English 1130: Academic Writing
Responses 3C
Take a metaphor used by Carr (jet-skier, brain as computer, shallows, depths, cathedral, etc.) and come up with a similar metaphor and a scenario which makes a point about how you (or other people) are effected by the Internet. Make sure not to use the exact same metaphor Carr uses. For instance, where Carr uses a cathedral, you might use a Greek temple, a gurdwara, a mosque, a synagogue, Yankee Stadium, the British Museum, or the downtown Vancouver library. You can use your own experience, create a fictional scenario, or give an explanation. Remember that the response must be in one paragraph and cannot exceed 100 words.
*** = my commentary on the response
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Jet-Skier –> Junkie. “Better, faster, broader,” the auspicious internet whispers. If knowledge is power, then the taste of power it offers is omniscient. “Just try it, the first click’s free.” Soon after dipping my toe in, I’m barely treading water with a weighted stone. What begins as an information networking tool, quickly evolves into a junkie’s addiction which shakes me to my “i5” core. The poignant “pings” and nudging notifications lure me seductively away from my task. “Don’t research, just search.” As my shortened attention span circles the downspout, a faint memory of my task surfaces, only to succumb to a cat video. (100 words)
*** This is a creative and insightful response. It’s well-written and very cleaver, which keeps the reader interested.
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Jet Ski -----> An Ocean Current People on Jet Ski's race over the sea, catching glimpses of what lays below the surface, yet quickly moving onto the next eye-catching object. Once you hit an ocean current, it will swiftly take you away before you realize it. The Net is an ocean current, providing vast amounts of applications ready to sweep you away. While on social media, I get caught up in the plethora of applications, going from one to the next in a blur, taking hours for me to realize how far the current has taken me.
*** This response has one very powerful idea, which might be highlighted more effectively in a time-line narrative, where the jet-skier is zipping around 50 metres from the shore and gets so caught up in what she’s finding that she doesn’t realize that she’s six miles out at sea. Then, one might speculate about the nature of this unseen and massive current…
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Scuba divers dive deep into oceans with an apparatus that allows them to remain safe while rescuing people who are in need. Firefighters dive into burning buildings and prevent individuals from life sustaining changes. They are equipped with resources to withstand extensive environments; the resources being unconscious decisions to refrain from google. Flames erupting, smoke filling the rooms, predators permeating the oceans; all of which are hazardous to humans. The rush. The entertainment. The adrenaline. The net is now the burning building; the place of which people enter, leaving it a mystery for when they will be able to escape.
*** This response needs a title. It could also be edited to highlight a particular scenario, from which a general principle emerges, but the point is clear nevertheless.
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"Pancake people" -> a Tinder user. "Pancake people's" principle is that googling the vast range of information just by one-click action allows them to neglect the human-being ability to analyze the data by a brain itself; the principle of a Tinder user is in searching their potential soulmate among tons of matches just by left-right swipes that significantly simplifies their life as they are convinced that such visual type of judgment is the way better than the acquaintance with inner intelligence and philosophy of the individual.
*** This response has a good idea, yet it needs work. The metaphor needs to be identified at the start: a Tinder user isn’t a metaphor for the Web (a metaphor has to stand for something else). Also, there are expression errors and awkward parts (identified in bold). Finally, avoid one-sentence paragraphs in general. Instead, use the first sentence to give your overall idea, use the next sentences to break this idea down into parts and to develop it, and then use the final sentence to conclude (by making an impact or presenting your take-away idea or sentiment).
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The scuba diver —> A Steller's jay. Migratory birds flock from location to location, sampling from a buffet of regions and landscapes. Throughout winter, the Steller's jay remains. It observes and navigates its surroundings throughout the changing seasons, learning who and what to trust. It hops from balcony to balcony, learning which provides the best and safest snacks. When the environment changes, new homes are built, or seasons change, trust is challenged. The internet is also changing and developing. By the time we think it is familiar, the seasons have changed, new developments have taken place, and we must again learn what we can trust.
