28 thoughts on “Sensory Experience”

1. 
   » Quotes doc from Knight ar­ti­cle:

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2. An every­day rhetor­i­cal ap­proach to the aes­thetic is past due. As early as 1934, John Dewey ad­dresses the state of the aes­thetic. Dewey (1934) as­serted that the ma­jor chal­lenge for a gen­uinely use­ful aes­thetic the­ory would be “to re­cover the con­ti­nu­ity of es­thetic ex­pe­ri­ence with nor­mal processes of liv­ing” (p. 10). Speak­ing in broad terms of philoso­phies of aes­thet­ics he claimed “the sys­tem in ques­tion has su­per­im­posed some pre­con­ceived idea upon ex­pe­ri­ence in­stead of en­cour­ag­ing or even al­low­ing es­thetic ex­pe­ri­ence to tell its own tale” (275).
   Ref­er­enc­ing Dewey, ” to re­cover con­ti­nu­ity of es­thetic ex­pe­ri­ence” in­vokes mys­tery about ex­pe­ri­ence and what is real. Knight’s ref­er­ence to Dewey im­plies that in­for­ma­tion is ever chang­ing in a sense that we can never per­fectly trans­late, im­port, and com­pre­hend in­for­ma­tion. From its ori­gin in­for­ma­tion is changed as it moves through con­scious­ness.
   “I have the po­ten­tial to con­nect my­self to an abun­dance of very odd and use­less things. But ul­ti­mately I chose what el­e­ments to re­mem­ber and com­fort­ably ig­nore the rest.”
   This con­nec­tion and ease of ac­cess to abun­dant in­for­ma­tion cre­ates an in­ter­est­ing sit­u­a­tion. We take what we think is valu­able and im­por­tant and we com­mu­ni­cate it to oth­ers, but this com­mu­ni­ca­tion of in­for­ma­tion works like the game tele­phone. Pure in­for­ma­tion is di­luted as it trav­els be­tween in­di­vid­ual con­cise­ness, this bat­tle we fight every­day in our quest to feel some­thing that is real or true.

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   1. Ref­er­enc­ing the spread of in­for­ma­tion like the game of tele­phone is a per­fect metaphor. I’m sure many times peo­ple have over­heard some­thing and re­peated to some­one else, that’s how ru­mors get started, and whether some­one chooses to be­lieve it is what is then trans­lated to their per­sonal knowl­edge. ” Knowl­edge…in­volves what, at least prag­mat­i­cally, is true and good, beau­ti­ful, and use­ful. ” Quoted from Vaid­hyanathan, things can be mis­per­ceived be­tween in­for­ma­tion and knowl­edge, I guess the sit­u­a­tion at hand is what can dis­tin­guish be­tween the two, which makes it re­ally dif­fi­cult. It is the same prob­lem we had in the last project, dis­tin­guish­ing the two, but what I’ve learned is that in­for­ma­tion and knowl­edge are dif­fer­ent for each dis­ci­pline at hand.

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3. “It is clear that our un­der­stand­ing of mean­ing mak­ing is be­ing re­worked, in step with our chang­ing times. Part of what is at stake here, as we move to­ward more vi­sual and in­ter­ac­tive means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is in un­der­stand­ing how au­di­ences cre­ate mean­ing via their me­di­ated ex­pe­ri­ences. This in­cludes me­dia that is newly cre­ated, which em­ploy mul­ti­ple sources of in­for­ma­tion and rep­re­sen­ta­tion, but also old forms of me­dia that an au­di­ence can’t help but see newly, from their evolv­ing po­si­tions and per­cep­tions.” (Knight, 148 )

   This made me think about how pro­fes­sors al­ter their class lec­tures to fit the mil­len­nial gen­er­a­tion that is mak­ing their way to ed­u­ca­tion right now. Some se­mes­ters I have have a pro­fes­sor who is not tech savvy and they just stand at the front of the class and lec­ture to large groups of stu­dents while writ­ing key points on the chalk­board. Ver­sus other pro­fes­sors who are keep­ing up with tech­nol­ogy and in­cor­po­rate videos, slideshows, etc. to help fur­ther our learn­ing. From my per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence I find it harder to learn with just lec­ture and no me­dia di­men­sions to fur­ther rep­re­sent what is be­ing dis­cussed.

