Sunday, February 19, 2012

Forwarding and Blogging

Ok...so the 'blog' sights that I have been following are more or less news sights. It seems like everything I've been clicking on in the Huffinton Post has been a link to an article posted in some news paper...but I have an idea that these articles may still work for these purposes. 

Forwarding is Harris' term for the idea of using other peoples work in your own. To put it simply. He basically points out that in academic writing writers often respond to others' writing and integrate those works into new works, and in doing so gaining new perspectives, adding new directions and topics of conversation, and putting forward new ideas. He makes it clear that he does not mean people write about the work of another like a book review or a summary, but rather, they are using the works of another to further their own point and agenda. Now that sounds rather mercenary and Harris does point out the dangers of forwarding. He says that a text can easily become "fatherless" and be distorted from its original purpose. 

Back to my search for a blog post that related to this idea of forwarding (and I thought that was going to be easy...) after reading a dozen or so articles (these exercises definitely make sure I'm keeping up on my news...) I found a random little blog post that hardly seems relevant to really anything but does add an interesting element to Harris' idea of forwarding. 


There is the link...if you are going to understand the rest of my post you will probably want to read this little post (it really is little and kinda cute) 

Basically Caroline Geigerich talks about how one day she came out to her car to find a little note someone left on her car. This particular someone had noticed her car and wanted to know if she was willing to sell it. As it so happens she did want to sell it she just hadn't garnered the motivation to do anything about it. Well now she has an idea she decided to take a picture of this cute little note and post a "note" on FB about the note and how she in fact did want to sell it and hey if anybody wants to buy it they should let her know...

The FB "note" is a success and she gets some more offers for the car.

At first I breezed by this little post without thinking about it but then I realized that this woman had, in fact, participated in Harris' idea of forwarding. She took the original note and recreated it into a sort of advertisement for her car. She wasn't just talking about the note but using it to promote a purpose. It's not the same as Harris' more academic examples but I do believe it applies...

No comments:

Post a Comment