Reflection

After all, I feel very glad I took this class which was a whole new experience to me. I really liked the use of a blog medium for how it helped me improve my writing. Also, feeling the atmosphere of the class created by passionate discussions and participating in the process of the group project really encouraged me to take one step forward.

At the beginning, I was nervous about making my essays public. However, it gave me opportunities to read other people’s essays and get comments. In general English classes I took, I did not get that long and detailed comments from my professors and of course from my classmates. The few words like “why?” “Support this topic more” or “run on” written in red pen in the margins of my paper rather gave me an unnecessary pressure instead of a help. I think that was why I kept getting the same words I mentioned above every time I turned in my essay, which meant that my writing was not really improving that much. So having my classmates and Kara’s long comments on my posts was really helpful for me to improve my writing and made me think about the audience by not assuming things when I write.

Even though I did not really speak much in the class, I learned so much looking at how Kara and my classmates led the discussions on various and substantial topics so passionately. This was first time I had class which was full of discussion. Now, I think I will be able to start thinking more critically and actually speak out my thoughts in my future classes.

Lastly, I felt great about my first experience of the group project. I have been mostly taking basic design and economics classes, so I had no experience of a group project and presentation in front of a class. On the first day of class, I was reading the syllabus checking if we had to do a group project. It is embarrassing, but honestly, I might have dropped the class if I saw the words, ‘group project and presentation’ on the syllabus because of my fear. Now, I do not fear about group project and presentation any more since I learned that they are great ways of learning about something more deeply and that it feels really great after accomplishing a goal with all group members together. So I really want to thank Kara for including this group project later and helping me get rid of my fear which existed for very long time.

I believe that experience is the power. Taking this class has been a very valuable experience to me, and I feel that I am improved in writing and thinking critically. Now, I am ready to start my third year with a fully charged mind. Thank you, Kara.

"Interpret"

The word, interpret which has its root in French word, 'interpreten', is an interesting word to discuss, as it is used in many different contexts these days. Also, it relates to almost all of the key words we discussed in class for six weeks.

The original word of interpret was 'interpreten' in French. 'Interpreten' means an 'interpreter', which has a similar meaning to 'translator' of different languages according to Oxford English Dictionary. This brought up a question about the difference between interpreter and translator. After a detailed search on the word, I could find out that if one orally explains the meaning of what a person is saying in a language to the other person of different language in a conversation, then, he is interpreting that person’s words. If a meaning of a word or a sentence in certain language is written in another language, one can say it’s an act of translating.

The word, interpret was not found in Old English but in Middle English. In the 14th century, its word form was changed from noun to verb as well as the meaning. Until the 14th century, the word, interpret was used as an 'interpreter' or a 'negotiator' which all indicate a person. These days, interpret is an action of explaining meanings of various things. The meanings of interpret in the history and today are still connected and have similarities as both indicates explanation of certain meanings. However, there is a distinct shift which is that now many different meanings can be interpreted from one thing. Also, interpretaion is not only about languages anymore. Anything can be interpreted, and there is no fixed meaning, because interpretation can be done under one’s individual belief or judgment.

There are different contexts related to the word, interpret. For example, one can be misunderstood by interpreting someone’s words unfavorably. Also, feeling a sense of danger can also be one’s interpretation. As mentioned above, translating still can be the meaning of interpreting these days, accept that it does not indicate a person anymore. Interestingly, the word, interpret is used in many fields with slightly different senses. A musician’s understandings of rhythm or music paper can be seen as an interpretation. Also, an engineer’s understandings of the computer language like numbers and symbols can also be explained as interpretation. A movie director makes a movie according to his interpretation. Although the fields that interpret is used are different, they all are in relationship under that interpret is basically one’s understanding of meanings.


The reason why I chose interpret as my keyword is because it connects to almost every words discussed in class, the media we analyzed and even to our group project. The keywords that are obviously and mostly connected to the word, interpret, are culture, ideology, image and sign.

As a design major, I think the skills of correctly and sometimes creatively interpreting images and signs of a visual work are very important for me to have. Also, all designers are required to create interpretable works that people can enjoy and take advantages in their lives. What is fascinating is that images and signs can be interpreted in so many ways. Even a single drawing of an eraser can be interpreted very differently among people.