   “The stan­dard de­scrip­tion of the dif­fer­ence be­tween knowl­edge and in­for­ma­tion des not fully de­scribe our cur­rent con­di­tion. Knowl­edge, as Neil Post­man ex­plained, in­volves what, at least prag­mat­i­cally, is true and good, beau­ti­ful, and use­ful. In­for­ma­tion al­ways re­quires in­ter­pre­ta­tion — some form of pro­cess­ing — to be judged so and thus to be­gin to serve as the ba­sis for knowl­edge. Too much un­processed in­for­ma­tion in­ter­feres with the gen­er­a­tion and util­ity of knowl­edge: it can gen­er­ate anx­i­ety, wasted ef­fort, and paral­y­sis. It can ob­scure the valu­able and beau­ti­ful. It can also di­min­ish re­spect for the care­fully crafted con­tain­ers of knowl­edge.”

   For me this pas­sage says what we chose to look at as knowl­edge comes from per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence, which then can trans­form into in­for­ma­tion as we choose to in­ter­pret it. In that way it evokes forms of ex­pe­ri­ence and mem­o­ries. But not in the way that we are learn­ing aca­d­e­m­i­cally as this ar­ti­cle goes on to dis­cuss that some­times we re­mem­ber not to re­mem­ber; but in the way that we have per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ences and life lessons.

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   1. → we def­i­nitely need more GIFs, this unit es­pe­cially!

      

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   2. I find it so in­ter­est­ing that you bring up the idea of pro­fes­sors at our uni­ver­sity us­ing ei­ther a mod­ern ap­proach or a tra­di­tional ap­proach to teach­ing stu­dents. It’s en­tic­ing to think about what school was like be­fore the in­no­va­tion of pow­er­point and even the use of the in­ter­net and computers–basically, lis­ten­ing to some­one, as that’s it. In the quote, “can’t help but see newly, from their evolv­ing po­si­tions and per­cep­tions”, we can re­late back to your no­tion of pro­fes­sors not be­ing able to evolve with the stu­dents, and thus imag­in­ing what our fu­ture will be like. Will our gen­er­a­tion of teach­ers use tech­nol­ogy or will there be a dif­fer­ent method that sur­passes even ours.

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   3. http://​www​.pro​conit​.com/​i​m​g​/​q​u​e​s​t​i​o​n​s​/​3​4​9​7​.​jpg

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   4. I too have pro­fes­sors who both in­cor­po­rate tech­nol­ogy, and those who do not bring in a com­puter them­selves. I have found that the teach­ers who do not use tech­nol­ogy as ef­fi­ciently as they could, choose to do so be­cause they have found their teach­ing style and be­lieve it to be the most suc­cess­ful way to con­duct their class.

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   5. 
      → the fo­cus on tra­di­tional class­room teach­ing & learn­ing(?) is a bit nar­row, es­pe­cially given the rich quote Jheadeux in­cluded:
      “Part of what is at stake here,
      as we move to­ward more vi­sual and in­ter­ac­tive means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion
      is in un­der­stand­ing how au­di­ences cre­ate mean­ing via their me­di­ated ex­pe­ri­ences”
      — us­ing me­dia that in­volve “mul­ti­ple sources of in­for­ma­tion and rep­re­sen­ta­tion.”

      This re­lates to our in­quiry di­rectly, con­nect­ing with Ret­tberg (re: “rep­re­sen­ta­tion”) and Vaid­hyanathan (“in­for­ma­tion”) read­ings as well. About classrooms/education, whether for teach­ers or stu­dents we can rec­og­nize how the dig­i­tal retrieval/display of in­for­ma­tion is hardly the en­gage­ment or pro­duc­tion of knowl­edge, as in Jheadeaux’s sec­ond quote.

