I read through all of Cam’s blogs for the quarter and then went back and read through mine and was surprised at some of the similarities. We still had our own experiences of the class, but I was glad to read about someone else having similar struggles with some of the more confusing aspects of the class. We both discussed some major themes such as identity, anonymity, communication, technological advances, etc. We both also used some quotes from the readings and connected the class with other experiences and events in our lives and the world. We also both talked about the value of life and how that would change if we changed into robots or were put into a machine such as Morel’s invention. She seemed to have similar thoughts as me about many values of life being in the small things and in the ability to think and live in our own bodies. We both addressed aspects of the futures such as what the next step in evolution might be. She wrote about how she didn’t think robots would be the next step and I wrote about how I didn’t think a uniform superorganism would be the next step. So even in our similarities we had our differences.
Some differences between our blogs were that I tended to write out a thought process by posing a series of questions, most of which I couldn’t or didn’t actually answer. Cam seemed to have more simplified and focused blogs. I also commented on the text a lot more than she did. I tended to get lost during class discussions so I would write a lot about the books; Cam seemed to connect with the discussion topics better than me. She also came out and talked about when she was confused or didn’t understand things, and although I felt the same way a lot of times, I tended to just ignore that and only talk about things I did have a better understanding of. I liked that she argued against some of the things talked about in class, whereas I just commented on the parts I agreed with and could relate to.
In this process of reading all our blogs, I came across a pattern in my blogs that I hadn’t noticed before. In almost all my blogs I ended up questioning or thinking about what is natural or intrinsic to humanity. In a lot of my blogs I ended up saying things about the inevitability and inherency of certain behaviors, tendencies and patterns of humanity. So apparently a big theme on my mind was what is natural to us as human and what is synthetic or at least more flexible about us. Another theme from my blogs was that I identified patterns in society and culture relating to the ideas from class. I would recognize a pattern and then comment on why the pattern is there, what we can do to change it, or if we should even change it.
The closest topic I could find to a major theme in Cam’s blogs was technology and it’s affects on the classroom learning experience and on communication. I think a big part of her experience of this class was the format of the class itself. She wrote frequently about technology and the way it was used in this class to add to our understanding rather than being looked down on as a distraction or an unreliable resource. She seemed to gain a lot from this class from the way it was set up to allow us to freely explore our thoughts on the texts through a variety of mediums. I also gained from this experience, but I feel like I gained more from the books themselves and the social, political and personal issues they brought up. My experience with this class focused more on how I think about things and figuring out what things I could benefit from thinking about more.
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