I bumped into a couple of interesting points while reading through “The Age of the Essay”.

In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you’re writing for yourself. You’re thinking out loud. But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. 

Are the essays that the University are making us students write essays that make us explain ourselves to the marker, or essays that challenges us to think out loud? I think it’s both. In a way, the questions raised make us think deeper in theory and express them out loud in our essays but at the same time, we HAVE to explain ourselves to the marker as well. It’s sort of like selling our ideas for marks, the way we write our essays in Uni. So based on the writer’s view on real essays, should the University really challenge their students with REAL essays, or academic essay is still the way to go? If real essays are all about us thinking out loud, I guess this blog post CAN be considered as a “real essay” as well?

So what’s interesting? For me, interesting means surprise. Interfaces, as Geoffrey James has said, should follow the principle of least astonishment. A button that looks like it will make a machine stop should make it stop, not speed up. Essays should do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximum surprise.

According to the writer, and I kinda agree, the most valuable ingredient in your essay is its surprise element. All of the essays that I did in Uni, I shamefully admit, have been written on subjects that I am most comfortable with. I have never went beyond the familiar zone of my subject to find a surprise factor that even I myself never knew. I am a very curious person, I like to find out about stuffs, but when it comes to assessments, I am more of a “just get it done with” kinda person.

Perhaps I should venture more into my chosen subject for my next academic essay.

Speaking of uni, the people from my class were responsible for coming up with symposium questions for this set of reading. One of the questions raised by a fellow student tingled my curiosity and I decided to research more about it.

Has modern technology made writing better, or worse?

This article about social media and writing surprisingly relates back to this reading. The writer stated that social media makes for better student writing. All the reasons behind why it is so all goes back to the first quote that I posted on earlier on. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well, and write better.

So yay, more reasons to spend time on the social media.

Reading on Bush’s article, it really amazes me how accurately Bush speculated the future of technology. Things that people have said was impossible several years ago are made possible several years later with the right resources.

Everything that can be invented has been invented.

Today, if you hear somebody say something like this, you’ll probably laugh that person off as an idiot. But this quote was said by Charles Holland Duell I, who was the commissioner of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It has been regarded as one of the biggest misquotes of all time.

Doesn’t look like an idiot to me.

Bush’s stated that we humans have a limit in transmitting and reviewing the results of research during our time, but that limit is continuously expanding as time goes by. Whatever that we’d think is impossible, may not be the case 20 years down the road.

This has got me really thinking, will technology ever stop improving?

This article by The Economist believes otherwise. The writer argued that the economy has been “slackening the rate of innovation for decades” and suggested a few more arguments about why he thought that technology is getting stagnant, which kinda makes sense.

I mean, I cannot imagine how the smartphone can be as efficient as it is today. Yes, there may be slight improvements here and there for smartphones but I cannot imagine that there will ever be another day where something as ground-breaking as the first iPhone will come by.

But then again, I may be wrong. Ten years ago when Harry Potter fans wanted the “Invisibility Cloak” to be real, professional minds laughed it off as impossible. Today, there IS a working invisibility cloak.

There may not be any more ground to break in the smartphone industry, but there is certainly many other things for technology to grow on.

And I still believe in the possibility of TELEPORTATION.

SPOILER ALERT: I am going to discuss about the final episode of “Six Feet Under” in this post and the series in general. So if you’ve only started watching the series or you’re halfway through it. STAY AWAY FROM THIS POST. I’ve just finished watching the final episode of “Six Feet Under” and wow, just…WOW. The final six minutes of the episode blew me away. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a greater moment in television. Kudos to Alan Ball (Oscar-winning writer for American Beauty)  for his works throughout the series and closing it in such a grand fashion. The thing about television series is, while books and films possess the capacity to provide a deliberate closure, television series struggle to do so because of long-form storytelling. When a series ends, viewers might feel that there are plotlines unfinished and suffer from the undetermined and ambiguous fates of the characters. There was no such thing with Six Feet Under. In the final six minutes of the finale, Alan Ball showed the viewers every death of the show’s regular character and it was effective in providing a sense of closure.

“Everybody’s waiting.”

Moreover, throughout the series every episode of Six Feet Under opens with a death, of which the body of the deceased will then be delivered to the Fisher & Sons (Fisher & Diaz later in the series) funeral home. These deaths make their way into the narration of the episode and carries death as the main theme that runs throughout the series. The fact that the show started with deaths (first death being the show’s patriarch Nathaniel Samuel Fisher Sr. played by Richard Jenkins) and ended with the deaths of every characters that the viewers have journeyed with and learned to love since brought me to awe of how the finale have succeeded where many have failed; closure.

This ARTICLE basically sums up how I feel for this magnificent piece of art.

Okay…

This is my first time handling a blog, ever.

Let’s hope everything turns out just fine.

Kidding, I’ve had blogS over the few years of my life. None lasted more than three months. So I’m kind of hoping that this whole blogging-assessment thing will work out for me. *gulps*

Ryan