      Sim­i­larly, when Knight dis­cusses aes­thetic mean­ings cre­ated by “au­di­ence” (ergh; maybe “par­tic­i­pants” bet­ter?): this is not nec­es­sar­ily knowl­edge in the tra­di­tional, ra­tio­nal cat­e­gory of mean­ing in Lit­er­acy (writ­ing)…

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      1. 
         → as we’ll ex­plore in Ex­er­cise 4, and fur­ther in Project 3, there are di­men­sions of ex­pe­ri­ence and iden­tity that can not be “cap­tured” (trans­lated) into in­for­ma­tion or even writ­ing — whether leg­i­ble for hu­mans or ma­chines.

         Like­wise, we have iden­ti­ties that ex­ceed leg­i­ble in­for­ma­tion, maybe as “un­processed” ex­pe­ri­ence or di­verse rep­re­sen­ta­tions of self (Ret­tberg) — we’ll test the po­ten­tial of aes­thetic ex­pres­sion (even if not “mean­ing mak­ing”) as a form ad­e­quate for com­pos­ing, per­form­ing, and re­flect­ing our dig­i­tal iden­tity; in­deed to re­flect back and re­flect upon our me­di­ated ex­pe­ri­ence.
         (“sneak pre­view,” look­ing ahead next few weeks; but good to grasp the sep­a­rate, if not nec­es­sar­ily con­flict­ing per­spec­tives dis­cussed here re: in­for­ma­tion & aes­thetic par­a­digm)

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4. The aes­thetic in tra­di­tional Eng­lish stud­ies is usu­ally lo­cated in a fi­nite ob­ject (such as a lit­er­ary text, which as­sumes a reader read­ing). To­day, mak­ing such an as­sump­tion or ap­pro­pri­a­tion of “text” is rather un­pro­duc­tive. There are more gen­er­a­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties open for aes­thetic con­sid­er­a­tion, and ac­cord­ing to new me­dia schol­ars, we should be con­sid­er­ing them. (Knight 149).

   I find this pas­sage in­ter­est­ing be­cause I am cu­ri­ous to see what other “aes­thetic con­sid­er­a­tion” op­tions as text we may find it today’s so­ci­ety, be­cause I be­lieve that some­times lit­er­ary text can be seen as aes­thetic. In this, I think about twit­ter, in which the lit­er­ary text is both fi­nite in de­scrip­tion, but as well as the lim­i­ta­tion of char­ac­ters that are al­lowed.

   In terms of the other read­ing, I find the par­al­lel be­tween knowl­edge (be­ing de­fined as “is true and good, beau­ti­ful, and use­ful) and in­for­ma­tion (where as it’s “al­ways re­quir­ing in­ter­pre­ta­tion to be judged so and thus to be­gin to serve as a ba­sis of knowl­edge”) Per­son­ally, I find that this re­la­tion­ship can be re­versed, as I be­lieve that some­times it takes knowl­edge of a cer­tain thing or area in or­der to con­nect back to in­for­ma­tion of an­other cer­tain thing or event and thus, go­ing in a con­tin­u­ous loop. We can then ask the ques­tion of which came first, knowl­edge or in­for­ma­tion? (Vaid­hyanathan 175). Our ex­pe­ri­ence is de­ter­mined by knowl­edge of that cer­tain even that may have taken place, lead­ing us to be knowl­edge­able about the fu­ture, and per­haps this can tie in with the idea of learn­ing from our mis­takes

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   1. 
      → in­ter­est­ing view, an­other look at the knowl­edge — in­for­ma­tion dis­tinc­tion.

