exibit one

I’ve never been one for the whole twitter craze. Frankly, I just don’t understand it. I tried it once; had an account for all of a week before I deleted it. I think it is a complete waste of time. So naturally, this assignment was going to be difficult for me from the start. I never properly learned how to use the site and then only having 140 characters to make a point stressed me out. Although in all reality the tweet could only be 134 because of the #gsure hashtag. I had no idea how I was supposed to make it multimodal, nor did I at the beginning have any idea what I learned about people and objects. So I was most definitely NOT looking forward to this assignment. However, through the process of this project I not only learned how to make multimodal work for such a short charactered platform, I also learned a lot about myself and others and how we all relate to objects.

I knew the assignment was going to be hard, but I did not count on it being as hard as it was for me. The prompt asking ‘what do objects teach us about ourselves’ was a hard topic to think about. I have never really thought about objects in relation to people so I wasn’t sure what to say. I kept looking back through the readings and my mind kept coming up with nothing. It was such a vast subject that my brain was so overloaded I couldn’t focus. To be honest, I went to twitter and looked up the old tweets from last semester to give me some ideas on how I was supposed to go about the assignment.

Once I saw the old tweets I understood what I was supposed to be doing. They focused my thinking and helped me to go back through the readings and figure out what I had really learned about objects and people. It was amazing what a simple example could do for me. I still had a hard time coming up with tweets; mainly just trying to focus my thoughts into 134 characters. Those first three were agonizing to write. The next ones were easier, partially because I simply revised one tweet from the first set and partially because I understood what I was doing by that round.

When I was going back through the readings to complete the twitter assignment I got to thinking about how I related to objects. I had always thought that people who valued objects were materialistic. However, as I started thinking about myself I realized that even though I do not consider myself materialistic, I valued my objects. For example, I realized how much value I put on my music playing devices. Whenever I do my homework or I am studying, I always have my headphones in listening to classical music. I simply cannot do my school work without that music. It focuses my thinking and organizes my thoughts and I do better on my assignments and my tests. If I didn’t have a music playing device, I would be lost. I have placed my entire academic value on that object. To me, it is the embodiment of me getting good grades. But even as I was recognizing these things, something was still bothering me. Eventually I understood that what was bothering me was the fact that all the articles I’d been combing back through seemed to be saying that our entire being can be put in objects. I wholeheartedly disagreed with that. And that, was the angle I took for my twitter essays.

In my first round of twitter essay drafts, I wanted to let people know that we are not defined by our things/objects. We are our own person who can be whatever and whoever we want to be regardless of our things. I used a combination of sarcasm, inspirational, and Loki (because everyone loves Loki). I tried to focus mostly on gifs because I’m obsessed with them and because as the saying goes ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. Furthermore, I chose not to use abbreviations but to spell everything out. I thought it would better convey my meaning because if someone took the time to thoughtfully compose a tweet without abbreviating, it would catch more attention. Also, because it seems more intellectual.

The writing by Ann Berthoff is what really took hold for my second drafts of essays. She’s talking about writing not being linear but rather a process with many different things to take into account. She makes an interesting comparison about cooking and writing saying:

“An analogy for writing which is based on culinary experience would have to include ways of calculating the guests’ preferences, as well as of determining what’s on the shelf — the cook’s and the grocer’s — and what’s in the purse… Such analogies leave out of account language, or they conceive of it in mechanistic or merely behavioral terms… In composing we make meanings.” (berthoff 648).

I believe that the same is true of people. We are not linear beings. We take into account an abundance of other factors. We are all looking to make meaning out of life just as writers do their language when they compose. Humans cannot be put into mere objects. Objects are 3D, they have simple sides with no emotions and no extra calculations to put into thought. Humans are past 3D; we have emotions and thoughts and we all see the world differently. Just as there is no way to put the writing process into a sequential pattern, there is simply no way to put human beings into a linear 3D object.

Trying to convey Berthoff’s article meaning in 134 characters was extremely difficult. I had to really cogitate upon the way to properly combine gifs to my tweets. The gif had to match the meaning but also had to add to the meaning as well. In my first tweet draft of this round, I was trying to find a way to talk about the fact that it is not just about the connections our objects make for us, but it is the quality of those connections that make our quality of life worth everything. And in the third tweet draft I was trying to find a combination of gif and text that worked together. In the end I went with the revised tweet from the first draft round because I couldn’t figure out how to make the other two work right. I feel like if I had one more round I could have gotten it.

All in all, the twitter essay assignment really made me think a lot about people and their relationship to objects. I learned some things about myself as well as about society as a whole. We as a society put so much emphasis on our objects that sometimes we forget that we are not linear and cannot put our entire life into our things. Although it was hard, it was a really fun way to learn about a subject!