*** Although the student might note explicitly that the migratory bird is like the jet skier, this is an excellent example of an extended metaphor which brings the reader into a larger contextualized understanding.
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Pancake people -> Excavating mines. It seems logical if your goal is to excavate mines that you would want to dig as many as possible. However with a finite amount of time and energy, you realize in hindsight that the mines you’ve excavated are insufficiently deep. This quantity-over-quality line of thinking is common in our daily lives thanks to the internet. People have been led to believe that multitasking or skimping will produce exceptional results, when in reality, it creates more abundant mediocrity. Diffused attention and shallow work certainly parallels being spread wide and thin, such as pancake people.
*** This is a very good, creative take. It would, however, be even stronger if the student followed the conceit into more applied and specific areas. I suggest replacing the later general statements with a more focused exploration – for example, of what a miner might find by going deep, in contrast to what a geologist might find by doing an induced polarization survey (in this type of ground survey, the geologist goes over a wide area to find the spots where a miner would dig). A conclusion that might be drawn is that mineral extraction, like knowledge, requires both breadth and depth. By writing so much about this response I don’t mean to suggest that it isn’t good. On the contrary, this response is particularly good because it stimulates the reader to push the analogy further. The response opens up new ways of thinking about the issue.
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The internet is like a metropolis. Due to the massive size, if any individual ventures in without any focus or goal, it will be almost impossible to find what is needed. Furthermore, similar to a city, there are many attractions along the road that will further distract the tourist or user from reaching their destination. The side activities that the Net offer can worsen the procrastination tendency of it user, making them less productive in the process.
*** This response needs to list the original and new metaphor; it’s an integral part of the assignment to show how you went from Carr’s metaphor to your own metaphor. This response could also use more specific scenarios that illustrate the point. At 77 words, there is certainly room for more detail, either along the way or at the end.
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The Internet’s High Church —> Secular State. The High Church influenced thinking, writing, and even dictated how people should conduct their lives. Yet, even its most tyrannical attempts to end defying ideas were not able to stop intellectual minds from pursuing deep knowledge. This principle also applies to the internet. While Google — the internet’s high church — influences mainstream thinking, the internet functions like a secular state. We are free to choose what to read, think, and write – even if it does not conform to mainstream dogmatic behaviour. (81 words)
*** This is a great response because it sets up a big idea and makes you think. It could be even better if the student omitted “This principle also applies to the internet” and used the extra 26 words to give some sort of more specific illustration. I would also suggest identifying what this High Church is. Often the term is associated with the Anglican Church, but I suspect the student means church in a more general sense. This is a fraught area -- capitalizing it as Church suggests the Catholic Church, and using Orthodox suggests Greece and Eastern Europe. I recommend keeping High Church in the title but then changing it to a phrase such as ‘traditional churches’ in the rest of the response. The student might even broaden the term further to ‘traditional religion.’ This response is illuminating in the way the one above on mining was: it makes you think through the issue in new ways. For instance, it may make you wonder what the difference is between churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques, or it may make you wonder how churches differ from companies and institutions…
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Crazy quilt of internet media---> The canvases of Jackson Pollock. The crazy quilt of internet media is an apt representation of the visual and informational "noise" the internet's advertisements and information presentation woven together in a seemingly chaotic pattern to create a wide covering blanket of media. As we see this wildly mismatched quilt, we become the canvas of the internet's Jackson Pollock approach. The seemingly wild spraying the media's paint until we begin to retain the broad and chaotic paint brush barrage of media, saturating our being with its emotional whims.
*** This is a response with a great deal of potential, yet the expression needs to be more clear (also the metaphors should be in bold). For example, “the noise of the internet’s advertisements” would make that long sentence more readable. It’s also a bit hard to see how one becomes a canvas of an approach. The final sentence is hard to read because it’s a sentence fragment. The ideas are great but the expression needs work.
