Latisha Encounters Tourists and Reflects on George

The first of the two selected chapters begins with a group of tourists entering Latisha’s Dead Dog Café. As Jane Flick’s GRRW reading notes makes known, the tourists are named after a group of actors who were known for their stereotypical portrayals of Natives in Canada. King plays with this by making this group all, to greater or lesser degrees, oblivious to what would be thought of as “manners.” Jeanette basically opens the conversation with a blunt “May we assume that you are Indian?” followed by Nelson’s equally callous, “Any fool can see that.” While perhaps not intentionally racist, the bluntness of it all makes the entire encounter awkward at best. This is made no better by Nelson’s attempt to grab Latisha’s hips and butt on two different occasions. Seemingly innocent but completely, and perhaps willfully, unaware of proper boundaries, Nelson is a perfect picture of the colonizer.

While dealing with these tourists, Latisha reflects on the beginnings of her relationship with George Morningstar. Flick’s notes point out the similarities between George and General Custer, from the reference to given name of “Son of the Morningstar” to later references to both George and Custer’s roots in Michigan and Ohio, king seems to be impressing upon the reader the comparison a great deal. I think the comparison goes even further, with both men seemingly fascinated and appreciative of Native culture, yet at the same time come to treat that culture with disrespect and violence. Another aspect of George’s character that stood out to me, especially as the book went on, is his relation to Satan/Lucifer. Besides Lucifer meaning “Morningstar,” there’s a certain shared character between the two that I found particularly interesting. Even in this passage we see George’s pride, with him thinking himself to be far more intelligent and cultured than he truly is. Flick points this out when he offers Latisha his copy of Gibran’s The Prophet, a pseudo-spiritual text as vapid and empty of real depth as George is himself. There’s also, I feel, a certain weakness to George as a man. Of course, a prerequisite for a man beating a woman is weakness, and even though this is best on display when George lashes out violently at Latisha we see traces of it in this passage. Latisha comments in several places on George’s vulnerability and insecurity, and though it’s not on full display yet we can see the seeds of his violent nature being sown in this and following passages.

Eli Speaks to Cliff and Remembers the Sun Dance Intrusion

The next chapter sees Eli Stands Alone talking with Cliff Sifton. Flick describes the historical Clifford Sifton as an “aggressive promoter of settlement in the West through the Prairie West movement, and a champion of the settlers who displaced the Native population.” In this regard, the name is fitting. Throughout the novel Sifton tries to get Eli to move on, to accept that he’s trying to defend a past that can’t be brought back. He speaks with high esteem for the dam, often calling it beautiful. He speaks disparagingly about Native treaty rights and special privileges, and accuses Eli on page 141 of not being a “real Indian.” He’s a picture of a certain type of person in today’s world, one that would, for lack of a better way of putting it, prefer indigenous populations to assimilate into the broader culture and leave their history behind, seeing no value in it. He says, again on page 141 and at other points in the novel, that Eli “can’t live in the past.” This conversation between them is essentially the same as all conversations between them, with all conversations being initiated by Sifton in his attempt to get Eli to move.

Like in Latisha’s chapter, during this conversation Eli is reflecting on an incident that took place at a past sun dance. A family intruded on the sun dance and the father attempted to take pictures. There are clear parallels between the father and Sifton, with both men holding little respect for indigenous practices and values, seeming to believe that the only rules are Canadian law. On the part of the father (and perhaps Sifton as well), he seems to believe to be entitled to the photos of the sun dance that he’s pretended not to take. This could symbolize the Canadian settler, settling on land and displacing indigenous people while believing they’re entitled to this because it’s in accordance with wider Canadian (or, at the time, British) law. It also foreshadows the climax with George towards the end of the novel.

Works Cited

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999). Web. April 04/2013.

Hall, David J. “Sir Clifford Sifton.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 22 Jan 2008, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sir-clifford-sifton. Accessed 17 Mar 2020.

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

Turcotte, Yanick. “James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 3 July 2019, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/james-bay-and-northern-quebec-agreement. Accessed 17 Mar 2020.

