Letter for You [HW #15- John]

Alright let me try to do in paragraph form and still hit all the ABCDEFs. Hey John, it seems like you never fail to make your blogs a coalesce of ideas from the text, ideas from the class, and specific examples from your life (e.g. skinny jeans in school, Swift vs. West, etc). It's always good to read your blogs because, although some of the observations are common, hardly anyone tries to create the ties between them. Creating these connections definitely relect on your desire to make sense of the situation we're in.

Between your blogs: Feed A, Feed B and HW 14- New Text, you make your opinion very clear. I'd say the best quote that sums up your view on this whole digitalization thing would be: "Digitalized representations fuck up your brains so you can function in a fucked up society." It's like we let DRDs control the way we think, the way we feel and the way we act so that we can play this little game filled with other branded, homogeneous people. We're being conditioned so our identities can correspond with the rest of our Feed world.

I found it interesting that you described online chattin as "kind of sounds like you're interacting with yourself." from what I can tell, you think that everyone puts on these fake identities that mostly revolve around being funny and charming. Andy by everyone doing this, we're all essentially interacting with ourselves. The way that I see this is that we're all looking for an outside source to tell us what we want to hear. And in order for the people to fulfill their charming role, the other person would have to do just that. You said that you tend to act funnier when you're talking online. I think that most people are aware that they act differently through AIM or Facebook or whatever. But how okay are we about being this phony? And why is that we are who we want to be when we're online, but we hardly become who we want to be when we're in the outside world?

Oh and also, how different are we from the people in our lives? Even without the keyboard, we associate ourselves with people that have similar experiences and interests. Like in our class Andy's class with Mr. Tsui, there were a handful of people that said/imploed that love is when two people share similar personalities and are "compatible" with each othe. We just tend to drift towards the people who are similar to us- the people within the same conformity. It always "kind of sounds like you're interacting with yourself" whether or not the keyboard medium is present.

One thing that I'd like to point out is your evaluation of M.T's choice of sending his message through a book. I'm sure you have thought about it, but I think that just saying "don't fix something if it's not broken" is dangerous. It may be true that portraying this in the form of a book is the better option, it's also important to see why the other options are bad. So maybe he chose to write a book, because the other sources would have been taken as seriously (e.g. if Feed was a movie, people would watch it for the plot, rather than analyzing for insights). And also "don't fix something if it's not broken"- isn't this the mentailty that is keeping us trapped in this corrupt way of living?

Time to continue "the viscious cycle" (Story of Stuff reference, hehe) of post blog, comment on blog, post blog, comment on blog... in Gavin's territory. Chao outside, Jutha Lucka.