Blog Post 7 - Text Links

     While I hope to use many written texts in my analysis about illness and the "sick role," I think it could be interesting to look at commericials about illness and see what sorts of social constructions are at work within them. Here are a few commericals I found:

Two from the National Alliance on Mental Illness -

http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7KVc/national-alliance-on-mental-illness-nami-listen

http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7770/nami-monuments   (this one is interesting because it shows national monuments and says that these people "beat mental illness" and the comment at the bottom of the article points out that many of the people depicted were murdered...)

and another is a Super Bowl Chevy commercial from last year that focused on cancer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vhMpXMPvdU

   I'm not sure if I will actually use these commercials specifically, but I think they can help me decide on a specific type of commercial/representation of illness to focus on for a section of my project. 

Blog Post 6 - Project 2 Proposal

     Right now I am in a class called Illness & Health in Literature that focuses on the "sick role" - how society views people who are ill and how ill people base their thoughts and actions on themselves and their illness from other social influences. I think people who are ill would be a perfect "othered" community to analyze because, as I've learned and am continuing to learn from my other class, illness can be a highly constructed social theme. 
     I already have a lot of information and texts, including Audre Lorde's "The Cancer Journals," Barbara Ehrenreich's "Welcome to Cancerland," Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor" and "AIDS and It's Metaphors," and an analysis of illness from the early nineteenth century, "Complaints & Disorders." Having already read all of these I do not think I will be stressed to find information, but I think I will still reach out to find other texts once I find the specific approach I am going to take. I also will have plenty of different subcategories to go along with; analyzing separate diseases and illnesses such as cancer, mental illness, AIDS/other sexual illnesses, and others.
      What I'm thinking about doing right now is just to explain & analyze how society shapes how we perceive illness, how patients/physicians "should" act, how we view different illnesses based on gender or age, and how society responds to those that do not conform to the "sick role." I will most likely take examples from texts from the patient's perspective and use that as a basis of exploration for the societal views. 

Blog Post 5 - Hanfler, TED Talk/Radio Lab, Lorber, and Young

Hanfler seems to base his idea of social construction differently than I would have expected; his explanation seems to focus on the construction of deviances, saying “deviance is not automatically understood as an objective fact but as constructed and interpreted meanings that are subject to change” (13). While I think many of us and many explanations - including some that we have studied for this class like the TED talk - construct sociality based on what is considered “normal,” we fail to focus on the idea that “normal” is constructed through deviances. Social construction is more so based on what we consider to be “not normal” and creating the judgements and stereotypes that either glorify or shame people from them. Yet, while we are able to recognize that society does in fact create judgements based on these ideas, we still attempt to construct the very foundation of gender and sexuality - aspects completely grounded within a person’s being.  “Schools, parents, peers, and the mass media guide young people into gendered work and family roles,” Lorber writes, “For human beings there is no essential femaleness or maleness, femininity or masculinity, womanhood or manhood, but once gender is ascribed, the social order constructs and holds individuals to strongly gendered norms and expectations,” (57, 58). I find it interesting that we are able to create a social construction of gender, gender identity, and sexuality, and yet remain socially oblivious to the fact that such elements are unrestrained and virtually never fit into exactly one category that we, as a society, have created.

Until I came to UNL I did not possess the understanding that gender was a social construct, I believed (and I think many others - in society I mean - still agree with this, sadly) that gender and sex were synonymous. Thankfully there has been a great deal of focus on the social construction of gender in almost every class I have taken in my two years here, and while I continue to learn more about the topic, the more examples I see of socially constructed ideas about gender and its representation - in both life and art, film and literature. Last semester I read the text “Close Range: Wyoming Stories” by Annie Proulx (famous for her story “Brokeback Mountain,” included in “Close Range”) and for my final paper I deeply analyzed Proulx’s construction of masculinity and queerness in the western genre and in relation to the iconic image of the cowboy - and that paper was basically my magnum opus at a whopping eighteen pages long. Anyway, social construction of gender is one of my favorite things to learn and study, so the TED Talk was not only very informative for me but very interesting as well. I think the most intriguing aspect of the talk was the fact that I thought it was interesting that the talk was from a heterosexual male (that sentence was a doozy!). I suppose I already attributed gender studies and professionals within that study to be either female, homosexual, or otherwise not a heterosexual male. Great, not only am I feeding into a social construct, but I’m feeding into a social construct ABOUT a social construct! Where does the forever overseeing cloud of social construction end???!!!!