I’m glad we got the chance to revisit this topic. I had forgotten about this book and King’s juxtaposition of his creation story and the genesis story (or his version of it anyway), but in all honesty I was a little irked when we read originally read this material. I’ll admit to potential bias at the outset, I’m an Orthodox Christian. However, it wasn’t the criticism of the genesis story that irked me. Good criticism is great, it’s often warranted, and it’s not exactly something Christians are unfamiliar with living in the modern world – especially in university. But King was so preposterously off the mark that it almost felt like a joke, or maybe more accurately, it felt at times like a deliberate misrepresentation.

I’ll give an example of what I mean. On page 24 King writes, “In Genesis, all creative power is vested in a single deity who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. The universe begins with his thought, and it is through his actions and only his actions that it comes into being.” (italics mine)

I don’t know what book he read, or what religious tradition he’s working within in his interpretation of the text, but I know of no mainstream Christian sect that would agree with that statement. Many schools of Jewish thought wouldn’t even agree with that statement, and their conception of God is actually unitary in the sense King implies. But I’m assuming he’s approaching the text from a Christian perspective because he alludes to just that at several points in the preceding pages. However, if he were working within a Christian tradition in his analysis of the text, then he would know that Christian’s don’t believe creation to have been, as King puts it on page 24, “[…] a solitary, individual act […]” It was, as any student of the religion could tell you, an act of cooperation and love between the three Persons that makeup the Godhead. The Trinity is one of the most basic and well-known Christian doctrines, so for King to leave that unmentioned seems, to me, an oversight at best, and intentionally malicious at worst.

Of course, he’s trying to set up a clear juxtaposition between his story and the genesis story, and in service of this juxtaposition he sets up three clear and distinct dialectical relationships between the stories: solitary act vs shared activity, harmony to chaos vs chaos to harmony, competition vs cooperation. But the fact is that these two stories aren’t nearly as different as King attempts to paint them, and I’m not quite sure why he’s so intent on doing so. As I just mentioned, mainstream Christian traditions (Catholic, Orthodox, High-Church Protestant) do not and have never viewed creation as a solitary act, and if King had just read a handful of verses further he would have seen God speaking in plural (Us, We, etc.).

There are issues with the other two dichotomies as well, though they’re less frustrating. The second one just sort of puzzled me, and I was left scratching my head wondering what he was talking about. Genesis isn’t harmony to chaos, it’s chaos to harmony in the exact same way as King’s own story. A formless void, a chaotic bundle of potential, given order through the cooperative interaction. When exactly is the slide into chaos King mentions on page 25?

The first dichotomy was frustrating because everyone familiar with Christianity (and some schools of Judaism for that matter) know that that just isn’t true. The second dichotomy was confusing because it doesn’t make any sense within the genesis story itself. The third dichotomy, I think is fair to say, is open to debate. I can see how he would be justified in interpreting the post-Fall world as one marked by competition rather than cooperation. There are mainstream Christian traditions who would agree, at least in part, with King’s interpretation. Without spending another 400 words on a really nit-picky aspect of Kings piece, all I’ll say is that it’s probably an overgeneralization at best.

My point in all this (besides venting a bit) is that the two creation stories aren’t all that different from one another. I was, obviously, unimpressed with King’s personal interpretation of the genesis story, as it doesn’t jive with Christian theology at all. The dialectical relationships he set up feel, to me, forced and invented. All this being said, the point of creation stories isn’t really to explain how the world came to be, is it? Some of the earliest Jewish and Christian traditions argued the genesis story is truth, not fact, and rather than explaining the literal creation of the world it describes our own lives and relationship with God, as each of us eats from the Tree and falls as we reach the age of self-consciousness (between 8 and 14 in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions), and we each are cast out from the paradise of childlike innocence and have to find out way back again.

Works Cited

Breck, John. “On Reading the Story of Adam and Eve.” Orthodox Church in America, www.oca.org/reflections/fr.-john-breck/on-reading-the-story-of-adam-and-eve.

