calling before she goes to bed to (not so much) subtly hint at me that its time for bed.

Another example of how these two communities have overlapped is when I was in middle school and high school the "cool" thing to do was curse all the time. When I was with my friends we would drop inappropriate words every chance we got, but the moment I was around my parents or family members I would have to censor myself. Once I had friends over at my house and I didn't realize that my parents were home at the time and they overheard us cursing and at that moment my parents were so appalled that their daughter who, they thought, never cursed was indeed doing that behind their back. 

Bartholomae's Inventing the University

"When students are writing for a teacher, writing becomes more problematic than it is for the students who are describing baseball to a Martian. The students, in effect, have to assume privilege without having any. And since students assume privilege by locating themselves within the discourse of a particular community-within a set of specifically acceptable gestures and commonplaces-learning, at least as it is defined in the liberal arts curriculum, becomes more a matter of imitation or parody than a matter of invention and discovery."

- David Bartholomae

Although this was a hard article for me to comprehend and I may be completely wrong, what I got out of this article was that Bartholomae is more concerned with the creativity of a particular students work rather than the grammatical aspect. When a student is so focused on getting a grade by the work that he or she presents to their professor, they are more focused on creating fewer errors in their paper rather than making sure that they are involved with the audience and making sure they write in a way that shows their voice. When a person is not so concerned with how a professor or a University is going to be grading an essay, the student doesn't feel the need to act like they are trying to impress and then be judged by the reader on their performance, instead they are taking on the position of someone with authority and intelligence in the subject, rather than taking on the voice of a parent or teacher.