This connects directly to the group project which was about seeing how different random people interpret the five pictures we picked and comparing their interpretations to ours. The medium I chose was Naver which South Korean people use. After all, I was personally satisfied by the result that I got responses different from those of American people because of the culture difference and ideology affected by their culture. For example, one responded to the picture with his religious view of Buddhism which is a pretty common religion in Asia.

Lastly, media is also connected to the word, interpret. For example, our group could get different types of responses based on each medium’s character. Facebook which users interpret as a website for socializations got comments somewhat dialogical and it was different from those in Crystal’s forum.

In conclusion, it is interesting to see the change in use of the word, interpret from one fixed meaning of translating to those various meanings in many fields today. Because it changed, we are all endowed with opportunities of interpreting things around us to anything based on personal beliefs which can be very meaningful and even philosophical. Also, it would be even more interesting to think about how the word, interpret, will evolve again and be interpreted differently in the future.

The Power of Comma

There are times when it is helpful for people to think of a ‘comma’ in their lives. It has the power of controlling time within oneself, and also, it can be a great comfort and relaxation. A dictionary describes comma as the mark (,) used to separate the items in a list or to show where there is a slight pause in a sentence.

As I got older, I often have seen myself chased by time and just pushing myself ahead with a plan which I was not even sure if it was a right for me. I have kept myself busy following the way of how other people seem to live and sometimes thought I was not happy as I felt like a robot. I hear people say that life is meaningless, and I think, as people get older and get used to a lifestyle which they have to repeat the same thing over and over like going to work, coming back home, sleeping and again going to work next morning, as an ordinary member of the society, they say it more. I believe many people can find out how meaningful their lives are and their own kinds of happiness if they sometimes think of a ‘comma’ and pause for a moment in their lives. Especially when people get stressed, they need moments to relax and look around.

To me, a comma can be interpreted in another way besides being a wise sign for someone to pause and see where he/she stands. It can also be an encouraging sign for someone to keep going when he/she suffers hardship, just want to fall down and stop.

When I first came to the United States and tried to adapt myself to the new environment in the high school, there were many moments that I felt things were much tougher than I had expected and wanted give up moving on. One day, I saw a little drawing of comma on the internet. However, the comma was divided into a ‘period’ (.) and a little ‘tail’. What it probably meant was that the ‘period’ (.) itself represents ‘the end’, but if one puts a little tail besides it, it can be changed into a comma which means a ‘short pause’ or a ‘rest’ before moving on. For the most of time, the sign ‘comma’ has been what told me that I could take a rest to save my energy but I must keep going after that.

I personally think a ‘comma’ gives ideas of managing my time and even my life wisely. It is a magical sign because it signals me to pause or move on based on my situations. I believe this little sign can help many other people also, as it is always good to have a free advisor in life.

Use of Media and Audience

My group’s main key ward is 'identity'. We decided to use pictures related to 'identity' from a site called Flickr. Flickr is a photo sharing website owned by Yahoo, and it is international that people from various countries can interact with one another by sharing their pictures and making comments on pictures of others. We ended up with five pictures after our discussion on which ones could get people’s attention and responses more. Facebook (American and Russian version), Youtube and Naver were chosen as means of exploring our pictures to random people outside the class and even outside the country.

My work was mostly done by using American version of Facebook and Naver which is one of the mostly used Korean search engines, that provides a service called ‘지식인(Ji-sic-in)’, meaning ‘Intellectual’ in English. As a person who has not used Facebook so actively, I was very glad to see that Facebook’s group service could invite many people so easily so that they could participate in our project. However, thinking about myself ignoring group invitations so many times, I was worried that not so many people would actually take their time to accept my invitation and even leave comments on each picture. So I sent invitations to only 10 people whom I think would react with curiousness. Fortunately, three of the 10 people joined our group, and all of them left pretty long, serious and interesting comments on every picture and a video showing picture slides. It was interesting to see that the three were the people whom I spent time with most recently and that they were all Design majors. I think they accepted my invitations asking for comments on pictures, since they were more used to participating in critique about images then other majors because of the curriculum of most design courses. I could conclude that audience’s interests could affect the rate of participation.