      Your last point makes me re­call the na­ture of nar­ra­tive knowl­edge, in se­quence, which seems par­tic­u­larly hu­man. What is the se­quence of event & nar­ra­tion? or ef­fects & causes? In our “time­line” think­ing & com­mu­ni­cat­ing, our nar­rat­ing al­most needs to pre­cede the event in or­der to un­der­stand it (knowl­edge through nar­rat­ing); like knowl­edge of causes, start­ing with ef­fects and look­ing “back­wards” to con­struct a time­line…
      (this is a bit “philo­soph­i­cal,” sorry)

      Back to our in­quiry and ac­tiv­i­ties: you men­tion ex­pe­ri­en­tial knowl­edge (term?), which Mon­day we rec­og­nized dis­tinct from Knowl­edge about and def­i­nitely In­for­ma­tion.
      For Ex­er­cise 4, Part 1 will try to cap­ture data/info of ex­pe­ri­ence (event) in slightly non-human ways, in ad­di­tion to our per­cep­tions if not even un­der­stand­ing; maybe knowl­edge about the ex­pe­ri­ence, but not even to in­ter­pret in this thought ex­er­cise — es­pe­cially so that we can con­tem­plate what can not be cap­tured as leg­i­ble in­for­ma­tion (or con­ven­tional knowl­edge).

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5. “Liv­ing in an era where tech­nol­ogy dras­ti­cally shapes the ways we com­mu­ni­cate, teach­ers and schol­ars of com­po­si­tion need a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of au­di­ence ex­pe­ri­ence with me­dia in or­der to ren­der more trans­par­ent the ways in which an au­di­ence cre­ates knowledge—or takes and makes mean­ing.” I be­lieve that this state­ment com­pletely sum­ma­rizes what is hap­pen­ing in our schools sys­tems to­days day in age. I know that some schools are in­cor­po­rat­ing the use of up to date tech­nol­ogy in their class­room so that they can bet­ter un­der­stand and con­nect with their stu­dents. Many stu­dents to­day are ab­solutely glued to their cell phones. We are very tech­no­log­i­cally ori­ented and that trend prob­a­bly will not go away for some time. I think it would be a wise de­ci­sion for teach­ers to try to in­cor­po­rate more tech­nol­ogy into their teach­ing styles if they want to be able to suc­cess­fully reach out to this new gen­er­a­tion of stu­dents. Teach­ers must study that these stu­dents re­spond well with tech­nol­ogy in the same way that some stu­dents re­spond well to pic­tures and sounds over sim­ple lec­tures. Tap­ping into the tech­no­log­i­cal as­pect of teach­ing could make a large im­pact for stu­dents who learn that way. 

   “The ease of re­triev­ing in­for­ma­tion with Google might make us too lazy to re­mem­ber things on our own.” Af­ter read­ing this quote, it has come to my at­ten­tion that Google is re­ally a dou­ble edged sword. It con­tains more in­for­ma­tion than we could even dream about and al­lows us ac­cess to it 24/7, how­ever too fre­quently, peo­ple use it to an­swer small ques­tions that they do not want to an­swer for them­selves. I do be­lieve that used cor­rectly, Google is an amaz­ing source of knowl­edge that we should be tak­ing ad­van­tage of. How­ever, overuse of this lux­ury could mean the be­gin­ning of a down­fall of hu­mans think­ing for our­selves and be­com­ing lazy on an in­tel­lec­tual level.

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   1. I com­pletely agree with this, as a stu­dent who has learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties i have had tech­nol­ogy in­volved in my learn­ing since i can re­mem­ber and teach­ers al­ways re­act dif­fer­ently to how i should use it and if it is at all ben­e­fi­cial. But the truth is if teach­ers found ways to keep us present and use tech­nol­ogy they could re­lated to stu­dents so much eas­ier. These things are sim­ple as just turn­ing off the in­ter­net so stu­dents can’t browse red­dit and face­book while in class, prox­ies and blocked web­sites work too.

      Google is a strange tool, one that we use con­stantly and a tool i re­mem­ber al­ways us­ing to try and learn more. But it doesn’t al­ways give you the facts or ex­pla­na­tion but vague an­swers that fit the search re­quest. While at the same time it has pro­vided the eas­i­est way to learn small things with­out hav­ing to take classes, such as to tie a tie or cook a turkey, or learn to brew beer.

