Blog Retrospective

Blogging for me hasn't been an entirely new experience. I currently have a personal blog, although it has been quite a while since I have made a post. I enjoy the process of writing my thoughts for an audience, even if it may be for just a few people.

As far as blogging for this class, I think the thing that benefited me the most was that it made me have to write regularly. Even though I am an English major, this last semester has not involved very much writing other than the blogs and assignments for this class, so having to blog kept me a bit more in "writing mode" than I would otherwise have been. I think the process of writing is always a bit daunting at first, but blogging made me have to continually push through my initial resistance, and often, once I began to write, ideas would begin to flow. William Stafford says that "a writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them." How true that is! I think that is the beauty of blogging, or any form of writing--it enables one to discover and digest ideas even while trying to articulate what to say in the first place. I definitely enjoyed writing about some of the articles more than others, but even with the more difficult ones I was forced to have to at least find the main ideas and expound upon what I did understand. This also forced a closer reading and enabled me to grasp through a second reading ideas that at first seemed confusing. That's not to say that I don't think some of the authors used an unnecessary amount of academic-ese, but I suppose that comes with the territory of higher education. I also think it would have been interesting to discuss in class what we had written in our blogs. Overall, blogging helped me practice my writing skills and produce ideas that I would not have thought of had I not set out to express them. I am not sure whether I will continue to blog or not, but I know that I will (hopefully for the rest of my life) continue to write. Blogging has reminded me of the value of having a regular "appointment" with my keyboard or journal because unless it is a discipline, the urgent (and even petty) things of life will crowd out the important habit of writing. And this discipline is not just a tool for personal enrichment, but when used well, has the power to effect great change for good in the world.

Literacy and Freedom

In his article "The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom" Paulo Freire explains the importance of teaching literacy to adults in ways that combine words with actions, or that demonstrate the significance of word sin real-life situations. He says that teaching individuals to merely memorize words and sounds is a way of treating them as objects rather than intelligent contributors to their own process of learning. This makes sense to me because teaching adults to read and write is different from teaching children to read in write in that adults have vast arrays of knowledge and experience--of "thought language"--which they bring with them into their literacy learning. It makes more sense to teach children to read in a more memorization-oriented way (although they would probably benefit from similar methods to what Freire describes) because they do not have the same knowledge and experiences with language that adults already possess. Allowing adults to learn in ways that show them the immediate relevance of language to their lives has the potential for being extremely empowering.

Ideas for Sale

As we discussed in class, advertisement can have a huge impact upon literacy. For example, if young girls buy the message of advertisers that outward beauty is of paramount importance, they will most likely invest their energies into improving their physical appearance rather than to developing their minds, or trying to get good grades. Or they may be smart, but feel pressure from society or their peers to play down their intellect while playing up their looks in order to find acceptance. And while advertising can affect many people without them even realizing how they are being impacted, those who have not had the chance to develop critical thinking skills are possibly the most vulnerable to unconsciously absorbing the messages of advertisers. With masterful subtlety, advertisers can influence not only what people buy, but how they think about some of the most important issues in life.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of advertising is how much of it objectifies women and uses sex to sell everything from deodorant, to breath mints, to beer. These advertisements subtlety (and sometimes blatantly) send the message that a woman's value is in being sexy and appealing to a man. Women and young girls are not the only victims of this message, however; young boys are continually bombarded with these advertisements and the images that they see impact how they see the opposite sex. Our society is saturated with sexual images and then we wonder why teen pregnancies are so high, why there is an epidemic of date rape, or why sexual harassment at school and the workplace is a problem. I am not saying that advertisement is the only thing to blame for all of this, but how can young people continually absorb messages that glorify sex and objectify women without those messages impacting how they see the world and how they act?The first step to changing one's actions is to change one's belief system. That's how powerfully what we think affects what we do. If young people are not taught to think critically about what they are seeing in commercials and ads (or to develop different literacies), they will be puppets in the hands of companies who sell not just products, but ideas.