Best of Week: We Live in a "Post-Idea World"

          After reading The Elusive Big Idea by Neal Gabler this week, I realized that I strongly agree with him. "Ideas just aren't what they used to be" (Gabler) and it's so true; no one is coming up with incredible inventions that would help our environment or help the economy get better or end world hunger. I mean there might be people out there in the corners of the world doing these things, but we don't know about them because the media is focused on the new iPhone 5 that just came out. Alexander Graham Bell- who invented the telephone- or Benjamin Franklin- who discovered electricity- would not be impressed with the new innovations we are coming up with in the 21st century; which are mostly next generation Apple products and new cars. I think we, as the human population, should focus on things that would help our being.
          One of the things that made me think while reading this article is when Gabler says, "to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief." I think he means that nowadays, instead of thinking about how to solve a problem with a new solution, we look back at how people did it before us and use their methods. Secondly, he brings up the point that "at a time when we know more than we have ever known, we think about it less. [...] We are certainly the most informed generation in history" (Gabler). This is definitely true because we can access so much information from the internet that instead of thinking about how we can answer a question, we can just type the question into Google and get the answer right away. Lastly, I think the most significant thing he mentions in this article is, "it is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside the social networking world" (Gabler). This makes me think about how the only thing I hear people talk about these days are what's going on on Facebook or who's tweeting what or what pictures people reblog on Tumblr. I feel like people are just so unoriginal these days because they see things on those social networking websites and that's where they get their ideas; I feel like these sites keep us from being creative and limit the ways we can expand our minds.
          The one thing that I could relate to in this article and about living in a "post-idea world" is the idea that, "among the young- [...] ideas are more difficult to express" (Gabler). This is a connection to myself because I do find it hard to be creative, especially with the my Mindbook, but I'm trying my best. When I use twitter, it sometimes makes it hard to express ideas because of the 140 character limit.
          In the end, I totally and whole-heartedly agree with everything Neal Gabler talks about in his article. We do live in a world where creativity is slowly fading away and it is harder for people to express their creative sides. Hopefully, better sooner than later, instead of moving backwards from thinking, we can move towards it again.
         

Carry It Forward: "The Writer"

Yesterday in class, we discussed the poem The Writer and how Richard Wilbur uses the starling, and the narrator to give readers different perspectives.  We also talked about how Tim O'Brien used different perspectives to try to help his audience understand the Vietnam War in his book The Things They Carried.

The whole perspective idea is valuable to me because I think that it makes writing much more interesting and fun to see a work of art in multiple, completely different perspectives. I think it's important for readers to be able to see a story or a painting in different views so they can understand it as a whole. By reading a story or a piece of writing in different perspectives, readers are able take out different meanings from the text and recognize the depth of the writing instead of just seeing it in a general view.
I will definitely be doing some more writing after high school and I'm considering maybe even writing a book after college. Being able to really think about the idea of different perspectives has really inspired me and now I want to include different perspectives in my writing this year and in the future. It's brought another element of writing into my mind and I really want to work with it. I think the idea we discussed yesterday, will improve my writing tomorrow (as in the rest of my life).