Two things a bird posted recalled this to my memory: first, the request for more blog reading; and then the blog-provided map-generator of one’s past travel destinations. When I was abroad in Santiago de Chile, I met another study abroad student who took his dissatisfaction with the study abroad experience in hand, dropped out of his program, and found work cutting trail in the Patagonian wilds. I know it sounds like a fairy tale, but I’m serious; some people just have a gift for living good stories.

It's already been said in numerous posts that the increased blogging activity in the last day has been quite interesting and amusing. This has been the first time that I have visibly seen evidence of shared procrastination, and yet again, is another sign that this class has done so much for me in changing the way I view academics and knowledge exchange. Also, coming to this blog the last day has given me seizures. I can't keep up with all the new posts! It actually forces me to skim everyone's entries just because there's so many, whereas before I actually read all the entries word for word.

An article on CNET discusses a bill that will make bloggers and personal website operators responsible for reporting illegal images posted on their sites. While the bill is designed to remove child pornography from the web, it sets high and somewhat unlear standards. This legislation impacts "any Web site with a message board; any chat room; any social-networking site; any e-mail service; any instant-messaging service; any Internet content hosting service; any domain name registration service; any Internet search service; any electronic communication service; and any image or video-sharing service," meaning that this blog is subject.

An article in today's NY Times talks about presidents of colleges starting their own blogs for various reasons, whether it's to get more closely connected with the campus community or to seem cutting-edge or to make comments about their personal political views.

It talks a little about how a president's image can change on campus based on what he or she writes on their blog, and that it is also dangerous for presidents to do such things because his or her critics can take comments made on the blog out of context and use them as ammunition against the president in the future.

I have been blogging for a pretty long time--more than six and a half years, or close to a third of my life.

Creepy? A little bit.

It also means that some very weird things have happened on/around my blog, and I am going to share one particularly weird experience here, because I am thinking of mining some of it for my final project. (It’s one of those things that’s so surreal that it seems a shame not to use it toward some more-or-less productive end…) This anecdote is at least among the top five weirdest things that have happened to me on the internet.

I've just gotten back to my room from David Sedaris's reading in Big Bridges. During the program, it struck me how bizarre and trivial the situations he chooses to write about are. He writes about 45 minutes in the trailer of a small-time pot dealer, or about the difficulties of making coffee without running water, and The New Yorker prints it. I realize that he's mainly a humorist, but there's nothing light about the best comedy. His writing does what a lot of great writing does: it takes something small, something that would otherwise drift off in time, and unpacks it, lending it unexpected significance.

I had a fairly long conversation with another member of this class at Oktoberfest in Clark I courtyard today, and I realized probably other people in the class feel the way they do regarding this blog. They (the conversation-mate) treat each blog entry as an assignment, a mini essay to be handed in each week concerning the readings, that they have to sit down and forumlate beforehand. This is nervewracking, and it is in the forefront of their intentions that this blog is part of our grade. This helped clarify for me why so many of the blog postings are lengthy and sound a lot like an academic paper. Unfortunately, though, this person does not seem to view the blog as something "fun" to post on, due to the nature of things they feel they're supposed to post.

I found the Burnett piece kind of odd as he seemed to be asking lots of questions, and then skipping onto another idea… where he found more questions to ask. Yet, very little was resolved. But here were a couple of things that I found interesting/alarming:

“In the life sciences and many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, images are still talked about as if they had specifiable effects. The most limiting example of this is the powerful trope of images as purveyors of violence and transparent vistas onto the events of the world” (xvii). I understand Burnett’s point here: allowing images to be only records of actual events, frozen in time, and beholden to the past and present certainly doesn’t match up with how he discusses images (or how he defines them in the following page). But this point also reminded me of the way that politicians and interest groups use the “power” of images to advance agendas about how the media should be controlled. I’m talking about the shit-show that followed the Columbine shootings and concerns that music and violent images incite violence in teens. This made me think about different ways that images can be viewed (or even thinking back to McLuhan where the medium is the message) and how that will have repercussions for the way that traditional (and untraditional) images are controlled. The sort of stuff that Burnett discusses (particularly the growing autonomy of machines and the blurry lines between biology and machines) is kind of scary and I can see future parties or political organizations trying to limit the creation of, or access to these sorts of hybrids in an attempt to protect impressionable groups.