“BibleGateway.” Genesis 1 NKJV – – Bible Gateway, www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+1&version=NKJV.

King, Thomas, “The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative.” CBC Massey Lectures. House of Anansi Press, 2003.

For this question we were asked to first read Lee Maracle’s “Toward a National Literature.” Specifically, to try to understand what was meant when the author said, “In order for criticism to arise naturally from within our culture, discourse must serve the same function it has always served. In Euro-society, literary criticism heightens the competition between writers and limits entry of new writers to preserve the original canon. What will its function be in our societies?” (Maracle 88). She gives an answer in the following lines, and to the best of my understanding it’s something like this: stories, and the literature that forms around them, function in society as a kind of blueprint for ideal behavior, relationships, organizations, etc. Through criticism of this literature, a society can parse out the meaning and assimilate those “blueprints” into itself, while leaving out that which the society doesn’t find useful. Through this process the society can grow and transform into something more ideal.

Maracle says something along these lines further down in the paragraph, saying, “The purpose of examining an old story is first to understand it; second, to see oneself in the story; and then to see the nation, the community, and our common humanity through the story and to assess its value to continued growth and transformation of the community and the nation.” (88). This is what I feel to be the core of Maracle’s view on literary criticism, at least in the specific Salish sense. She speaks at other times about the European tradition of criticism, seeing in it nothing more than a “competition between writers.” (88). Whether or not this is the case is not for me to say, though my instinct is that the purpose of  this kind of criticism does not differ all that much between different cultures and nations.

In comparing the views of Maracle and Fry on the topic of literary criticism and myth as it relates to nation-building, one difference stood out to me. There seemed to me to be not so much a difference in opinion on the subject, but rather a difference in the order of operations. We’ve already seen that Maracle believes story and literature to come first, followed by the criticism that allows society to assimilate what it feels to be beneficial and discard what it does not. My sense is that Frye sees this process as being exactly the reverse. On page 234 he writes, “Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphorical thought.” (Frye 234). Later he writes, “At the heart of all social mythology lies what may be called, because it usually is called, a pastoral myth, the vision of the social ideal.” (240). Frye, in my opinion, seems to feel that literature reflects the mythology of society, acting as a kind of mirror – as opposed to Maracle’s interlocutor. Criticism helps us to understand these social ideals, these mythologies, but I don’t get the sense from Frye that he believes it to be possible to just take what you like and plug it into wider society and discard the rest. This may be an oversimplification of Maracle’s view, and indeed the only real difference might be the kind of societies we’re talking about: Maracle’s being small and local, a tight-knit community wherein small actions can have resonating consequences; Frye, rather, speaking about Canada at large, a broad and disjointed collection of communities. It seems to me that the kind of active interlocution Maracle suggests  is far more tenable in a local community vs a nation of millions, but again I may be misunderstanding one or both authors.

Works Cited

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.

Maracle, Lee. “Toward a National Literature: A Body of Writing.” Across Cultures, Across Borders Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures by Paul Warren Depasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, Emma Larocque (z-lib.org), Broadview, 2010. Print.

This is an early post on the way that technology is affecting the ways in which we tell and share stories, among other things. I chose this post because I feel, due to my age, that I had a somewhat intuitive sense of the way in which certain technologies are shaping the world around us, and that this lent itself to a better-than-average blog post.

Assignment 1:3 – Technology and Story

This post dealt with my “sense of home.” I chose this because of how much I enjoyed writing it. It was extremely rewarding to take time to trace my ancestry and the movements of my ancestors and then to tie their experiences into my own life, which has found me moving a great deal.

Assignment 2:2 – My Sense of Home

This last post is an analysis of the introduction to “Living by Stories,” and in a way of the character of Harry Robinson specifically. I chose this because the aforementioned introduction has been my favorite thing that we’ve read thus far, and I found Robinson to be a fascinating person.