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   2. I think that the dan­ger of Google is less based upon in­tel­lec­tual sloth and more upon the use of the in­for­ma­tion we re­ceive. An­swer­ing smaller ques­tions with Google in pur­suit of a larger an­swer is of­ten just an ab­bre­vi­a­tion of me­an­der­ing through a text­book, and can help keep in­di­vid­u­als on tar­get rather than let­ting minds wan­der while look­ing for ref­er­ences. The hu­man mind rou­tinely ab­sorbs more raw sen­sory data than it can ac­tively process, es­pe­cially con­sciously, and must sort through that which is rel­e­vant to the thought at hand while also pro­cess­ing the en­vi­ron­ment and the back­ground, which leads to in­for­ma­tion be­ing left out, dis­carded, or ig­nored, of­ten for no con­se­quence, but oc­ca­sion­ally with un­for­tu­nate re­sults. It is what we choose to do with the in­for­ma­tion we ab­sorb, and why we chose to pur­sue it that makes a dif­fer­ence.

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   3. I think that the fact that we highly use google for in­for­ma­tion is a way where it lim­its a person’s knowl­edge and di­verse out bring­ing whereas, a per­son us­ing Google is only lim­ited to the word phrases and such topic rel­a­tive to word(s) we search within Google. What I am try­ing to point out from ex­er­cise 4 is the con­cept of what in­for­ma­tion we use to tran­scribe such new in­for­ma­tion we en­counter and pro­vide within our writ­ing.

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   4. 
      → to fol­low and un­der­score Hunter’s last point, in con­text of Unit 3 and our broader scope (“world­views”):

      we pre­vi­ously rec­og­nized — and some tra­di­tional in­sti­tu­tions still do — in­for­ma­tion recall/recitation as knowl­edge, even though our brains are not the best storage-retrieval proces­sors
      Just like data leg­i­ble & com­mu­ni­cated by ma­chines (Ret­tberg chp 5), we’re “off-loading” in­for­ma­tion to net­worked data­bases (“Google” some­what names this his­tor­i­cal de­vel­op­ment) as pros­the­sis…
      and while this has its own form of “think­ing” (al­go­rithms; re­call Idea Chan­nel video) and “de­ci­sion mak­ing,” I’d like to fo­cus our at­ten­tion on new forms of knowl­edge and iden­tity ex­pe­ri­ence emerg­ing.

      For in­stance, just like de­cid­ing & per­form­ing what to do with in­for­ma­tion (ex­am­ple: con­sider any tra­di­tional aca­d­e­mic as­sign­ment) in writ­ing —
      what about de­cid­ing & per­form­ing with in­for­ma­tion in social/public con­texts? and with cul­tural forms (per­haps along with, or in place of Info), to per­form or ex­press new knowl­edge or iden­tity ex­pe­ri­ence…?

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6. “La­tour sees the dilemma clearly, the aes­thetic has been de­duced to empty shadow play, bounc­ing back so­ci­etal and cul­tural in­flu­ences to such an ex­tent that it’s be­come im­pos­si­ble to speak of hav­ing one’s own aes­thetic ex­pe­ri­ence. In­deed, the modus operandi has been to “ex­plain away” the aes­thetic by ad­dress­ing the so­cial and ide­o­log­i­cal fac­tor­shid­den be­hind it. Yet, this un­apolo­get­i­cally a pri­ori “way of know­ing” serves to cre­ate a nar­row, lim­it­ing con­cep­tion of what the aes­thetic is and how it is experienced—privileging mind over body, the­ory over ex­pe­ri­ence, and uni­ver­sals over par­tic­u­lars.” This spe­cific quote shows the strug­gle to put such amaz­ing in­for­ma­tion from people’s per­sonal; ob­ser­va­tion and analy­sis which are usu­ally cat­e­go­rized into a lower level of sig­ni­fance than the­o­ries that are based on a third per­son stand that show an un­bais trail of thought from the au­thor.

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   1. “The prac­tice of de­ter­min­ing the value of a work but it’s ap­pear­ances in other ci­ta­tions (bib­lio­met­rics) is a con­tro­ver­sial and trou­ble­some topic within the aca­d­e­mic culture…the ex­pan­sion of the prin­ci­ple to mea­sure the pre­sumed “im­pact” or “value” schol­ar­ship within the hu­man­i­ties has gen­er­ated crit­i­cism, be­cause much of the best work is pub­lished in books, rather than in a sta­ble set of in­dex­able jour­nals” (Vaid­hyanathan 6, P. 15). This quote shows a sim­i­lar way of fil­ter­ing knowl­edge within the Acad­e­mia of pro­fes­sional lit­er­a­ture from the quote I posted above.

