"Gender, Advertising, and Mass-Circulation Magazines" Helen Damon-Moore and Carl F. Kaestle

This chapter seems to show that magazines have tended to be read mostly by women.  Since the role of women was seen as the "house wife" type, the earliest magazines tended to focus their advertisements towards women. The advertisements along side the stories and articles allowed the earliest magazines, such as the Ladies' Home Journal, to profit highly.   When the Post magazine tried to become a magazine for business men, they found out that it was harder to do because, while the men's interest were in their work, each job was different; therefore, each man's interest was different.  The Post as well as most magazines that tried to be men interest magazines ultimately geared there focus to include women.  According to this article, history shows that advertising is easiest for magazines when it's targeted towards women.  Even with the movement to the television, women's magazines and family magazines (geared to both men and women) have dominated the magazine industry.

I agree with the reasoning of the this article.  The social roles of men and women played a huge part in determining how the owners of magazine publications have determined what to include in them.  However, I believe that the magazines have changed a bit over time in that there are more "family" magazines than women dominated magazines.  While it does seem that woman still read magazines more than men there is at least more out there for men, such as, computer, sports, and car magazines.  They are focused magazines, which in a way tells us more about how the social roles of men and woman are still different.  Understanding how is still a question that I can not even answer.

"From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies" Dennis Baron

Baron gives us an article about the different stages that all literacy technologies have gone and are going through. According to Baron, each new literacy technology starts as a "restricted communication function" that is only known by few people.  History shows that the first writings were used by tax collectors and the writings were used for such purposes.  It seems that writing wasn't intended for putting down thoughts and ideas or conversations and stories.  Several people, including the famous philosopher Plato, believed that writing would dumb our minds. Eventually writing did expand into these areas even though it was a long process because of so many hesitations towards it.  Baron states that writing itself is a technology because it does things that simple speech can not. Some examples Baron gives us are: writing can not show body expression; pronunciation can be confusing based on the look of words; and the tone of voice is lost in written text.

The physical technologies that Baron uses in this article are the pencil, the telephone and the computer.  Each of these physical technologies is important for the stages of technology because they each are part of the technology.  The pencil was created for craftsman to make marks on their work and later used for writing by scientist simply for convenience.  Eventually, this convenient device was used by more people and later on along side the pen.  The pencil has evolved tremendously as far as the wood used and the type of lead or graphite used. Even the rubber eraser has evolved from a stand-alone to one clamped onto the pencil.  The telephone is considered a literacy technology by Baron because it is one of speech.  People had to learn a new way of speaking in order to communicate over the phone because they didn't have the use of body language and facial expressions.  This way of speech involved more of the tonal and word usage of the language.

Finally, is the computer literacy technology.  Just like writing and the pencil the computer was not intended for writing.  Baron states that the computer was created to handle complex math problems.  Eventually the technology became more advanced and over several years it has evolved to become one of the most widely used technologies to use for writing and reading.  Along with the internet the computer itself has revolutionized the literacy technologies.  It is perhaps one of the biggest creations since writing itself was discovered.  Baron believes that we face several issues with this new technology before it can become authentic.  Several of the things put on the web can be corrupted and we face the problem of finding out ways to sort out the truth from falsified ideas or facts.

Is Baron against computer aged technology?  It isn't very clear to me; however, I do believe that we are still a long way from figuring out what is authentic and what isn't, but I believe that the internet has great potential to becoming a great literary source and/or tool.

"Who Am I? What Am I Doing Here?" Linda Flower

This chapter brings up the questions of "Who am I and What am I doing here" when we enter a community that is different from ours.  She focuses on the idea that the college student or educated person goes into a lesser educated community to help educate them or do something for there benefit.  She ask these questions because she believes that it is important that the educated learn from the experience as well.  We can not simply just "study and assist" and not learn from the community as Harkavay and Puckett stated.  We must create a service learning environment were the educated will become more educated from participating rather than observing and helping.

In order to better understand how difficult it is to create a system that works, Flower discusses some logics that may be useful in creating one.  The Logic of Mission is the idea that we are on a mission to "help" a community, for example, to learn how read or improve there reading skills.  However, we must use the "middle-white class" tools to do this.  This doesn't seem to be working because there are still several African-American and Hispanic students struggling.  We need to design tools that benefit the individuals in a community; each community is different and needs different tools.  The Logic of Technical Enterprise is similar.  We create services to help individuals because we have the resources, but we don't really care for them.  We need to bring back the care and the compassion rather than just the services, which brings us to the next logic.  The Logic of Compassion and Identity can best be quoted:

It turns service from an act of charity or authority into an act of empathy that grasps an essential identity between the one who serves and the one who is in need.  Less motivated to blame or reform the victim, compassion is also not afraid to acknowledge the pain, the stress, the sense of dislocation, and even hopelessness that go with poverty, racism, diminished self esteem, and vulnerability.

 While Flowers notes that there are issues of interpretation of what it means to be compassionate, it is definitely a major part of what needs to be included in a system to help others.  The Logic of Prophetic Pragmatism and Collaborative Problem Solving is based on the ideas of John Dewey.  According to Dewey, all knowledge is a hypothesis of something and that it isn't true.  Knowledge is just an idea(s) backed up with evidence, but there is no certainty that it is the truth; therefore, when we go into a new community we must go in with an open mind and that we use our knowledge to create a relationship with someone rather than be a know it all.  Finally, The Logic of Intercultural Inquiry raises the question of how to deal with the differences we all have.  One suggestion is collaborative inquiry in which everyone involved participates in the instruction, so they can give there ideas and hopefully this will lead to a better understanding of each other.