Blog Post 4 - The Work of Each Section in the IMRDC Paper

Introduction:

“As soon as he wakes up in the morning, Ronnie, an undergraduate student at a large, Midwestern research university, sends a tweet from his phone, which lets his roommates know he’s awake.” (9)

“Ronnie’s experiences represent common ones for undergraduate students across the United States. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, as of August 2011, 83% of 18–29 year-olds used a social network site (Madden, 2012).” (10)

Both of these are examples of how I want to start my essay; I want to start kind of like a story to introduce my partner’s social media, then work into the factual information and research. I think this is a good way to lead into the essay, and it should be easy to keep it entertaining this way.

Methods:

“While such methods should be adapted to the context, I believe this combination of methods can allow writing researchers to study dispersed literate activity in contexts where writing is often difficult to trace.” (12)

I think its a good idea to explain yourself in the methods section and explain the “why” as to how you collected the data.

“I measured students’ participation levels on social network sites through

a preliminary questionnaire distributed during my classroom visit, which invited students to indicate if they were interested in talking with me further about their social network site use.” (13)

Maybe it is just the English major in me, but this sentence is written really well; it is clear with both it’s explanation and diction, which is an important element to remember when writing something scholarly like an essay

Results:

“For Ronnie, Twitter represented a ‘stream of consciousness,’ as he described it in an interview; he updated Twitter several times per day and connected primarily with close friends and roommates through the site.” (15)

I’m so glad that I read this because this is the essential description of what twitter is and how many people use it. I was struggling for a while on how to describe that twitter is “just a bunch of random stuff and thoughts,” and this is a great way to frame it.

“Ronnie’s construction of Alison involved his literacy skills through this ecology of practice: by integrating his knowledge of genre and discourse conventions, technological affordances, and self-presentation skills, he created a believable composition on online interfaces.” (30)

Being sure to include Ronnie’s prank of creating Alison was an interesting and important piece for Buck: it showed that Ronnie had assimilated his own knowledge about social media and identity into creating this false one, much like Buck is assimilating her data into an analysis of the same topic.

Discussion:

“‘I guess it’s some sort of a statement. So many people just kind of go with what’s on Facebook and trust it. There’s really no basis other than assuming people are honest.’”  (31)

This is basically what we’re banking on doing this research and essay, that our subject is honest and what we find (unless we can determine otherwise) is true in essence.

“Social network site users keep the sites going not through their monetary subscriptions to these services but through their data, which these sites then monetize and sell to advertisers. Writers on social network sites, and their data, are the products that social network sites sell.” (34)

Also an important aspect to remember while doing this research: social media sites are doing the same sort of research that we are and analyzing their users. Not a huge or hugely important part but I thought this was an interesting idea to make sure and incorporate.

Conclusion:

“Ronnie’s practices and the situations he confronts in representing himself

online make visible the issues that many others confront in their social network site use, usually in more subtle ways, when engaging in common activities such as sharing family and vacation photos or making comments on a political issue or event.” (34)

Probably a good idea to keep a sort of generalization about social media and the way other people use it while collecting data and making assumptions and conclusions. I might want to include some parts like this in my own essay.

“For Ronnie, social network sites index a nexus of information through which he manages and organizes various aspects of his life. Ronnie’s activity within these spaces represents important literacy work that relies on his knowledge of site infrastructure, genre conventions, and audience. (35)

Just another well written part that does a good job of making conclusions clear and to the point, while also giving good insight as to what may be going on in our own research - and helping us put our ideas into words.

Blog Post 3 - Questions for Social Media Project

1. How do you see social media being part of your life and your identity in the next ten, twenty, or even thirty years?

2. Is there anything you do not or will not post onto social media? Why?

3. How is your audience for your twitter different than your audience for say 

your facebook or tumblr? How does this shape what you do or do not post?

4. How are you different than the average user? How are you different than the users you follow?

5. How often do you post to social media? How often are you on social media? Why do you think you do one more than the other, or do them about the same?

6. Does social media affect your interests? How may it or how may it not?

7. What are your habits that you have on social media? Do those factor into your identity, either on or offline?

8. Someone you don’t know, has never met you and does not know anything about you clicks on your profile, what do you think they think? What do you think they identify you as or how do they construct your identity?