      Last re­mark, both Knight and Vaid­hyanathan show a sim­i­lar view on how in­for­ma­tion within the pro­fes­sional writ­ing are fil­tered and highly struc­tured by aes­thet­ics and ac­cept­able knowl­edge that is con­sid­ers “real” in­for­ma­tion to stu­dents and peo­ple of the Acad­e­mia.

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      1. 
         → on this last point, we do in­deed want to think fur­ther about In­sti­tu­tions in this unit, even while fo­cus­ing on ex­pe­ri­ence and iden­tity.

         Per­haps in par­al­lel or anal­ogy (help­ful to think this way):

         Acad­e­mia — Writing/Literacy — In­for­ma­tion — no aes­thet­ics = no ex­pe­ri­ence (not per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence, wis­dom, sub­jec­tive mean­ings; but dis­ci­pli­nary knowl­edge, dis­course for “every­one”…)

         //

         Net­worked So­ci­ety — Elec­tracy — Aes­thet­ics = ex­press ex­pe­ri­ence & iden­tity

         (more fo­cus of next week, but we’ve al­ready seen the Ap­pa­ra­tus The­ory chart…)

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7. “Through­out the next two cen­turies of West­ern Eu­ro­pean in­tel­lec­tual thought, in­quiries into the aes­thetic con­tin­ued to demon­strate con­cerns re­gard­ing the source and sta­tus of knowl­edge. No­tably, the­o­rist Louis Althusser’s work lo­cated the aes­thetic firmly in the con­text of ideology—that is, in society’s dom­i­nant be­liefs and val­ues.
   “What art makes us see, and there­fore gives to us in the form of ‘see­ing’, ‘per­ceiv­ing’ and ‘feel­ing’ (which is not
   the form of know­ing), is the ide­ol­ogy from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it de­taches it­self as
   art, and to which it al­ludes.”
   Althusser’s words al­most echo back to the an­cient Greeks—that per­ceiv­ing is not re­ally a form of know­ing.
   He con­tended that the aes­thetic re­veals only ideology—not re­al­ity.”

   This re­ally speaks to me the idea that per­ceiv­ing is not re­ally a form of know­ing. I grew up a large por­tion of my life over­seas in places such as Hong Kong, Shang­hai and Eng­land and it has been the hard­est thing to try and ex­plain to oth­ers what it is like to live in some place. In fact i de­vel­oped a bad habit of not telling peo­ple about the places i lived be­cause deep down i knew that they could never know what i was talk­ing about un­less they lived it and spent time in those lo­ca­tions. These places i lived are so much more than their out­ward names, see­ing and “per­ceiv­ing” aren’t enough to un­der­stand a place, you have to bath your­self in it, to re­ally know what it is. Not ob­serve but par­tic­i­pate.

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   1. I find the idea that per­ceiv­ing only pro­duces an ide­ol­ogy in­ter­est­ing be­cause ide­olo­gies are the ba­sis for people’s de­ci­sion mak­ing but they are also fal­si­fi­able. In a bi­o­log­i­cal sense, some of us are color blind and those peo­ple tech­ni­cally per­ceive light in dif­fer­ent col­ors.

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8. “La­tour sees the dilemma clearly, the aes­thetic has been de­duced to empty shadow play, bounc­ing back so­ci­etal and cul­tural in­flu­ences to such an ex­tent that it’s be­come im­pos­si­ble to speak of hav­ing one’s own aes­thetic ex­pe­ri­ence. In­deed, the modus operandi has been to “ex­plain away” the aes­thetic…”

