Category: Reading Responses

This chapter surrounds the idea of “closure” and how much humans crave that sense of satisfaction when consuming any sort of media or literature or faced with a problem out of our hands, that even when we don’t have the ending or solution specifically spelled out for us that we use pieces to fill in the blanks because we as humans cannot stand the feeling of being unsatisfied or left in limbo. This chapter made me think about something called TMT or Terror Management Theory and I know this is going to be a stretch but bare with me.

Terror Management Theory definition: “People that feel threatened by their own death and therefore adopt worldviews that allow them to find meaning and worth in their lives.” (Moore, 2022) I believe death and closure go hand in hand with each other which is why this chapter made me think of this theory.

A lot of the ways that we as humans end that feeling of un-satisfaction is with the reminder that we have a purpose and it will make sense one day because someone else is in control of the story so technically right now I might feel lost but it’s in the hands of someone else and I just have to trust that, and THAT is enough of the satisfaction that I need to tie me over. That is the basis of the Terror Management Theory; trust in a higher power that everything will work out and relieve yourself of the existential stress that comes with no closure.

Let’s focus on closure and what that can mean. When a family member dies we are overwhelmed with this intense feeling of un-satisfaction because we won’t see that beloved family member anymore. Will I ever see them again? Are they just gone? Are they in pain? Where will I go someday when it’s my time? So many questions with absolutely no answers because death is a piece of life that will always be unknown, there will never be true closure. Unless you believe in a religion… Religion promises eternal life free of pain, suffering and the feeling of no purpose. Now you no longer have the stress that could have led you to make irresponsible and erratic choices because of the intense lack of closure. Congrats your terror has been managed.

Our brain when confronted with a problem that feels entirely out of hands and cannot be concluded through our own work we will reach for other reasons to explain why these things are happening and will fill in the blanks or “gutters” with whatever high-power you’ve chosen to manage your terror of the unknown. That could be religion, drugs, intense political support and many other things.

We are faced with a problem that leaves us with no closure, we combat that problem by filling the holes with faith and make ourselves come to a conclusion that fills the gutters enough to feel satisfied. I can talk about this theory for hours and how much is connects to every single aspect of our life and all the moments we yearn for closure and direction. But for now I’ll leave you with just this, I highly recommend looking into the link below if you are curious to know more.

Citations:

Moore, M. (2022, June 14). Terror management theory: History, belief, and more. Psych Central. https://psychcentral.com/health/terror-management-theory 

This reading brought me to face a reality that I’ve noticed and commented on before but never really fully confronted. That reality being that everyday we get closer to the totality of digital media and subsequently leaving printed literature of all kinds behind. In the writing the author mentions that we are living through a period of overlap which I think hits it right on the money.

The way in which I really this statement bears true is by looking at the generations of people around you and asking them what they do in their free time or what year they were first given a phone. I specifically think my generation which is Gen Z and the tail end of the millennial’s are the exact example of the overlap the author mentioned. Millennial’s grew up watching television, but didn’t receive their first piece of handheld electronic communication until around high school, they grew up with radio shows, Walkmans, cassettes and MTV along with pagers and those brick phones. The tail end of this generation received phones in high school but still relied heavily on books, lectures, and in person education for all learning, but at the same time they are losing the importance of the news paper, planners’s, call books, and much more less modernized technology. As my generation steps into the picture we see large advancements in portable technology such as game boys, iPhones, computers and even e-literature. In elementary I was learning part of my education through online programs in the library and at this time we see a direct shift in the way of learning through curriculum that’s been enhance by technology.

I was still able to grow up with a small amount of technology shoved in my face though, I didn’t grow up with an iPad in my hands, we still read paper books and were always given handouts and live lectures. We were to write essays, not type them. Personal laptops such as MacBooks didn’t even come in to the picture until about my freshman year of high school; yes they were around, but we did not depend on them like today’s form of education. My generation was the last generation to experience at least any part of life with out a screen being somehow involved.