The next part of the chapter talks about the resistance of these ideas of collaborative communities.  However, Flower continues to argue that collaboration is needed to help us move forward as a community and learn from one another.  She concludes the chapter with an assignment given to some college students who are trying to answer the questions: Who Am I? What Am I Doing Here?  The answer to these questions can best be summarized by this final quote:

Community/University projects offer a variety of ready-made identities, from the service provider, technical expert, organizer and advocate to the cultural critic, role model or buddy. However, these may lead to roles and relationships we do not want to claim, especially if they blind us to the agency and expertise of others. So the question of What am I doing here? can take on a special urgency and feel very much like a problem of identity. Yet, these reflections by mentors and writers suggest that, first of all, identity in this partnership is not something you bring with you; it is not about who or what you are. Identity is defined by the relationships you create. It is built around the shared goal of inquiry and literate action and your role in that partnership.....This identity.....appears to be constructed through collaboration and over time in an effort to confront competing voices, to explore alternatives, and to imagine for oneself a committed, revisable stance.

Flower, Linda. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. Carbondale: Southern      Illinois UP, 2008. Print

“Images of Empowerment” Linda Flower

This chapter has a lot of stuff going on.  I don’t understand it as a whole, but I do understand bits and pieces.

According to Flower, when put in practice, empowerment can mean several things depending on how you answer three questions: “Who is being empowered?  To what end?  By what means?”  If you’re a poor person and excluded from power because you see that the rich and privileged have it all, then you will view empowerment differently from the privileged who are “developing their own capacity to resist, serve and act on the behalf of others (123).”  You will also view empowerment differently if your goals are different and how you plan to reach those goals. 

Flower says that “empowerment depends on speaking appropriately, speaking up, and speaking against as well as speaking with.”  I believe by speaking appropriately you have to be willing to understand that there are cultural differences amongst us.  You would speak to someone from Spain differently than you would to a middle class white man from Virginia.  There are several differences amongst cultures, ethnic groups, classes and regions of the country and world.  I understand Flowers notion of speaking up as being willing to speak your own “voice.”  Your own ideas and understanding of society must come out in your writing and speech.  Being willing to put yourself out there will hopefully help others begin to understand your ideas.  This will start a conversation and lead to discussion and debate to hopefully create a larger understanding of society needs.  Since this country has several cultures, we need to be able to speak against ideas in order to challenge and learn from them.  By challenging others ideas and understandings, we can teach them new things, but also learn from others. 

At this point in the chapter, I began to get more confused because Flowers tries to explain the problems with the above dependencies of empowerment.  Anther option of speaking against ideas is to actually speak across differences.  Use shared ideas to work together rather than the differences.  Or, as Kurt Spellmeyer suggest,  in composition classes “students are first recognized as meaning makers in their own right, involved in the work of reading and writing because it addresses questions that matter to them....the goal is not to preserve or transmit knowledge but to appropriate it—to use writing to discover what these differences mean for each individual.

Flowers then sites a study that tries to explain a theory of empowerment, that I don’t understand.  What I would like to learn is how all of this works together as a whole text.  What does it all mean?

Flower, Linda. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. Carbondale: Southern      Illinois UP, 2008. Print

"What's in a List?" Jack Goody

                Jack Goody explains how the early writings from 3000 B.C.E. in Egypt and Mesopotamia have influenced the “cognitive operations” of the human mind (32).  He focuses his argument on ‘the list’ because he believes that just like today’s writing, the list has a purpose, to influence “the organization of social life and ... the cognitive systems (33).”  According to Goody, the list can be divided into three different categories: inventory, shopping, and lexical.  The inventory list was used mainly for administrative purposes.  Estate inventory, taxes, itemization and several other things were written down to keep track of things.  It was an economic tool that helped keep records for the state.  The shopping list was a sort of events list that recorded things to be done or things that had been done.  Goody gives the example of recording star distances from one star to another by the Mesopotamians.  Other things recorded with this type of list are recordings of the weather and administrative boundaries.  Finally, the lexical list was like an early dictionary.  Words of the same meaning or morphology were grouped together to show “relationships among the words in the vocabulary of the language (42).”  Based on the Onomasticon of Amenope, an early Egyptian writing, Goody explains that the author of the Amenope creates a lexical list that is put in a hierarchy order.  By doing this the author is showing how the people viewed society; the gods and kings at the top, working men in the middle and everything else (e.g. trees, animals, etc.) at the bottom.  The list reflects a more complex idea compared to the inventory and shopping list, which are more simple abstract things.  Overall, Goody says that words have a value when they are placed in a list because they the words grouped together have a relationship.  The words can give a result (inventory), they can record happenings and help predict what’s going to happen (shopping), and they can reflect society’s awareness of the world or their beliefs (lexical).

Who is Matthew and What is Community Literacy?

My name is Matthew Garcia and I am a junior at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.  I am studying to get my BA in English with 8-12th grade Teacher Certification.  Going into teaching is something that I have always been hesitant about because over time I have lost interest in reading.  However, I will not lose hope that I will gain that interest back, but for now I will just continue to concentrate on graduating.

Community Literacy is something I am not familiar with, but I hope that it will give me the tools I need to be a successful educator.  This class includes service learning in which I will be required to go out into the community and put the skills that I learn in this class to test.  I hope that this experience will get me more comfortable with helping others.  While I have some experience volunteering and tutoring, I still get nervous when I have to help and educate someone.  I am ready to learn and hope that this semester will teach me new and enjoyable things.