   This pas­sage notes the fact that the aes­thetic is largely ig­nored to­day in schol­arly study and re­flec­tion, lead­ing to dif­fi­culty in re­count­ing an ex­pe­ri­ence ex­clu­sively from an aes­thetic per­spec­tive. I think that this is largely an out­come of im­proved learn­ing about how one thinks, re­acts, and processes that which they ex­pe­ri­ence on a day to day ba­sis. A per­son does not act based upon the ex­pe­ri­ence alone, their minds take in all the in­for­ma­tion, process it, high­light­ing what is rel­e­vant in the mo­ment, stor­ing other things rel­e­vant, and sort­ing out all the flot­sam and jet­sam in be­tween, whether con­sciously or un­con­sciously, and re­acts based upon that in­stan­ta­neous sort­ing of rel­e­vance to ir­rel­e­vance with re­spect to the cir­cum­stances. This makes the aes­thetic rel­e­vant only as a build­ing block to the hu­man mind, rel­e­vant for its con­tri­bu­tion of data, but rel­a­tively un­der­whelm­ing in sig­nif­i­cance when there are things like re­ac­tions and con­cepts born from the sen­sory data upon its analy­sis.

   “Yet he was in­ca­pable of think­ing clearly about many is­sues, blinded by his per­spec­tive and po­si­tion. Me? I can Google with the best of them and in­form my­self about a vast range of top­ics. So which one of us was the more ca­pa­ble thinker?”

   The au­thor com­pared his mem­ory and ac­cess to mem­ory to his grand­fa­ther, who had hun­dreds of Hindu prayers and works mem­o­rized from child­hood to death, and noted that hav­ing a great mem­ory and su­perb un­der­stand­ing of the in­for­ma­tion con­tained is not the same as be­ing a great thinker. While the author’s grand­fa­ther could de­bate Hindu scrip­ture and trans­la­tion, he was in­ca­pable of un­der­stand­ing other con­cepts, like gen­der equal­ity and physics. This high­lights the fact that in­for­ma­tion, un­til it has been an­a­lyzed and processed, is ir­rel­e­vant to the hu­man mind. Some­times analy­sis ren­ders in­for­ma­tion un­us­able, or too com­pli­cated with­out other knowl­edge, and the in­for­ma­tion given to an in­di­vid­ual is ren­dered in­ert, but if some­one is ca­pa­ble of tak­ing in knowl­edge, pro­cess­ing its use­ful­ness with pre­vi­ously learned in­for­ma­tion, they can choose to act, speak, or ig­nore that in­for­ma­tion and its im­pli­ca­tions and ap­pli­ca­tions, mak­ing them a broader thinker.

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9. From Knight:
   “What art makes us see, and there­fore gives to us in the form of “see­ing”, “per­ceiv­ing” and “feel­ing (which is not the form of know­ing), is the ide­ol­ogy from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which is de­taches it­self as art, and to which it al­ludes” –a quote from Louis Althusser’s in­flu­en­tial es­say “A Let­ter on Art in Re­ply to An­dre Daspre” (2001)
   What I find in­ter­est­ing about this and aes­thetic ex­pe­ri­ence is how closely in­for­ma­tion has be­come in­ter­twined with hit­ting mul­ti­ple senses at once in or­der to cap­ti­vate our at­ten­tion. Since so much in­for­ma­tion is read­ily avail­able at our fin­ger­tips, with­out in­te­grat­ing some “art” and hit­ting mul­ti­ple senses it is un­likely to be no­ticed by our in­creas­ingly short at­ten­tion spans in this day and age.

   From Vaid­hyanathan: The con­cept about re­mem­ber­ing with­out for­get­ting due to the googliza­tion of knowl­edge I find par­tic­u­larly in­ter­est­ing. Whereas in the past we had to re­search and mem­o­rize in­for­ma­tion to have knowl­edge of it, nowa­days we can pre­tend that we never for­got that in­for­ma­tion while ul­ti­mately choos­ing what el­e­ments to re­mem­ber while ig­nor­ing the rest. So now we can seem to have greater knowl­edge than we have a true un­der­stand­ing of in­for­ma­tion sim­ply by “googling” a topic and stat­ing the in­for­ma­tion re­trieved. In this way, ex­pe­ri­ence has changed vastly be­cause now in­stead of need­ing to find a niche of peo­ple with knowl­edge about a topic we can eas­ily learn about a vast quan­tity of top­ics read­ily, mak­ing the world we ex­pe­ri­ence much more in­te­grated than is was a mere 20 years ago.