Assignment 2:4 – Question 2: Robinson on Making Meaning from Stories

I chose to read Robinson’s story, “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King of England,” prior to reading King’s article. By the time I came to King’s article I had read Robinson’s story in my head and out loud a few times, and I’m glad I arranged things this way. Reading King’s article after having gone through Robinson’s story, I found myself nodding along with how King described Robinson’s literature. One passage in King’s article in particular perfectly described my experience in reading Robinson’s story. At the bottom of page 186, King writes, “[Robinson] develops what we might want to call an oral syntax that defeats readers’ efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read the stories out loud.”

Just as King stated would happen, I found my efforts to read the story silently “defeated.” Though on my first reading I didn’t speak the story out loud (I did in my second reading), there was a very clear and distinct voice in my head that was, in a way, performing the story as I read it. The syntax of the story very plainly lends itself to this. The rhythm of the lines, the breaks between lines, the stops and starts, the word choice and “interesting” grammatical choices all work to make it feel unnatural to read silently – or, perhaps more accurately, work to make it feel natural to read out loud.

For me this effect was most pronounced in the parts of the story that consisted heavily of dialogue, particularly between Coyote and the King, like pages 70-75. I’m not sure there’s something special about dialogue, but more probably that there are more stops and starts in the text itself. It could also be that the unusualness of the word and grammar choice is most pronounced in the dialogue, as it feels more unnatural.

As to how this oral syntax shapes the meaning of the story, I’m not certain but I have an idea. Reading silently, I feel like I “smoothed over the text,” if that makes any kind of sense. The line breaks, pauses, etc. were all less emphasized. Reading it aloud on my second reading, I found myself accentuating those pauses and breaks, adding and detracting emphasis from certain parts of the text. Emphasis can do much to alter the meaning of something, as well as add an emotional layer that’s not present in a dry, “smooth” reading.

I also found myself imagining a speaker performing this story with hand gestures, though I never acted them out myself. The way the story is written lends itself to that, I feel.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190.

Robinson, Harry. “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England.” Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 64-85.

This question asks us to first discuss two reasons given for the limiting of our capacity to find meaning from first stories, and then to find and discuss a third reason given by Robinson himself in the introduction to “Living by Stories.”

The first reason given is that the social process of the telling is disconnected from the story. The introduction to “Living by Stories” gives several examples of the importance of the storyteller and the problems found in the loss of said storyteller. Right at the beginning of the introduction we are shown a brief glimpse of the power of the storyteller; at the bottom of page seven Wickwire writes, “[…] Harry told this story without interruption or props beyond a continuous series of striking hand gestures that were choreographed into the narrative.” This shows how the element of the storyteller is an integral aspect of the story itself. To further develop this point, Wickwire writes on page eight, “The print versions of these stories were short – on average, a page or two in length – and lifeless. Most lacked the detail, dialogue, and colour of Harry’s story. Many were also missing vital segments […] In many cases, collectors had created composite stories from multiple versions, which erased all sense of variation in the local storytelling traditions.” (italics added for emphasis). There is a distinct sense that, not only is the storyteller an integral part of the story, but attempts to replace the storyteller with the written word will inevitably leave out vital parts of the story, capturing fragments rather than the whole.

The second reason given is “the extended time of criminal prohibitions against indigenous people telling stories combined with the act of taking all the children between 5 – 15 away from their families and communities.” Again, the introduction provides us with reasons as to why this impacts our capacity to find meaning in stories, though this reason seems to me to be far more self-evident than the previous. On pages twenty and twenty-one, Wickwire writes, “Although he had spent lots of time listening to his grandmother and her contemporaries tell stories, he did not begin to tell stories until he was immobilized by the injury […] He explained that the stories all came back to him much like ‘pictures’ going by.” Here we see the necessity for close familial and communal relations for the transmission of these stories. The only reason Robinson was able to become a storyteller was because he spent his early life inundated in his own community. The removal of children from their communities makes it impossible for them to grow up in this way, thereby cutting them off from the transmission of these stories. If you don’t grow up listening to these stories, they’ll never come back to you like “pictures going by” in your old age.

