[Aran Fox]

It might be worthwhile to qualify these comments with Thoreau’s  own insistence that his way of life is not for everyone, but only for those drawn to it. With this in mind, Thoreau becomes less a social author, and more a living experiment, chronicling and observing his experiment for those who might wish to take it up after him.

This qualification aside, I do think that the multiple revisions, which at times seem pointed at a more direct interaction with the readership, might make Thoreau a “social author”

[Aran Fox]

I think, too, that there is some sense of eliminating the privileged literature. The problem, pointed out by Emily above, is that vast quantities of databased information is available at new record highs every day. As Western audiences’ exposure to Caribbean literature, including demotic English and vernacular English, increases, we may be tempted to dismiss it for its “inaccuracy.” This is the inherent danger in selecting and “weeding out.” To be sure, it is a choice that must be made given the quantity of information available, but it must be done with care.

[Aran Fox]

This questions seems to be getting at the ideas of implicit racism. Another way to phrase that, using the example McCoy provides, is to say that our cultural demand for validation of African American literature by white male “experts” betrays an implicitly racist belief. Therefore, the culture within which a text is read can determine the level of racist expectation. Indeed, that is what literary criticism can achieve – creating a culture in which various qualities (from sexism to racism) are diminished or acknowledged. If, then, we read through the “culture” that McCoy’s article proposes – one in which black authors need not white validation – we begin to undo the implicit racism present in literature.

[Aran Fox]

I think that my (group 3’s) question is attempting to understand a similar phenomenon. In terms of answering, I think that the age-old “the rich get richer” situation is very much at work on the internet. This effect is what leads to certain sites getting more and more view because they began with more views. Circular logic, I know. The possibility for this paratextual space to become problematic is similar to the situation Dr. McCoy describes when discussing Frederick Douglas. An opinion online, by nature of it being a marginal opinion, might not receive the same attention as a result of its marginalization. Thus, sites with more views will be seen as somehow more legitimate, despite the possibility that the marginal viewpoints as just as legitimate. Much like YouTube videos with millions of views compared to videos with only a few views, users tend to believe that more views means better, or in this case, more worthy or correct, content.

[Aran Fox]

I believe the change that most affected the rhythm is the addition of the comma in the middle of sentence 4. While it is impossible to know exactly how the speech was read, this added pause adds emphasis to the second half of the sentence, “that that nation might live.” Without the comma, this last part of the sentence does not stand out, as the sentence is fairly long to being with. The emphasis on nationhood that arrives with the addition of the comma is an excellent choice for a politician leading in a time of civil conflict.

The addition of the “us” in the Bancroft versions and beyond does offer a significant alteration to the meaning. Rather than forget the dead by merely referring to the living, a sort of memorial in opposition is created by describing the people gather as “us, the living,” rather than “the living.”

[Aran Fox]

By limiting the situation with his particular bias, he in fact does the opposite. In a moment of irony, Thoreau has created a poignant scene. The reader expects that Thoreau will simply observe the ants and laud their natural power, their strength, or something else along those lines. Instead, Thoreau has challenged expectation with an epic satire. In the end, Thoreau is describing the power and fury of the world of ants – who represent nature – and the world of humans – with their emotional drives to violence represented by Achilles

[Aran Fox]

In some ways, the type of work Thoreau created lends more to questions of the present than those of the past. Certainly, knowledge of Thoreau’s life and influences can help with a biographical approach to his writings, but Walden is also interested in a particular approach to living. Thus, my question becomes, how would a modern adherent of the Thoreauvian lifestyle behave towards the current immigrants to the U.S.? “Baker Farm” indicates that at the very least he would perpetuate seemingly harmless ethnic stereotypes – of Latinos as border-crossing, illegitimate, non-person aliens. Perhaps defenders of Thoreau can try to hide behind a Zeitgeist-defense of sorts, but whether or not he intends to be insulting or insensitive, he has at this point only become part of the problem. Another white American colonizer of European descent attempting to ignorantly define another culture under the guise of paternalistic nagging.

