Flog #8

This week was very interesting to me, and I found myself really stopping to think. The readings for Tuesday were dense, but I really appreciated how they directly played off of one another, with one being a commentary on the previous. I absolutely loved Jonathan Lethem’s piece. His examples about music and cartoons were things I had never previously thought about, but really opened my eyes to what originality really means. Also, not knowing that his paper was patchwork until the very end was a weird experience for me. To know that everything I had just read was a combination of all these different creators made me question everything honestly. Even if we think we have an original idea, is it really? It is probably based on everything we have picked up in the world around us. This piece also made me realize that originality and technology have an inverse relationship in my head. As technology and access to it increases, true originality and unique ideas decrease. This is something I continued to think about during the other readings. Goldsmith had a lot of interesting commentary in regard to the influence of digitalization on originality. I also really enjoyed the comic reading, and I wish I could have been in class because I am sure Jacob would have had really cool insights into the music world, as it is something I am quite unfamiliar with. I also just thought the format was really cool, and I have never come into contact with a truly academic piece using this format.

I feel like this Hack will be really hard for me because this whole week, I struggled to know my own opinion on this topic. I would read one thing or hear one person’s perspective and think to myself, oh yeah, that makes sense, but then I would see the other perspective and also agree. For me, the feeling of this week was intriguing but questioning. I also felt like during these readings I would start thinking about a point the author made and then read the next 5 pages without actually digesting anything because I was thinking about a previous statement. I think I need to do a better job of trying to digest and separate so I can read and then fixate.