Journal: Additions to the course reflection

After I wrote and clicked post on my previous entry to this blog, 1230 AM Wednesday morning, I went outside and sat in the hot tub. I thought I needed to relax after a long days work, I like to do so by sitting in the hot tub. Anyway, while I was out there I started thinking about my entry a lot more. Its funny how people, well me at least I'm sure most other people do this too, tend to think of good things to say after the situation has ended. I find myself doing this a lot, saying things like ohhh I should have said this or that. Its not often that we can go back and make a correction without anyone noticing. For instance if I were talking to someone in person and after the chat was done I thought of another point to say I can't just call the person up and say hey I thought of something else! Unless its really important. But with journal writing, especially on the internet, you can go back and add in your additional thought, sometimes without people even noticing you've done so. There's edit buttons! Its kind of scary really. We're entering a society based around technology. With it comes no errors. A perfect society, so to speak. Just look at it. Most work processors have a spell checker in them. My web browser has a built in spell checker so when I'm writing on the internet I know when I've made a mistake. The pictures I may include in my post can all be edited to the way I like them in a few minutes using photoshop. If I don't understand something I can look it up on wikipedia, if I don't know what a word means I can Dictionary.com it, even if I need additional points for my article I could Google some. Once my article is published, if, by chance, my entry had an error in it I may receive tweets and emails from readers notifying me of the error which I could go change right away using that edit button.

This new wave of technology is really putting the blindfold over the rest of us readers. I'm sure more and more writers are seemingly more and more brilliant because of this technology. We're getting into an era where we're afraid to make mistakes. Not only because we rarely see mistakes (Think back when newspapers were the only form of news, even magazines still do this today. I used to like reading that little box of text found near the front stating all the errors that the journalists did in the previous edition.) but because everything we do is becoming published and viewed by other people. Its no big deal to make a mistake on something you've written for yourself, but to make a mistake in something being published online which can potentially be viewed by many people. Its frightening for some.

For me I don't care if I'm right or wrong, if my opinion matters, etc. Online you're as anonymous as you'd like to be. But I was talking to someone in class 3 weeks ago who asked me what I was doing my learning log and journal on and I told him on twitter and blogger. He almost cringed at the idea and asked me how I felt about the ability of other people to read the posts. Apparently he did not want any of his thought, opinions, and ideas on the internet, he did not want the ability for someone else to read them. He figured at the rare chance someone made the connection between his online identity and him he may be embarrassed. This thought had never occurred to me before, I didn't think there were people like him out there. But it could be that he is afraid of making a mistake, be it in his writing or opinion, and having a wrath of online personas go after him for that mistake.

Anyway I've gone way off track again. This post was going to be short but I ended up typing a lot more than expected. Again, its interesting how the mind wanders. What I thought about last night in the hot tub was something else I took from this course. It has made me more aware of my scheduling and my task list. Because I always knew I had something to do in this course, yet it was not due, I was forced to think about when I was going to do it. Doing so lead me to realize the other tasks that I needed to do. I started making task lists for the work that was required of me. This helped me substantially throughout the term as I never found myself in a state of panic because I had just realized something was due. Every piece of homework that I had was completed and handed in in a timely fashion because this class forced me to think about everything going on.