We are coming up over that overlay curve very quickly. This new generation of children are completely enveloped in technology to the point where it’s a bit concerning. Young kids are given an iPad as a distraction, pre-teens are given a phone and those 2 things consume the child’s life. TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, streaming services, online learning, door dash, kindle, VR, it’s all this generation knows. Kid’s don’t play outside anymore, they don’t read the funny section on the paper because their parents read the news on their phone, most kids don’t even watch cable anymore because it’s becoming outdated.

It’s just an insane line of change that we’ve seen these past 30 years, technological advancements are eating any thing that isn’t electronic alive. Even things that are electronic are becoming as outdated as the newspaper. I think the moment we started to shift was the creation of the Pager; the first piece of technology that was able to tear you out of physical reality at any moment. This response is a bit all over the place but I hope my thoughts were still conveyed in an understandable way.

An additional resource that I looked into was a website that described the generational shifts between each generation and I think it helps support my points as to why each generation is so different. https://imagine.jhu.edu/blog/2022/11/17/the-changing-generational-values/

The relationship between text and the reader is much more complex than I originally perceived it to be. In the article it talked about how reading is a one way street whereas, talking with someone is 2 ways. When you are listening to someone tell a story you can pause them, ask a question to make sure you are perceiving and understanding the story in the way they intended but when reading a text of a story, there is no clarification. In this situation there is only the readers understanding and hope that the readers is envisioning things correctly. An author can be as descriptive and detailed a they want to be but there will always be a chance for interpretation from the reader that might augment the reality the author is trying to explain.

The text talks about the uncertainty to communication between text and reader and while I do think that is true based on how I explained my thoughts earlier, I do believe that the relationship between text and reader isn’t as complex and unstable as the text claims. Yes, reading is about interpretation and trying to follow the authors text as accurately as possible and there will always be room for misinterpretation, but, so is face to face communication, I don’t think this ‘issue’ is something that needs to be broken down and fixed by studying reading structure and trying to make sure reading is as perceivable as having a conversation with a human.

Reading is an amazing opportunity to understand what is said and imagine what is left unsaid. It’s what I think makes a good author, if an author can give just enough detail to stimulate the mind of the reader but not too much that it takes the fun out of reading and imagining in the first place then that author can give the reader an incredible experience, one that I believe is more dynamic than a conversation between two people. Not to mention that an argument trying to be made here is that reading is complex because of what is left unsaid but the same thing could be said for a face-to-face conversation. We as humans leave things unsaid in conversations all the time and often substitute the unsaid for body language and signals, someone with poor social skills may have an easier time understanding a written 1st person story than having a conversation and hearing the story from said person. It is all about perceptions and interpretation. Another thing that could be added to support this is the divide in a learning setting where some students learn better by reading a textbook and others learn better through lecture and demonstration. One is not better than the other, the only factor that is important is how does the student prefer to learn. This website I have attached below goes into a good amount of detail between example learning and text-learning that it helpful when supporting my point that neither text/reader and in person conversation is better than the other, it is all up to how someone wants to learn and finds the most success. https://elai.io/video-learning-vs-text

Overall, I believe the interaction between text and reader to be complex and multifaceted but I also believe in person conversation to be just as complex. The author of this article (from my understanding) was making a point to explain that face-to-face interaction is less complex than reading a text but I believe both are just as complex as each other in their own multitude of ways.

This article talked all about the transition of writing and how it went from a transcription of speech to a structured system. There was so much debate in the beginning of this transition, especially from Socrates who’s opinions and theories were very oral speech orientated. Socrates believed that writing should just be the transcription of speech, not an actual system with rules. I believe reading and writing to be so much more than just transcribing current events and oral speech. The structured writing system has given people the power to take readers to different worlds and place themselves in situations as if they are truly they’re experiencing it, a good writer can put on a movie inside the readers head. Reading oral transcripts does not have that same ability at all, I also believe that this way of writing would be very hard to learn from. I understand that we watch lectures and listen to others talk to learn things but some things have to be explained in ways that transcribing someone exact words just can’t do. Though this part was interesting, the section that really made me think was the debate of whether sight and hearing were involved in reading or if it is just sight. In the 80s reading was seen as just an ocular activity but recently psychological studies show that there is ocular and oral actions present in the cerebral mechanisms during reading.

