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Overall, I have enjoyed class so far this semester.  I really enjoy the tensions created by the readings.  I like the way that they push off of each other and force the class to further our thinking on a particular topic.  I particularly liked this last unit on information, especially at the start when we read Paul Grobestein and Katherine Rowe and tried to define what is information/ what is noise.  I did, however, find Katherine Hayles to be frustrating because I thought that her arguments in her papers, especially in "How We Read," were poorly constructed and inefficiently argued.  With that said, I wish would could delve into the text more.  In Katherine Hayles' case, I feel like it would have been easier to challenge or appreciate her arguments if we really teased out her arguments rather than skim over her main points.  By that I mean, instead of just bring up Katherine Hayles' distinctions of reading (close, hyper, machine) and discuss it in relation to the rest of the class and its readings, I would have liked to explore how Katherine Hayles comes to these new forms of reading and using this as grounding to explore whether we can even accept Hayles' opinion on reading based on how she ushers for her new distinctions and how they interact with how what we have learned so far.  As one who primarily close reads, I personally find it difficult to value the tensions and make connections between readings if we skim of the intricacies and movements made within the texts that we read.  And while I think that our discussions are extremely useful, I think that at times the discussions become a bit slow and anecdotal because they aren't as grounded in the text (which function as a shared experience for our discussion) as they could be.  I thought that our discussion of the film Conceiving Ada was really fruitful and I think that it is because all of our discussion tied directly back to the film which grounded our discussion in something that we all experienced.  With all of that said, I feel that my challenge in this class is to explore other types of reading other than close reading.  But overall, I really enjoy the class.  I like how everybody comes from such diverse backgrounds (some English majors, some computer science majors, some with a history in film studies, etc) and I like how each of these disciplines are invoked in class to develop a better understanding on the topic at hand.

For a book, I would suggest that we read Brave New World by Aldus Huxley, Farhrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury or 1984 by Gerog Orwell.  One of the questions that interested me the most was "what happens if somebody rejects technological advancement? Are they not a cyborg?  Does the rejection of technology make that person unnatural?"  All of these books examine a technologically advanced, distopic society (distopic according to the protagonist.  A majority of characters sink happily into the way of life depicted into these other book) and explores what happens when one person resists.  I feel that these books would be a good way to examine not only the rejection of technology but also the skewing of information (as the societies in all of these books seems to only be able to function by severely altering the information available to its citizens.)