Naver’s service, ‘Ji-sik-in (Intellectual)’ works differently compared to Facebook’s group service.
Ji-sik-in is all about asking questions and answering others’ questions in lots of fields. People can set their interests up to three when they join the site. Then questions in their fields pop up when they log in. One can earn a few points for posting or answering questions, and if their answer is selected as a best answer by the questioner, they receive much more points from the questioner. So, to post a question and get truly helpful answers, one must have many points to ‘attract’ people since they click on questions from a long list, looking at how many points they can get if they get selected as a best answerer. While earning more points, one’s level goes up from ‘commoner’ to ‘superior’ which is the highest level and the look of his/her virtual character changes also. Top ranking people get to be introduced on the first page of the site. This is how the system makes people spend their time to participate.


www.naver.com

I could require people to answer my question seriously in certain length I wanted. However, up to about two people for each question answered seriously, as maximum number of people to be selected by a questioner were two. The other answers after the best two were mostly jokes or simple opinions like “creepy” or “I like it”. Of course, many times there are people who post their answers very seriously even after the best answers are selected, truly wanting to help the questioner although it did not happen this time. Therefore, I think this is a beneficial medium as it encourages people to share their knowledge although it dose not allow users to conveniently select or invite certain people I want to answer my questions like Facebook dose, giving chances to bored people to post random jokes which are sometimes even insulting.


One of the best answers I got

To conclude, I found out that all popular media have their own ways to attract people by providing convenient services which might also have downsides. So, in order to make our project as successful as possible, combination of various media is a good way to start with as each medium targets different types of audience.

Culture

The term, culture has a very broad definition as we discussed in class today. Culture may be about religions, art, politics and many other things. I picture culture as a pyramid with unimaginable size. ‘Culture’ would be on top, and it gets wider as it goes down towards the bottom. To get closer to the definition of culture, I tend to think of it as ‘characteristics of people living in a country', and when I think of it that way, the first thing that always comes up in my head is language which I would like to put right under ‘culture’ in the pyramid and focus on in my essay.

I have always thought that language best represents the culture, as it comprehends many things like history, what people value and mostly the inclination of people in a country. So I like the expression that “A country’s culture is dissolved in its language.” As the US and Korea were the only countries I have had chances to live in, I would like to take examples from the cultures expressed by languages of the two countries. Americans represent individualism, while Koreans represent collectivism. The most obvious example is the use of ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘my’, ‘our’. Unlike American people, Koreans say ‘our school’ when they mean ‘my school’. This applies in most cases. ‘My teacher’ in English would be said ‘our teacher’ in Korean, and even ‘my parents’ is said ‘our parents’ in Korean. Another example is about different postal forms or paper forms of the two countries. People put the names on top and nation’s name on the last line in the US, but in Korea, the nation’s name should be written on top and people’s name is written on the last line.

Besides the US and Korea, I think Japanese also represents people’s inclination or what they value in Japan. According to my grandmother who spent a part of her life in Japan, they put a great importance on being modest. I remember seeing dialogues in Japanese study materials, and many expressions were in ways of modestly lowering oneself and/or honorific. Practically, as I think about Japanese people I have met so far mostly during English workshops on campus, they very often used expressions like “It was nothing” or “It was not only me” in English as if they were saying in Japanese when I personally thanked them or tried to praise them.

Going back to the use of ‘I’ and ‘we’, interestingly, there are times that people from countries with no collectivism use ‘we’ in their conversations. Especially these days, I find uses of ‘we’ as people talk about Olympics a lot. It seems that the competitions create collectivism in participating countries. Generally, even American people or any others with individualism use the words, ‘we’ and ‘our’ when one introduces or talks about his/her culture to someone who has different cultural background. When I was taking English pronunciation workshop last winter, the people in the class had various cultural backgrounds. I remember that the instructor was using the word ‘we’, meaning Americans, almost in every class when she was saying such things like “Sometimes, even we get confused by the sounds of ‘can’ and ‘can’t’.” So, ‘we’ seems to be a convenient word for people when it is culture to culture.

Talking about culture, Raymond Williams said “I don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I’d never heard the damned word” in New Keywords. I agree with his thought that the word, culture is too complex, but I want to describe ‘culture’ as ‘fun’ or a 'connection' that makes me feel I belong to somewhere wherever I am in the world, instead of ‘the damned word’. Culture’s diversity, variety and even its complexity are enjoyable in my opinion. No one knows what are in the bottom row of the pyramid of culture, since almost everything can be expressed as a culture. So, I think it is better to enjoy the process of the endless learning about culture starting from language, rather than trying to make the perfect definition out of it.

We are the users, not targets.

It is not too much to say that internet is essential in our lives today. Also, internet is believed to upgrade people’s life qualities with its enormous amount of information and opportunities. However, many people seem to believe in technology including internet unconditionally that sometimes they just ignore or do not even realize how much they can suffer or be controlled by it.