I had a bit of trouble finding a third reason. At no point in the introduction does Robinson flatly say “a reason for this is x.” There seemed to me to be, however, a certain line of thought that Robinson touched on several times in the introduction. That being the necessity of time in the telling and retelling of these stories. On page twelve Wickwire, quoting Robinson, writes, “”Well, I can’t tell them noting in two, three hours. Very little. But some people, one man, we talk, I and he, for over twelve hours. So they really come to know something of me. It takes a long time. I can’t tell stories in a little while.” This idea is revisited again later on. Again on pages twenty and twenty-one, Wickwire writes, “The hip injury turned out to be a good thing for his storytelling. Although he had spent lots of time listening to his grandmother and her contemporaries tell stories, he did not begin to tell stories until he was immobilized by the injury. While running his ranches, he simply had no time to sit for hours telling stories.” As far as I can tell, this is a third reason that Robinson gives for our limited capacity to find meaning from first stories. Both telling the story and listening to the story require time, lots of time, time that many if not most of us in the modern world don’t have. It requires a different, slower way of living, one in which you can afford to allow yourself to be swept up for hours listening to a storyteller perform their first stories for you.

Works Cited

Robinson, Harry. “Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory.” Compiled and edited by Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talon Books 2005. (1-30)

For this assignment I read the blog posts of Sarah Afful, Nargiza Alimova, Emilia Brandoli, Megan Cameron, Aran Chang, and Sophie Dafesh (it’s a complete coincidence that they’re the first six students listed on the “student blogs” page I swear). This is my list of takeaways/summaries from their stories, along with commentary:

• Home is found in the love of one’s family
  •  Particularly when one is young
• The home for an immigrant is elusive, and they often feel stuck between two worlds
  •  When one moves from one place to another, especially when it’s a regular thing, one is unable to develop the same kind of attachment to the geographic place wherein one resides that others do
• Home is a point in time with one’s family
  •  I particularly liked this point, it emphasizes the fact that physical location isn’t as important as temporal location
• Home is found within one’s relationships
  •  Similar to previous points made in other stories, but makes the important point that it’s not just familial bonds that can create a sense of home, but friendships as well
• Home is a circle of love that one surrounds oneself with
  •  Similar to previous points made, but I particularly liked how it was worded (I pulled this almost verbatim from the story)
• Home is a complicated feeling made up of many parts
  •  It’s difficult to define what “home” means, and any attempt to define it will inevitably leave out an important aspect
• One can’t truly understand one’s home until one leaves it
  •  Related especially to the point made about immigrants, and applies to more than just one’s home. Similar to the saying “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” It’s always difficult to appreciate or understand something when you’re in close proximity to it, it often requires taking a step back (physically, temporally) and viewing it more objectively/reflectively in order to truly understand/appreciate it

It’s the late 17th century. A French woman boards a ship destined for Quebec, part of a program to increase French power in North America. There she will marry a young Frenchman and settle in Montreal.

It’s the late 18th century. The great-grandchildren of that woman have spread themselves across Canada, assimilating into the predominantly British settlements.

It’s the late 19th century. A man arrives on Ellis Island from Sweden. He is told that his last name, “Johannsson,” is relatively common, so he changes it to “Asp,” after his favorite tree. He lives in New England for a time before marrying and moving to English-speaking Canada.

It’s the late 20th century. My parents meet in Vancouver, BC. After marrying, my father joins the US Navy and the family emigrates to the US. The Navy sends them to San Diego, California, where I’m born. We stay there three months before moving to Pensicola, Florida.

After a year there, we move again to Corpus Christi, Texas.

Another year, another move, this time to Oak Harbor, Washington.

After two years in Washington, we move to San Antonio, Texas, where my sister is born.

After another year in Texas, we move to Jacksonville, Florida.

After living in Florida for the second and final time, we move back to Oak Harbor, Washington, for another two years.

My father gets the opportunity to stop being a pilot for a while and instead do a tour on an aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt. The family moves to Williamsburg, Virginia.