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The Cathedral → Sunday school. The same basic principles of the net are taught the way one would learn the basics of religion in Sunday school class. Roles are reversed as elders become the children in Sunday school, and the youth become the leaders. The internet has become a system of humbling older generations and their past methods. With each new addition of technology, the older generations fall further behind, leaving it to those younger to teach them. (73 words)
*** This response is good, yet mostly relies on assertion and needs more illustration. The student has at least 27 more words to illustrate the point (and more words if the writing was more condensed).
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Jetski—> Beauty is only skin deep. Jet skis pass over the top of the water, skimming over the top without penetrating deep past the surface. The internet has become something that doesn’t require a lot of thought, meant to mask the reality of things. Making things seem easier or more glamorous. By accepting the internet for being something that doesn’t provide much more than superficial, we are losing our ability to connect with the people around us and ourselves as we are looking only skin deep.
*** Like the previous response, this one tends to rely on assertion, and could use more illustration and more extension of the metaphor itself. On the level of argument, there are also too many assumptions and generalizations. Try to be more specific.
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The scuba-diver —> sharks. A novice scuba-diver was exploring an unknown territory in the open ocean. Lurking in the shadows, a shark was continuously learning more about the scuba-driver's preferences waiting to strike. He watched and recorded the scuba-diver's activities and where he spent his time. Being alone in the water, the shark recognized how vulnerable his prey was. The shark seized this opportunity to bite the scuba-diver's leg. Although still swimming, he was wounded and left a trail of blood for the other sharks to find him. (84 words)
*** This is an excellent response. The only slight error is the m.m. (misplaced modifier – see Marking for marking abbreviations and examples), which is in bold above. This response makes me remember (with a chill) when I first saw Jaws at the theatre in 1975!
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Internet’s high church -> Facebook. The church is a place where people go for public worship; and Facebook a place where folks go for public information nowadays. The religion which ties peoples of all around the world to a particular system of faith, in the digital realm of Facebook there's a quite different particular system strongly embedded, a system programmed to addict its consumers. We also have a quite different but actually similar form of a Priest role operating within Facebook, exhibiting the capacities of authority and mediatory agent, making sure we are being fed the needed [avoid irony] information from ads and propaganda.
*** This response makes good points, yet it needs to identify a metaphor (a church is a metaphor yet Facebook isn’t a metaphor) and it needs more proofreading (in bold above).
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A cathedral —> a forest. Every cathedral is unique and it can take centuries to build one. The interior is often adorned with a plethora of grand, meaningful paintings which are like bits of information that we learn in our own way. Similarly, a forest is so vast and thick that there is no end to explore. The human mind is a forest. Everyone thinks and operates differently just like how forests have varied environments. Thinking is a process, and so is the growth of a forest. Using Carr’s view, the internet is stripping away the complexity of our minds like deforestation.
*** This response develops the comparison clearly. The only improvement I can think of is to link sentences a bit more in order to avoid choppiness (this is only a small problem in the middle of the response).
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Fast food chains bring me the item I want in about 5 minutes. I can pick up the information laid out in front of me and serve it without much effort. The layout and arrangement of these are so plausible that I create the illusion that I am eating a very wise diet. Nevertheless, I soon come to realize painfully that my body is in malnutrition. Filling a meal with fast food is, after all, only half a meal. Fast and easy things can make both nutrients for the body and brain pay.
*** This response has a lot of potential, but it tends to focus on one point and leave out the comparative aspects. The two metaphors should be clear in the title (which is absent here), and the comparison to the Net should be more explicit. Another comparative aspect left out is the intimacy and knowledge of preparing one’s own food.
