Blog #5 How "cool" is this blog?

So I committed the ultimate rookie blogger mistake and didn’t write my blog for Monday on Word first and then paste it to the blog, and for some reason my blog did not publish so here I go again, writing it all over again, which sucks for two reasons. One, it is almost a week late, and two, I have to write the whole damn thing over again. So here it goes…

Last week in class we had the chance to go through Lexia to Perplexia, and I did not really understand it at all. I’m finding this is becoming a common theme for me. I probably didn’t understand the website much because I simply got caught up in the clicking and linking, and eventually I was only clicking to see what came up next instead of reading things. Eventually, I got the point where all I was doing was clicking to see how long this site would continue…it goes a while.

Anyway, now to some stuff that did make a little bit of sense to me. The whole idea of cool and what cool is exactly. In Jeff Rice’s book Writing About Cool, he tries to link things that we relate with cool such as hip-hop or Nike shoe commercials with cool in writing. The part I found most interesting was that Rice tries to explain to us that we need to “learn how cool has been transformed from a personality trait into an electronic writing strategy…” (pg.12). The area where this made the most sense to me was when he was explaining how websites have taken these ideas of what we find cool and using it to make money. Then he moved on to how this has changed cool from what was once viewed as somebody like James Dean who was rebellious teenager trying to go against the system, are now being used rhetorically against consumers. However, I would argue against him and say that James Dean’s appearance was used to sell the film industry, so Jeff Rice has to be careful with that subject.
Other than that, I think class really took off last week, and people are really starting to open up in class and share their thoughts. It isn’t always easy as some of us don’t really understand the readings until Scot explains what we were supposed to get out of it. I do have to say I definitely enjoy being in this section of English 201 rather than any other one though. I feel we are learning a lot of useful relevant information, not that we wouldn’t in another 201 section, but most of us have already learned how to write long papers, and not many of us have designed a webpage or been really involved with blogging. That’s all she wrote…