9. Do you think there is a strive for everyone to construct a certain “perfect” identity on social media? If so, what is this “perfect” identity? How do you think this affects what you and others post?

10. Does social media empower identities or make them vulnerable? How so?

11. Is social media an honest look into the identity of yourself and others, or is it more of an alter ego?

12. What is your favorite way to use social media? What are you most proud of relating to social media?

Blog Post 2 - Social Media

It would seem that from the three articles, their authors/subjects either find social media to be a liberating or hindering aspect to their identity. While Bev Gooden (“Hashtag Activism”), Joseph Delgado and Roxanne Gay (“Writers of Color..”) use social media as a way to reach out into communities - in their instances, communities that suffer from oppression - while Erin Ruddy (“Fakebooking”) feels limited by her social media, believing that she cannot post a pictures that is only half-true. Gooden, Delgado and Gay all use social media to strengthen how they identify themselves; Gooden as a survivor of domestic abuse, Delgado as a queer poet, and Gay as a writer of color. They all take a step to create a collective community of freedom and respect. “It [community] is a concept both seductive and powerful,” Harris wrote, “one that offers us a view of shared purpose and effort….the gambit of community, once offered, is almost impossible to decline - since what is invoked is a community of those in power, of those who know the accepted ways of writing and interpreting texts,” (“The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing”).

Ruddy, on the other hand, felt that by posting the picture of her children with a snowmen she would be betraying her own identity in a way, by presenting a situation that as she describes, was not as joyful as her snapshot made it seem. Harris wrote, “We do not write simply as individuals, but we do not write simply as members of a community either. The point is, to borrow a turn of argument from Stanley Fish, that one does not first decide to act as a member of one community rather than some other, and then attempt to conform to its (rather than some other's) set of beliefs and practices.” This seems to be the dilemma that Ruddy faced, that even though it might be a norm to post a seemingly harmless pictures of her kids, it went against her own will to conform to that community.

While I don’t belong to any specific social media communities, other than the social media platform itself like the twitter/tumblr community and whatnot, I have included myself into online communities that work specifically to include and present works of art, photography, and writing. And while I do belong to these communities, I don’t believe any of them are huge benefactors in developing my identity; or maybe they are and I am just blind to it, the possibility is not ridiculous.

Blog Post 1 - Harris and Writing

I have always loved writing and have always considered myself to be a writer. I can only attribute my love for writing to the appreciation I have for a damn good story. I longed to give people the same escape I had when I found myself spending hours on end with a book in my lap, lost in the pages and lyricism of language. I supposed I’m the kind of writer who writes to be read. I write to entertain; for the enjoyment of others and the enjoyment of myself.

I agree with Raymond Williams’ definition of community when he says it can be a “warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships” and I agree with Joseph Harris when he says the it can quickly become an “empty” and “sentimental” word. As I understand it, community seems to be a somewhat neutral term, it doesn’t have the personal touch of a family and doesn’t have the concrete connotation of nation. To be in a community it seems there needs to be an established mutual understanding of the state of the community and its members. There also seems to be an equality from all members of a community, where there is no one superior to another and no one with absolute control.

The communities in which I find myself a part of are my neighborhood (not a community I am part of by choice, mind you), the community of students here at UNL - including the communities within each of my classes - the community within Andrews Hall, and the community of laborers in my workplace. Thinking of these leads me to believe that communities have a certain secular quality about them that strongly excludes them from other communities - whether it be the walls of a building or a strict belief system or some other social barrier.

It’s not easy to completely understand the position Harris takes when it comes to language and writing in communities (at least it wasn’t for me). Harris seems to allude the aspects to the assimilation of ideas within the community: “crossing the border from one community of discourse to another” as he puts it. It would also seem that Harris attributes a flirtation with different viewpoints to be another way in which we establish communities and learn to function within them. And while we may do that with our communities, we may also do so with our writing.

Communities are not without conflict, and in fact it, it may be the conflicting theories and ideas of its members that makes a community such a common social force. There can be a certain comfort in discrepancy and individuality, and that may be why we are comfortable establishing community with one another, but keep it as such; only a community. As Harris puts it, community is both an “appealing and limiting concept.”