We stay in Virginia for two years. Here we get to experience what is essentially the birthplace of the US, with Colonial Williamsburg being maintained as a time capsule of what life was like during the 17th and 18th centuries.

After two years in Virginia, my father gets accepted to the Naval War College where he will work towards a Masters degree in “Surface and Sub-Surface Naval Warfare.” We stay in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, for a year and a half.

While in Rhode Island, we get to experience more of early American history. Not only is Rhode Island full of history in and of itself, but Boston and New York are both relatively nearby. For the year and a half we stay in New England we get to explore this area and learn it’s history.

After my father’s studies were finished, we moved back to Oak Harbor, Washington, the last move the family would have to make for the Navy. At this point we’ve moved, between states, a total of nine times. If moves between homes within the same state were included, it would be more like fifteen.

Upon turning eighteen, I travelled to Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand for six months. When I came back I moved out of my family’s house and moved into my own apartment on the other side of the island. From there I moved to Bellingham, Washington. I left and travelled through Mexico for several months before returning and moving to Vancouver, BC, to attend UBC. I stayed in Vancouver until I couldn’t stand the city and it’s incredibly expensive rent and moved back to Oak Harbor for my final year of university.

I like to say I’ve moved twenty times in twenty-five years, and though I’m rounding up by one or two that’s essentially right. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced “home” in the usual sense, though I suppose I wouldn’t know if I had. I can only know what I’ve experienced, and what my experience has taught me is that home is somewhere between “what/where you choose” and “what you feel you have a connection to.”

Works Cited

Asp Family History. Ancestry. https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=asp. Accessed 24 Jan 2020.

Colonial Williamsburg. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/. Accessed 24 Jan 2020.

Filles du Roi. The Canadian Encyclopedia. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/filles-du-roi. Accessed 24 Jan 2020.

I have a great story to tell you

There once was a monastery high on a mountain. There monks lived, young and old, and they were all joined together in song under the leadership of the abbot, the eldest and most revered of the monks. This song was the song of life, and as they sang the story of the world was told.

One day, one of the younger monks was watching the birds outside his cell, and listening to them sing, for he was very fond of birds. Then he said, “I’m tired of singing the part the abbot has assigned me. These birds don’t all sing the same song and they are still beautiful. There are many of us here, we could be like the birds and make our own parts.” Then he began to sing a melody of his own making, and discord entered the song of the monastery. And as the discord entered the song, discord entered the story of the world around them. And the melody of the young monk caused the rivers to flood.

The abbot, hearing the song grow discordant, told the young monk to sing his appointed part. But the young monk was excited to hear his own melody and began to sing louder, and couldn’t hear the abbot. And some of the other monks, seeing how happy the young monk was, began to make their own parts as well. And one new melody brought a famine, and another brought a drought, and another brought an earthquake. And so on did the story of the world change, until finally the song had grown so out of tune that death entered the world.

Now the young monk was happy and caught up in the song he was singing. But then he saw his favorite bird lying still on the ledge of his cell’s window. The young monk grew concerned and brought the bird to the abbot. When he showed the bird to the abbot, the abbot saw that the bird had died. The abbot told the young monk the bird had died, but the young monk was confused, having never heard of death before. The abbot explained to the young monk what death was, and the young monk grew sad, and wanted to change the song back and remove death from the story of the world. But the other monks couldn’t hear him, they could only hear their own songs. And the young monk began to despair, not being able to do anything to help the bird. And the abbot said, “Once you have told a story, you can never take it back. So, be careful of the stories you tell, and the stories you listen to.”

I pretty blatantly stole parts of this story from a variety of places, mostly because creativity of this kind doesn’t come naturally to me.

As for commentary, I’m not sure I have any. But I can say I gained a new appreciation for the art of storytelling, because coming up with something that’s not too obviously derivative isn’t as easy as it sounds

I chose to respond to question seven, as I’m probably addicted to social media by any reasonable definition of “addiction.” I think that people of our age, who were born in a time without social media and watched it develop, are acutely aware of what changes social media has made/continues to make to the way we communicate, the way we gather information, the stories we hear and share, and so on, almost ad infinitum.

