Girl Wide Web 2.0 edited by Sharon R. Mazzarella

Image from here

Girl Wide Web 2.0 (check it out on Goodreads or Amazon) is about how girls and women are renegotiating their identities through means of the Internet. The book is written in a series of essays; each author has taken a specific subject of the Internet which girls and women that are participating in and has analyzed how their culture has redefined how they represent themselves online. In the foreword, Dafna Lemish writes, “Through the variety of possibilities of engaging others online, girls … explore new opportunities to express their voices, and so the Internet is involved in self-growth. Some practices involve the construction of very private and individual identities and a creative process of expression. Others experiment with social relationships and create communities of ‘sisterhood.’”

I liked this book and appreciated the perspectives that it had on the evolution of identity online. While there was a lot of valuable information in the book as a whole, there were two particular chapters that I found useful as far as expressing online identities from different cultures: “Degrees of Caution: Arab Girls Unveil on Facebook” and “East Meets West: Is There a Difference Between Tai and American Girls’ Use of the Internet and Negotiation of Identity?”

Accepting New Technology as Tradition

After today’s lecture from Dr. Wickman, I got thinking about how traditions are often reasons why some people are not as willing to be as explorative as others.

In chapter 69 on page 278, it describes what happens to the whale after its carcass is let go in the ocean: "When the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, never the less still shows the whit mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale’s unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log—shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There’s your law of precedents; there’s your utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not ever hovering in the air! There’s orthodoxy."

As Dr. Wickman pointed out in class, this relates to religion. But I would like to postulate that this idea of blind following that is being suggested is not only pertinent to religion but to technology as well.

People don’t like there to be a lot of changes in their lives. Throwing changes into a normal and structured life, at least for people like me, can give a “you-threw-off-my-groove” kind of vibe, and it takes time to accept the change. We are creatures of habit.

Courtesy of  Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, flickr.com

I See Why English Professors Love This

I've never read Moby Dick before, but, much like Dr. Wickman pointed out, it's always been on my radar because it's just one of those books everyone knows about. I'm actually really glad I've never picked it up before now, though, but I already see so much that I just would not have been able to appreciate before simply because being an English major for a year and a half has taught me so much about how to read and how to understand great literature. Thanks to my education, lines like "Ignorance is the parent of fear" (p. 19) and extended descriptions and musings on topics like whether our shadow is our true self and the body just a vehicle are so much more rich and intriguing simply because I have learned how to think literature as well as just read it.

Queequeg, and more, his relationship with Ishmael, fascinates me. It's so interesting how they can be such good friends, and still Ishmael off-handedly judges him at time for being a "pagan" and just dismisses his intelligence and/or his behavior as inferior. At the same time, though, I don't think Ishmael could or would become as fast of friends with anyone from his same religious/cultural background. So, ironically, the very thing that keep he and Queequeg forever at a kind of distance--their cultural and religious differences--is the very thing that excuses such a fast friendship. And this is all the more intriguing because this is often how it happens in our own lives. I remember making very fast and very strong friends on my mission for the LDS church in Argentina, yet always feeling a kind of insurmountable distance simply because of cultural differences. Melville plays with this phenomenon very precisely and it keeps me reading (despite the obvious and grueling lack of any plot whatsoever in these early pages).