RESPONSE TO LETTERS - Sandra Chu

[sandrachu]

It was nice to see you again as well. I agree that it was uncomfortable doing the abstractions - I hope to get feedback on our Social Meeting Exercise soon so that we have a better idea of how to properly make abstractions.

[sandrachu]

I am trying to gain perspective by reading my classmates' and teammates' posts. It's interesting to see what one of my teammates has posted so far regarding the Social Meeting Exercise. When I compare and contrast the words and sentences Brooke and I chose and created, you can see the different topics that we each found striking for the same meeting.

[sandrachu]

When I looked up "Soft Power" I came to the definition that it is the power to attract and co-opt, rather than the power to coerce (a "Hard Power"). I am guessing that the best way to share information and have it be believable is to consistently share it. We are all doing this in the Fishbowl with each post.

[sandrachu]

We seem to be creating our own societies within our groups, and each assemblage is different from the next. Together as a class we will make something different from just the material of just our own personal Fishbowls or our group Fishbowls. After I googled Actor-Network Theory, I had the thought that this experience truly would be different if we were communicating in a different format (a different website, on paper, on the phone, etc.). While we don't often think about it, the other factors that support our communication do also matter to the quality and experience of our communication.

[sandrachu]

We are creating these posts in the Fishbowl using our own personal experiences and carefully selecting which words we choose to depict these experiences. It is good to select and weed out the information we want to keep or forget - that way, we are choosing what has value to us.

[sandrachu]

I am curious to see how our social meeting exercises turned out. I hope that we can go over some of them in class, as it would finally put faces to the posts that I read online in the Fishbowl. It would be interesting to see both Professor Dugal's and our classmate's reactions and feedback.

[sandrachu]

Even though they are considered "soft thoughts," these types of thoughts can still be very telling of a person's core, and can be built upon to create content of heavier substance.

[sandrachu]

Thanks for sharing this email with a past student. I think there is definitely life in pursuit of theory - we all follow our own personal philosophies and strive to deepen our understanding of them.

[sandrachu]

Yes, I definitely did experience the blend of my idealizations and reality during the social meeting exercise. While I knew it was not going to happen exactly as I pictured, I still had a preconceived idea of how the meeting would happen, and I clung to it until I actually met my group mates in reality. It's not like this will ever stop; we'll always have idealistic expectations of what will happen in our lives. We can't rewrite them until after the event has actually happened.

[sandrachu]

It's true that we have become a society of consumers - we've moved away from highly valuing human capital and have shifted to putting more resources into automation and consumption. With the idea of becoming simultaneously the promoters of commodities and the commodities we promote, I'm reminded of all the people you see on social media trying to promote their businesses, where their carefully curated personalities and posts become part of their brand.

[sandrachu]

Of the five literacies that Professor Dugal mentioned, I think critical consumption of information may be the hardest to learn. We're constantly bombarded with information on the internet, and not all of it is relevant or important. It can be hard to find information that is actually useful to you, especially if you aren't very well-informed about the topic.

[sandrachu]

In order to continue to develop our quality of thinking, I believe that self-reflection is needed. We can always go back and look at our Fishbowl posts to see how we were thinking at a point in time, and reflect on any changes that we may want to make to our thinking process. We are always impressionable, and our way of thinking can always change at any time.