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   1. I like your in­sight from the Knight ar­ti­cle. I see this in how nearly all com­pa­nies have in­ter­ac­tive and highly vi­sual web­sites that at­tract con­sumers and keep them on their site for a longer du­ra­tion. Now a days if we go to a web­site that does not have the fa­mil­iar fea­tures we are used to we are likely to leave and look for an­other use­ful web­site that is eas­ier to op­er­ate.
      This re­lates to my ex­am­ple of how a cus­tomized search en­gine lim­its our abil­ity to dis­cover new and un­fa­mil­iar in­for­ma­tion just as a bor­ing web­site de­ters vis­i­tors from com­ing back to stay­ing on the site.

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10. “the role of the aes­thetic has been disembodied—due to the “es­tab­lished” ways of know­ing, which frame the aes­thetic as a highly in­tel­lec­tu­al­ized pur­suit based on the idea that
    knowl­edge it­self is a his­tor­i­cally, cul­tur­ally, and ide­o­log­i­cally im­bri­cated process.” This quote from the Knight ar­ti­cle shows how in our cur­rent so­ci­ety we dont value our base emo­tions and in­stincts any­more, but rather im­me­di­atly fil­ter that in­for­ma­tion in our brains and re­act or act in a way that is pleas­ing based off our cul­tural, his­tor­i­cal, and ide­al­is­tic view of what is ac­cept­able in so­ci­ety.

    “How­ever, if search re­sults are more cus­tomized, you are less likely to stum­ble upon the un­known, un­com­fort­able, and un­fa­mil­iar. Your web search ex­pe­ri­ence will re­in­force any in­ter­ests, af­fil­i­a­tions, bi­ases, and opin­ions that you al­ready poses.” This quote shows how we limit our growth as peo­ple when search en­gines are cus­tomized to our pref­er­ences. This cus­tomiza­tion makes our searches more ef­fec­tive for a large per­cent­age of the time but also lim­its the amount of in­for­ma­tion we are likely to stum­ble upon which would help us be­come more well rounded peo­ple.

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    1. I agree that it lim­its our growth. As un­com­fort­able as some in­for­ma­tion might be to us, it is im­por­tant to be ex­posed to ALL kinds of views. We can­not ex­ceed our en­vi­ron­ment.

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11. “It is clear that our un­der­stand­ing of mean­ing mak­ing is be­ing re­worked, in step with our chang­ing times. Part of what is at stake here, as we move to­ward more vi­sual and in­ter­ac­tive means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is in un­der­stand­ing how au­di­ences cre­ate mean­ing via their me­di­ated ex­pe­ri­ences. This in­cludes me­dia that is newly cre­ated, which em­ploy mul­ti­ple sources of in­for­ma­tion and rep­re­sen­ta­tion, but also old forms of me­dia that an au­di­ence can’t help but see newly, from their evolv­ing po­si­tions and per­cep­tions.”

    This im­me­di­ately made me think of the Dare­devil se­ries on Net­flix. Over the past 2 decades, there has been a grow­ing trend in films and tele­vi­sion to not only cut the tran­si­tion time be­tween frames but also to di­rect in this sort of “re­al­ity TV-esque” style that is, at this point, an­noy­ing. Dare­devil, on the other hand, has two scenes in par­tic­u­lar that break this trend–one in the first sea­son and an­other in the sec­ond. In short, the scenes are sev­eral min­utes long and con­sist of sin­gle, con­tin­u­ous shots.

    “The ease of re­triev­ing in­for­ma­tion with Google might make us too lazy to re­mem­ber things on our own.”

    I’m re­minded of the ar­ti­cle ear­lier in the se­mes­ter that dif­fer­en­ti­ated “know­ing” and “know­ing how to look it up.” Vaid­hyanathan says that it “might make us too lazy” but I think that it has more to do with so­cial val­ues, or lack thereof.

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