Discourses of Attention

I thought this article was very straight forward and incredibly interesting.  This article got me thinking about how much TV I watched at certain points in my life and how my attention span changed over time.  As a youngster, I watched a moderate amount of TV and had a decent attention span.  As a teenager, I saw my attention span decrease while my TV watching increased.  Currently, I watch a lot of TV before bed and have recently realized that I need to start reading more.  I feel there is no comparison to reading a good book.  They are full of description and a person's mind is much more active while reading.  I also feel like my vocabulary drastically improves when I'm reading consistently.  A quote from the article that stood out to me was when the author said that people today are "unlikely to devote more than a few minutes at a time to any kind of activity" (p. 593).  I feel like this is true when I think about a lot of my family and friends.  This article has really made me think about how I spend my downtime and I want to make a collective effort to get back to reading as much as I used to.

Burkitt Text

Social Selves by Ian Burkitt was a really helpful book that really helped me gain a better understanding of the self and helped me learn to answer the question "Who am I?"  What I realized from reading the book was "that it is possible to be both a social being and an individual self" (p. 192).  An individual is able to grow from the his/her inner self, but surroundings and social worlds also have a big part in shaping an individual.  Another important quote from Chapter 8 that reflects this idea is when the author states, "to have a self is to be able to orient oneself in the social world; to be recognized by others and to be called to account for your actions, having the capacity to reciprocate" (p. 193).  Our self helps reflect who we are as individuals in the social world and how we interact with one another.  Reading this book has helped me understand many different theories and concepts about the self.  This book was relevant to this class because with social media, it is now more important than ever to have a true understanding of what the self really is.