If we were questioned about how much truly efficient and productive time we spend surfing internet everyday, I wonder how many of people could answer to that right away with confidence. People read unhelpful things that they will eventually forget after some days as those tend to create people’s curiosity with their interesting titles. There are ads with visual and sound effects that attract people and make them spend time on looking at products they are not even going to buy. Also, underage people can easily have an access to information which might be harmful to their sentiment.

Sometimes, internet system requires people to give their personal information in order to join certain websites and get an access to what they want, and most people usually provide their information with their unconditional belief in the newest protection-technology when they do not even know how it works. On 5 August, a news was reported in New York Times, and it showed how the great technology can be abused against many numbers of people. According to the article in New York Times, 11 people were charged as they stole 41 million card numbers by scanning wireless networks of retail chains. The thieves sold the retails' customers' PINs, credit and debit card numbers and withdrew thousands of dollars from ATMs according to the article.

Internet can be used to control great numbers of people with its technology. Also, internet's virtual system easily creates mass psychology which might incite people to take an action. For example, Blackberry advertisement we discussed in class had sound and visual effects such as the constantly moving sound bars and moving pictures. Unless people purposely try to exam the advertisement as we did in class, they would simply believe what they see like narrators telling their edited stories of how their lives have gotten better with the blackberries. Even if the ad has hidden problems, and the product might not be as good as it is described in the reality, People may be persuaded to make a consumption wanting to improve their lives as those models in the ad. Also, people are likely to assume that many other people who have looked at the advertisement will do the same.

Another example is the meat negotiation concluded between the US and South Korea a few months ago. At the time it was concluded, some exports posted an article about how dangerous the mad cow disease is. In the articles, they said that there are possibilities that the meat has certain bacteria causing mad cow disease and that even a very small amount can affect humans. Since South Korea decided to import meat even more than 30 month that are considered not perfectly safe and meat is used in almost every production like make ups and baby foods, the situation of South Korea seemed very serious. After reading this, Korean citizens panicked and started to have a demonstration near the presidential residence for renegotiation.

As time passed, I could see an interesting change in articles on the internet. Experts' words were changing over time, and I read some comments of people who introduced themselves as assistants and students helping those experts, that the government authorities are pressuring the exports to publish partly corrected articles to calm people down. Today, some Korean citizens are saying the meat is actually safer than people think, while some others say the government is too busy hiding the facts and trying to control citizens using media power, as it needs the negotiation in order to meet other economic goals. This great panic all started from a few article on the internet, and personally, I am confused and do not know which side is right at this point because it seems that everything is constantly changing.

Looking at the situation for a few months, I have realized that people's reactions and opinions were swept along in various comments and articles posted by some people when those articles might not be true. After all, Korean citizens' distrusts toward the president has increased, and people are left with feelings of uneasiness not knowing which of all those information on internet they should believe.

Of course internet and technology we have today are efficient and useful in many ways. However, we need to keep reminding ourselves that we should not be affected too much, controlled and fooled by our technology but only taking advantages of it because we are the users, not targets.



New York Times article :
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/business/06theft.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=11%20charged&st=cse

blog and writing

I actually have a blog which I stopped using a long time ago. It was easy to create one, but taking care of it by continuously posting writings was harder than I thought. However, I really enjoy visiting other people’s blogs. Every blog I have visited was different in many ways, and I could virtually experience meeting various types of people so easily including those I would not have chances to meet in real life. Also, reading different ideas and thoughts that are even opposite to mine was beneficial to me as it made me practice thinking in many points of view. In this class, I think the pressure of publicity is what will make me feel afraid the most and also what will help improve my writing skills the most. I am expecting that I will be able to fix my habit that I tend to just assume things when I write essays. I will have to read more and collect more information to improve the overall quality of my essays, as I will be showing them to many numbers of people. However, I am very excited that I will be able to read other people’s essays and learn various writing styles.
I am really not confident about my writing and have lots to learn. I have taken two English courses so far in UCD, and both courses were ESL courses which were offered to people that English is not their first language. I learned English grammar, sentence structures and writing paragraphs for essays in those courses, but at this point I feel like I forgot most of them because it has been more than a year since I took them. Honestly, I am somewhat embarrassed to show my grammar level to all my classmates, but as I mentioned above now I just hope I can get a noticeable improvement in writing throughout this course.