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Jet ski-------Iceberg Jet skis float on the ocean surface, partially submerged, unaware of what is beneath them, enjoying the beauty they are able to see [do skis see?]. An iceberg floats above the ocean surface but you are unable to see where it ends, what is happening beneath that surface-level view you have. People on the internet only usually share the parts of their personality and lives that they want the world to see, never [this is a border-line error and is acceptable outside of academic English] the bad parts. You truly do not know what is going on behind that screen, to keep [this is not just a c.s but also a m.c. – see Marking for these abbreviations and for the types of mistakes you want to avoid] whatever true or false persona they have created for themselves. (100 words)
*** This is a good response in terms of content, but it needs another edit for smoothness, clarity, and grammar (in bold and brackets).
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The human brain ------> a spider web. The human brain is as delicate as the thin strands of spiderwebs. The brain is an intricate mental meshwork that allows the neurons to send in every part of our mind ; the spider silk web weaves together that binds itself to the entire cobweb in order to make it useful. Newer lines are made everyday to replace the older ones getting weaker. That start of the bridge thread is what connects to everything from there on.(77 words)
*** This response has potential yet is marred by not having a metaphor to begin with (the human brain isn’t a metaphor) and by vagueness and expression errors (in bold).
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outdated computer —> Roland Synth. The internet is the newest model of digital synthesizers, able to cycle through tens of thousands of authentic sounding digital samples in a matter of seconds. However, not one of those will deliver the lush analogue sound waves that you can feel in your bones, sounds that a Roland synth from 1985 can deliver, sounds that take more work to cycle through then they’re worth so you marinade yourself in them for a while and have an experience. Digital synthesizers have so many options that they become obsolete to more efficient replacements before you can decide on one. (100 words)
*** This is a very creative response, yet it could be more clear about the metaphor element (it’s hard to see a person as a metaphor). It also seems to contain a contradiction (in bold) and the last sentence isn’t clear to me: how can the many options make them obsolete?
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Cathedral → Sea World. The cathedral is a place of worship, where individuals go to praise. Sea World is a similar setting, seeming harmless at first glance but the deeper you look the more damaging it becomes. The animals stuck in tanks are made to be a source of entertainment but how much harm is being caused? The same can be said about the internet - it is worshiped like the cathedral with all kinds of information being only one click away. But like Sea World, the deeper you browse, the more inclined you are to see the harm that is gaping beneath the surface. (100 words)
*** This is a very good comparison, although the title confused me a little (does it refer to SeaWorld in San Diego or Orlando, or aquariums in general?). Also, the harm needs to be more clearly defined. It also omits the possibility that many viewers are more fascinated the more closely they look. Perhaps this problem wouldn’t arise if we knew what the damaging aspect was in particular.
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Cathedral ---> the Great library of Alexandria. A cathedral is a large building which holds the seat of a bishop, who contains knowledge of the church and its proceedings. While the great library of Alexandria contained knowledge on a plethora of subjects gathered from around the world as they entered ports in Egypt, ever growing and expanding the knowledge within. The internet is the great library of Alexandria in computerized form as it continually expands and gains more and more knowledge adding them to its abundance of servers for the access of humans all over the world.
*** This is a very good response, apart from the sentence fragment. The student might also include a follow-up: what would the equivalent be — or can there be an equivalent to? – the disastrous burning of that great library?
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Jet-Ski —> skipping stone. A jet-ski is a jet-propelled watercraft that skims across the water’s surface, transporting its rider to a destination in an accelerated manner. A skipping stone is a smooth rock that is thrown into the water, travelling at a rate of speed that allows it to skip across the water’s surface. With every brief touching of the water, the rock succumbs to the friction; its energy fades, it slows, it becomes smothered by water, eventually sinking, to find its place on the floor.
*** This response has a lot of potential, yet it spends too much time telling us the obvious (the first two sentences) and it needs to tie the ideas together more clearly. Is the Net making our energy fade? Are we sinking? What does the ocean floor stand for? The extended metaphor has to be more clearly relatable to the thing it’s illustrating, or we might end up like Joey (in the Friends episode), who asks, “Are we still talking about sex?”
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