HW 15- Treasure Hunting

After taking a hiatus from commenting on our peer's blogs, we wrote comments responding to our group members posts numbers 10-14. The purpose of this was to give our partner's some ideas for how to unite their posts into a theme for their final project; highlighting the best parts of their work and analyzing it to help them edit down what they already have into the framework for their essay.

Marco,

I think that from looking at your posts for assignments 10-14, I really have the feeling that your are on track to put together a really coherent and interesting essay. From all of the posts, I liked the uniqueness of one of your points in this specific post.

You talk briefly about how digital activity can be attributed to accessibility in that the choice between physical activity and digital activity is a no- brainer. I agree with this, physical activity especially in my life is always the priority over any digital interaction, because I just like being out and "actually" doing something.

Their seemed to be a common unifying theme in your post that incorporates the idea of the actual choice which people make, and the choice which fictional characters (such as those in "Feed" make). The idea that we realistically can chose how long and at what times we tap into the digital world, is drastically different from the all-day, every-day kind of exposure that the kids in Feed were subjected to.

If you use that fiction vs. non-fiction lens to write your essay, I feel like you will end up with a really interesting essay that is quite different than the others that are going to be written for our final project.

I wanted to focus on this concept in your posts specifically because I tried to convey a similar thing on my blog. I found that I couldn't really articulate this, and you did, which is to your credit as it was a really good (and interesting) point.

Good job Marco, I like what you have been doing on your blog, and I hope to read your undoubtedly unique essay once we have completed our digital unit. Your work always gives me new ideas and makes me think deeper, keep it up!

Jake F.

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Beatrice,

I really like how you don't get hung up in your writing, and move from point to point, without useless filler. I definitely feel like you put alot of thought into your posts and it shows. You tend to say alot more in a few paragraphs, than some people do in entire page long posts.

Your point about being "out of whack with reality" really made me think about how we actually seem to take most of our social cues from things we see in the media, in movies and in the digital world. I.E., we like our "real" lives partly through popular ideas and false representations.

Although I liked your post, I was kinda confused by your last part about "not reading books literally". Specifically pertaining to "The Jungle". I get your point about how we can't look at Feed literally, because the concept of that book lies deep below its surface, so reading it literally would be worthless. As far as Sinclair's book is concerned, the result of reading that book literally, lead to the pure food and drug act of 1906, and is directly why we have an FDA (food and drug administration) today. So why you would think that was a bad thing, I'm not sure.

The concept of ourselves [the reader] as the hammer, and Feed as the nail, is something I strongly agree with. I think this is quite similar to what I wrote in my post, and I would encourage you to branch off of this to further develop that point into an section of your final essay.

Nice work, with the exception of that one point about The Jungle, I really think your right on target with what you were saying. Your arguments are thought out and coherent, and of what you expressed I felt pretty in sync with. Keep it up Beatrice

Jake F.