Monthly Archives: September 2014

Tuesday’s class really created an interesting discourse about Canadian history, and the role of life narratives in this National Literary Canon. It arose questions about who was doing the writing, who was being written about, and how accurately this reflected the various facets of an important historical event. As we learned, in the specific historical events revolving around the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the people who were doing the writing consisted of members of the dominant white male hegemony that was strongly in place at the time. They wrote about others of that elite class, as seen by poems of the time period like ‘Towards The Last Spike,‘ an epic poem that chronicles the building of the CPR that focuses in on the nailing in of the last spike and minimally addresses the workers who built the vast majority of the rest of the railway, Chinese Immigrants in particular.  The intertextuality and allusions on page 130-131 in the Diamond Grill was very effective at counteracting this violent, misconstrued history and turning it on its head by taking the language and documentation and distorting it to show a truth that was and is much ignored. This section is a part of a discourse about censorship and perception of a nation, and how one can revise the teaching of history so it encompasses the previously invalidated experiences of minorities (who are often exploited then forgotten in the building of a nation.) This topic is still prevalent today, in cases like this where Colorado is considering revising the history textbooks to downplay the civil disobedience that catalyzed civil rights movements. How can we incorporate more Auto/Biographies in education to create a more truthful account of historical events? And whose stories are valid, and to what degree? How do we teach History objectively?

Works Cited

     Associated Press. “Hundreds of Colorado students protest history curriculum changes that would promote patriotism.”Fox News. FOX News Network, 24 Sept. 2014. Web. 24 Sept. 2014. <http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/09/24/hundreds-colorado-students-protest-proposed-history-curriculum-changes/>.

Pratt, E.J.. “Towards the Last Spike (Annotated).” Towards the Last Spike (Annotated). N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Sept. 2014. <http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/pratt/poems/texts/188/fr188annotated.html>.

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The other week, I read an interesting article by Matt Honan, a professional blogger, on the website ‘Wired.’ It was directly relevant to our in-class discussion today of Pariser and how Facebook whittles down our world view through a feedback system that generates power through our likes, comments, and demographical information. In summary, Honan liked everything he saw on Facebook for two weeks, then observed the effects on his timeline in comparison to pre-liking-spree. With each like, his ‘filter bubble’ narrowed in one direction or another, onto different political spectrums or, as he put it, “down rabbit holes of special interests until we’re lost in the queen’s garden, cursing everyone above ground.” (Honan) This caused me to wonder what it does to people who just join Facebook, and how it affects their mental development and growth in terms of the supposed website ‘goal’.

Facebook, as we discussed in class, is theoretically designed to expand the horizons of our knowledge, and create social connections to people in our own community, and, as the logo depicts, across the world too. However, if one joins Facebook, enters in the mandatory information, adds their friends, and begins to ‘like’ things that tailor future information that is propagated on our News Feeds, how does this affect one down the line? I’m curious to know how adversely this reinforcement system affects one’s ideological, cultural, and personal beliefs in comparison to someone who doesn’t use Facebook. I think this system creates dangerous binaries within the Facebook society, as in you are either a or b, and are visually limited to only the information of your self- imposed group, disarming you from engaging in a legitimate discourse or having a fair argument with the information presented on both sides of a topic. This, in turn I believe, affects people in the sense that they are unable to discuss issues in real life out of the confines of a laptop screen, as they are uninformed, biased, and illiterate in anything but the beliefs they already held from the start. Facebook is instead creating binaries, lines, and borders, separating individuals instead of connecting.

          Honan, Matt. “I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days. Here’s What It Did to Me | WIRED.” Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 14 Aug. 2009. Web. 11 Sept. 2014. <http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-facebook-for-two-days-heres-what-it-did-to-me/>.

Lareau, onathan . “Non-Dual Thinking: There Are Things We Don’t Know.” Tiny Buddha. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Sept. 2014. <http://tinybuddha.com/blog/non-dual-thinking-there-are-things-we-dont-know/>.