The first major change I can point to is one touched on in the question itself, and that is the ability to publish without publishers. I see this as a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the lack of a physical medium on which one relies to disseminate the story means that the cost of entry has been radically reduced. It costs next to nothing to publish and spread one’s work. Sites like Medium allow aspiring writers, journalists, and political pundits to publish their thoughts and stories for free and without any editorial oversight. Platforms like Facebook help writers find an audience and build a community around their work, allowing projects that might not otherwise have been published to gain a potentially massive amount of attention. A perfect example of this is Humans of New York, a project dedicated solely to the spreading of stories and voices that would have gone unheard had it not been for the technology at our disposal (ironically enough, a collection of HoNY stories has recently been published the old school way, becoming a New York Times Best Seller). The low cost of entry, the ease to which stories can find audiences, the speed at which quality work can spread, all contribute to the growing number and diversity of stories that we are able to read/hear.

The other edge to this double-edged sword lies in the fact that there’s no need for one’s work to grace the editor’s desk. While this is one factor in the lowering of barriers to entry previously discussed, this also means that it’s never been easier for lies and fictions to spread, and it’s been shown that false information spreads faster than the truth. The widespread dissemination of false information is something that has only relatively recently begun to gain attention, therefore it’s difficult to say just what the ramifications of this will be. Speaking to my personal experience, among myself and my friends it’s lent itself to a feeling that nothing online can be trusted, that there are no longer any unbiased sources of information, that there is no ability to discern objective truth from falsehood online, and that everything seen and read on the internet should be treated as being false or being manipulated in some way. This attitude, even though it’s my own, strikes me as being almost as dangerous as believing everything you read on the internet. It introduces the possibility that, even though it’s never been easier to spread a story, allowing for voices that would have previously gone unheard to be heard, the fact that these voices are being heard through the medium of social media means that they won’t be believed.

The last aspect I want to touch on is the famous comments section. The optimistic among us might have thought that the unique structures of social media that allow for news outlets, writers, authors, etc. to publish their work essentially for free, and then to be able to interact with their audience in a way that resembles the Greek and Roman forums of antiquity, would have lent itself to a strengthening of what those same Greeks and Romans would have called “republican virtues.” That it might have allowed a more diverse, open, and honest communication between author and reader, between speaker and listener. That it would have allowed for the readers and listeners to challenge the authors and speakers in an open forum, inverting the relationship between author/speaker and reader/listener, blurring the distinctions between the two and creating opportunities for dialogue that allow greater truths to be revealed. Unfortunately, a cursory scroll through basically any comments section would leave anyone who held those optimistic views feeling a little naïve.

To summarize (or tl;dr, for the other social media addicts): social media, and the internet as a whole, has allowed for the widespread dissemination of stories and voices that would have gone otherwise unheard. This diversification and multiplicity of voices is almost certainly a positive thing. However, the low-to-nonexistent cost of entry has caused the widespread dissemination of false information as well, lending itself to a growing cynicism about what one encounters online, potentially leading to a silencing of those very same stories and voices. In addition, the unique structure of social media has blurred the lines between author/speaker and reader/listener and opened up opportunities for greater dialogue between the two. However, those opportunities often fall at the wayside to be replaced by trolling and arguing, with the participants shielded from the consequences of their actions by a veneer of anonymity.

Works Cited

Bogomilova, Alexandra. “How reading online comments affects us.” Social Media Psychology, https://socialmediapsychology.eu/2016/10/05/onlineandsocialmediacomments/. Accessed 16 Jan 2020.

Fox, Maggie. “Fake News: Lies spread faster on social media than truth does.” NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fake-news-lies-spread-faster-social-media-truth-does-n854896. Accessed 16 Jan 2020.

Humans of New York, https://www.humansofnewyork.com/. Accessed 16 Jan 2020.