[Aran Fox]

The discussion thus far has taken a different turn than I imagined it would when I was thinking about this question. I anticipated a discussion concerning the ways in which communication technology has shaped the way people converse, but this conversation has so far emerged as one about simply the failings of online communication. In the early days of the internet and especially during the blogging heyday, the internet was championed as a sort of ultra-democratic, one person-one voice revolution. While it certainly seems to have evolved that way, it has come with obvious detriments, as Casey has already noted.

So I’d like to briefly imagine the possible solutions to Thoreau’s problem. He seems interested in the idea of communicative spaces. He notes the trouble of personal interaction, as people can get carried away and thoughts begin to ramble. However, in the age of the internet, with the personal element of conversation largely stripped away in anonymous or quasi-anonymous online posts without any sort of culpability, the problem can be considered to have even magnified. The “big thoughts” of Thoreau’s time have gotten bigger, with more thinkers, to boot. I end up coming down on this issue on the side of the internet, because it is a tool with immense power and potential. However, I would hold off on eliminating personal conversation or debate when it comes to more serious things – imagine if Congress held all of its deliberations on a forum discussion board rather than on the House or Senate Floor.

[Aran Fox]

For me, this ends up being a difficult one to think about. Many times, I find myself sitting at my desk with just my laptop opening, deceiving myself into believing that I’m reading the essay on something or other that’s open in a PDF reader. Actually, I’m just listening to music and doing my best not to read the essay. So, in that sense, sure my laptop has made me a little more inefficient. The thing I wonder though, if it’s not just correlation being misrepresented as causation: I could just as easily distract myself without my computer. So, I opt for a more positive view of how technology has affected my reading. I know that when I read outside of class, the big problem I have is choosing what to read. It’s no secret that the modern American reader has access to an unbelievable number of books. With this overload of books, how do I chose what to read?

The first time I observed this phenomenon was when I discovered iTunes and the vast quantity of music available to me. There are two things worth noting here. First, quite literally a hundred or so albums that have become personal favorites would never have been accessible to me without the internet. Some of my favorite albums simply don’t populate the shelves of the local Best Buy, and my family’s music taste is 80’s pop-rock heavy (ugh).  Second, the immediacy of getting this music was part of what made it so attractive to me. I have never liked shopping in stores and browsing on shelves, so this keyword driven, search bar enabled browsing really eased my transition into digital music. I think both of these are true of the way I consume books now. Though I don’t buy ebooks or read many full works on my computer, I do utilize Amazon and other online sellers. I have the same quantity to chose from, but organized in such a way as to make it easier for me to sift through. Indeed, I doubt I would have come across many of my favorite reads this year if it hadn’t been for the 20 minutes or so I spent browsing through the most popular list results on Amazon.

The one detriment I immediately recognize, though, is the lack of a reading community. For the most part, these popularity contests on the Amazon booklists stand in for my community of real, right-in-front-of-me, human readers. I don’t typically share books with friends, and they don’t typically share them with me. I think this is a product of the digital age, for sure. However, I’m not sure I’m so hurt by it. I have found it thoroughly enjoyable to discover works on my own, read them, and move on to the next book on Amazon’s “Best Seller in Health Policy” list (where I found Atul Gawande’s thought provoking Checklist Manifesto).

[Aran Fox]

This problem reminds me of the classic adage “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Simultaneously this claim, maybe even specifically in the world of computers, is encouraging and deeply saddening. There are people like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, whose “individualism” essentially stands in for all the people underneath them; the personage of Jobs or Gates comes to represent the individual work of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. With each contribution obviously being valuable and probably even necessary to the completion of the project, while the work of coding and coding and coding and coding seemingly fits the definition of drudgery Thoreau seems to so detest, I am left wondering whether the Walden inspired individual wouldn’t give up early. Would he not be made inconsolable by the “how much is not done,” after the exaggeration of his own importance is deconstructed and placed before him?

[Author]

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