Amanda Leonard

Stephen Tyler from American University wrote: “It thus relativizes discourse not just to form — that familiar perversion of the modernist; nor to authorial intention — that conceit of the romantics; nor to a foundational world beyond discourse — that desperate grasping for a separate reality of the mystic and scientist alike; nor even to history and ideology — those refuges of the hermeneuticist; nor even less to language — that hypostasized abstraction of the linguist; nor, ultimately, even to…

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Peer Review Sammi: Your essay is off to a really good start. However, the first thing I noticed about your paper was that the first sentence seemed to be leading the reader in the opposite direction of where your stance is. I would recommend just rewording that to make your argument clear right off the bat. Another thing I noticed was that for your paragraph about online shopping, it seems that you’re not using much of your own ideas and…

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Interview with a grown-up

I am choosing to use my third, mystery source as Meet the Life Hackers by Clive Thompson. I found this article using the link and sources provided by my professor but I chose to click on this one because it related back to something we had read in Richard Restak’s, Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era, when he talked about life hacks. This essay is about how to find the perfect middle ground between distractions from technology that…

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  It seems very strange to me how this all came about. I find it hard to believe people did this, and continue to do such things because it seems ridiculous. These people followed instructions from a complete stranger and for what purpose? They must have had to put a lot of faith into knowing others were there with them, as well. I wonder what it is that made these people decide to do this. This shows how technology has…

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“It concerns many people that our brains are not able to adjust to the changing technology we have and that they cannot handle the digital distractions we are faced with. However, our brains are wired to adjust with our environment, thus, they change along with technology and distractions that come with it. Restak states, “Our brain literally changes its organization and functioning to accommodate the abundance of stimulation forced on it by the modern world” (Restak). This shows that our…

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Our world is constantly changing, which means we as people need to change with it in order to keep up. We have so much more technology now than we did before: TVs, smartphones, laptops; and they are changing the way our brains work. Richard Restak states in his essay, Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era, that, “This technology driven change in the brain is the biggest modification in the last 200,000 years…exposure to technology seems to be spurring…

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Before: Because there is so much information at such a rapid pace, it would appear that this could be damaging, however, there are many reasons to believe the opposite. After: Because we are fed information at such a rapid pace, it would appear that this could be damaging, however, there are many reasons to believe the opposite.   Before: We have so much technology nowadays that we did not have before: TVs, smartphones, laptops; and they are changing the way…

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I am noticing a lot of connections between Richard Restak’s Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era and Sam Anderson’s In Defense of Distraction. Both discuss how our brains being distracted can actually be beneficial in different ways. Restak talks about how ADHD can be useful in the workplace and Anderson discusses how “distraction” is just “following your attention.” Restak and Anderson both discuss how technology is the root of this distractedness in our world today because it has…

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I am excited to see how ePortfolio is going to fit into my English class and what we will be able to use it for. I believe that ePortfolio has the potential to help my professor, my classmates, and I to connect with each other outside of the classroom. This definitely will make things possible that simple pen and paper cannot, such as being able to communicate whenever, wherever. It gives us the ability to expand beyond the classroom and…

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