GIST

In y'day's NYTimes, Ethnic Differences Emerge in Plastic Surgery: "the city’s many immigrants to get tucks and tweaks that are carefully tailored to their cultural preferences and ideals of beauty....the results can seem less like science than like stereotyping....A century ago...the bulk of those operations were targeted at assimilation issues....Today...many immigrants reshape themselves to their home culture’s trends and tastes."

 I was very intrigued by our last discussion on the role of Critical Thinking, as provoked by Katherine Halyes' essay, "How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine."  Overall, I agree with Hayles; I do not think that close reading is necessarily the best way of reading.  (As a side note, I really wished she had further defined the term "close reading."  Is she equating "close reading" to critical thought?  Or is close reading simply what it sounds like: reading slowly and paying close attention to all of the words?) While I think that there is a difference in the way that we read digitally and the way that we read physically, I do not believe that digital reading is necessarily a bad thing.

 Generalized descriptions of reading styles are kind of difficult to grasp... Hyper reading might be different from ‘close reading’ but the definition of ‘close reading’ itself is shaky. If it means reading every word, can you both hyper read and close read a very short text? And can the outcome of ‘critical thinking’ then the same for both methods? Assuming critical thinking to be the formation of some kind of opinion of the text, another layer of variation is added due to the reader’s subjectivity.

Our discussion of information and meaning related to what I have been discussing in my social theory class. We have been reading the work of the early 20th century social psychologist Hebert Mead who posits “meaning arises and lies within the field of the relation between the gesture of a given human organism and the subsequent behavior of this organism as indicated to another human organism by that gesture.”[1]For Mead a gesture, or to put it in terms of our class a certain code, only takes on meaning when the person to whom the gesture was directed responds in an anticipated manner.

Since we spent so much time in class talking about sharing information through coding and decoding, I thought it would be interesting to post about hiding information through cryptography. Cryptography is the conversion of data into an encrypted code which can then only be deciphered through a specific decryption key. This practice has present day applications to ATM cards and computer passwords, but cryptography was also being used much before the creation of the computer. Some of the earlier forms of cryptography were invented when more people became literate because before this time, simply writing down a message instead of speaking it would be encrypting information.

My title pretty much expresses how I feel about the subject: there is way too much for me to process right now.

Not to jump the gun, but my post this week is intertwined with the book that I'd like to suggest we read, in whole or in part, during the last week of class. I was browsing the New York Times online when I stumbled across a review of a new "book on science" that could not possibly be more relevant to this class. 

Before talking about other forms of information, it is important to notice that daily conversations have been the most prominent form of information throughout the history. Secondary forms, other than communication between humans, have changed significantly over time. Before the development of computer technology, primary form of information was presented as a form of writing. Art and music definitely existed and some people might claim that they were forms of information as well, but the abstract definition of information makes it hard to judge if they count as forms of information. It is still not doubtable that writing was the most prominent form. After the development and wide spread of computer technology, most of the forms of information are acquired thru computer.

A really interesting example and test case for our discussion, today, about what information is, was provided by tonight's Jeopardy. If you have been living in a cave, be sure to check out

On ‘Jeopardy!’, Computer Win Is All but Trivial