I don’t see reading as simply ocular, I hear the words as I read anything. Even as I’m typing this right now I can hear the words before they are being written down. This phenomena is a very hard thing to vocalize and describe, even though I know I cannot hear the words from the outside, it’s as if I have ears on the inside of my head and my subconscious is talking to me saying the words just as I am thinking them. It’s wildly interesting to me that even in the 80s, a time that feels so recent, we had a completely different understanding of the brain and it’s workings. I hope we see more advancements in the field of psychology that explains this everyday occurrence.

Reading Response 2

This text was very confusing for me at first, I didn’t quite understand exactly what the text was arguing about when talking about written literature and printed literature. I never really thought that there was a difference between these 2 ways of producing writings but after reading this text by Müller I now see the significance in an original copy of a writing on paper compared to the reproduced copies of the original. I feel a good example of this would be the vast array of versions of the Bible. The first written bible is currently in the Vatican library like you’d expect; this bible is parchment that was written on with ink by hand, not a reproduced copy that’s been translated or altered in any way. Now take that original copy of the Bible and put it next to a recently printed version of the New Testament of the Catholic bible that has been translated and changed over a thousand years and i’m sure you will find a vast difference. The original bible was written by four greek scribes and the entire thing is hand written, we can trace the entirety of the New Testament back to the Codex Vaticanus, but the New Testament we know now is different from the direct greek-english translation of the Bible. It’s been morphed over the years to follow along with the ever changing grammatical rules of the English language along with the unreliability of the transcriber who did the translation, as they could interpret the Bible in a different way than another transcriber as there is not always direct translations between languages. Another aspect of this that you could consider is how many different religions sprang from this text, even though they all honor the same god the religions have their major differences and all have different versions of essentially the same story. Someone read the Bible interpreted it in a different way than the traditional Catholic Church does and then split from the Catholic Church and started another catholic denomination that we now call christianity. Essentially these religions honor the same god and have the same morals but are now two entirely different religions because two groups people interpreted the Bible differently. (Not to mention all the socioeconomic and political attributes that pushed this split of religion as well, but it still comes down to the fact that someone interpreted something different from someone else when reading and now there are hundreds of versions of the Bible.)

To bring us all back to the point I was attempting to make; nothing is more reliable than the original copy, interpretation dictates and guides all further knowledge that is passed down generation to generation, and I understand why primary sources are so important in scholarly work now.

Reading Response 1

I found this reading very informative. I feel like we as people often over look the mundane and simply choose not to question its origin or reasoning. Though, I know this is not true for everyone, I would say it’s a an accurate assumption for the majority. I would never have though that the letter J had such a historical and significant purpose. Languages and alphabets don’t interest me very much but learning about the origin of the letter J might have changed that for me. The letter J was the last letter to join the Roman alphabet along with V and W. I originally thought they were lined up in chronological order of creation but it’s much more purposeful than that. The letter J came from the letter “I” and before the creation of the letter J all words that now start with J were written with an “I” and all of those J words were pronounced with a U sound. For example, Junior would be pronounced YOUnior, and names like Julius Caesar would be YOUlius Ceaser. It’s such an interesting thought to think about how language morphs and changes over time, and it’s never a blunt change, it’s always a slow changing process. I couldn’t imagine our current alphabet or language looking any other way but a thousand years from now some researchers might look at our current language and think how silly or incomplete it looks. My other Initial was G and that letter came from the letter C, which honestly makes sense, they are very similar looking already and have a similar form in the mouth when sounding the letter, Guh and Cuh.