Countering? I thought it was qualifying.

The whole time that I read the article by Harris on what countering is, I had this little voice in the back of my head going "This sounds a lot like qualifying." I'm not going to lie but it really does seem like that. When you counter you don't argue against or for and opinion but yet you regain credibility for the opinion as you improve upon it or qualify with the opinion. Countering isn't necessarily arguing either nor is it total agreement. Qualifying and countering are the same thing and I'm used to calling it qualifying so I'm going to continue to. I'm not qualifying with Harris here though, I'm giving it a new name. As for the blogs that I read, I'm not so sure either of them really give examples of countering. Profootballtalk.com is really a blog that allows the collection of all information that is pertaining to the national football league. As for instapundit.com, the guy never has his own opinion to anything but as I discussed in the previous blog does more of a forwarding of ideas and opinions. He adds a couple of ideas to a piece that he puts on his blog via a hyperlink to the article. Now this is more the continuation of an Idea. He is not qualifying because he never agrees with an opinion or tries to match it but puts up his own idea of a subject. If he were to qualify with a piece at all he would have to take a position in relation to another opinion in an article rather than give his own opinion to a subject. The difference between the forwarding and countering is that the new opinion refers to the subject of a piece in one and to the opinion in the piece on the subject in the other.

Harris has his very lovely idea of forwarding of ideas. Many different people transfer an article or piece from person to person and forward not only the article but also their own opinions of the article itself. Forwarding in itself is a never ending conversation that spans from person to person in an endless chain of ideas and thoughts that continuously has links added to it as it goes from person to person. I have been following the blog instapundit. Now this blog is not really written by Glen Reynolds but rather is put together by him. The blog is a great example of Harris' idea of forwarding. The major thing he does it post links to multiple articles and pieces on his page and uses small paragraphs to add his ideas. I'm not sure if people can post comments on the blog or not but on many pieces that are posted by Reynolds there is an option to comment on the article. The forwarding idea can be good in the fact that is a conversation allowing people to communicate over the internet. However, most of the time when a person does post a comment that is where he/she enters the conversation yet ends their involvement in it. Ideas go on and on but the person and authors origination the ideas don't. This is one of the biggest problems with the forwarding concept. Instapundit is an example of this forwarding and here is one of the articles that he recently forwarded. Be careful of the website though. It's for guys.

blogs sphere

I don't know exactly what I'm going to say in this blog mainly cause I think I'm over complicating the topic here. How are the blogs and NY times articles I'm reading functioning as a press or news sphere? Truly I think the only reason that blogs are part of the press sphere is do to the fact that people go out and look for blogs that are going to bring them the latest and most interesting news. Not only that but the news and information they might fine is related to topics that they mostly want to hear about. I chose two blogs. One was Instapundit which is a strongly conservative blog and I chose it exactly for that reason because I rather here about topics that are more conservative than here about the ideas of liberals. I also chose Pro Football Talk do to the fact that I love football. I pay a lot of attention to the sport and know a lot about it. I'm no expert but in my never ending quest for knowledge I certainly love this blog because of the insight it provides into NFL teams and the league itself. Using blogs as part of your news sphere can be a problem though. Let me ask who the author is. The writer of the blogs could be some average Joe that doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. Knowing the credibility of the author will give credit to the blog and the writings.

News and blogs.

That was odd. This blog just posted randomly. I hate blogger. Well I hate blogging too. Blogging can cover the news but it is mainly the conversation of the author who wrote it. Blogging can cover any topic. Some bloggers write about what they had for dinner. In relation to them being a part of a news sphere, it is certainly possible. Blogs can be news coming from our peers. The only problem is the fact that most of the bloggers get their information from the press. These writers don't sent in the middle of congress and listen in on the meetings and report on it. They find articles on the web and watch the tube and find out information. If you read a blog for news you might as well and go talk to your grandmother who has just good enough vision and hearing to watch to TV and get the news from her dimensia stricken brain and get the news from her. It could be just as accurate. That's one thing that I didn't understand about Jarvis' article about the news sphere. Most of the time you still get your information from the media or news, it just comes second hand. Relating the news sphere to Sullivan's article on "Why [he] blogs" is just as simple as stating that blogging is a part of the news sphere. Sullivan writes blogs for the challenge of keeping up with the current news that he finds. We read the blogs and find out what he interpreted the media to be saying. Why Sullivan blogs is to keep up with the news.

Okay. Um well let's see. What the hell did that guy say about the sphere's and the news? I really have no idea. I got more information form his poorly drawn diagrams than his wording. I read the article multiple times and really didn't understand what he was talking about. I understood the fact that we no longer get all of our information from one source. We spread our sources all over the internet, different TV channels, and multiple magazines and newspapers. The press sphere incorporates the idea of us finding out multiple pieces of information from all over and around us. The news isn't just information either now, it is the communication of the world around us that is centered at the individual instead of the community. Let's face it too. The media no longer focuses on news and current events that may be the most important anymore either. They focus on the stories and topics that are going to get the individual to watch a particular channel or read a certain paper so that they have better ratings and/or a profit. I hate reading the news and seeing the news. The reason why is exactly what Jeff Jarvis tells us. He states that the news can create a news story and it generally does so. It's true too. The news is so bias that it cannot no longer be trusted and the news sphere that we participate allows us to decipher the information and lets us find our own truth in the overload of fact and fiction.

My experience reading.

I no read good and or write good either so i cant understand all this stuff. No that's not true I just hate a lot of it. Checking up on these post and the new york times all the time is starting to get onto my nerves. I didn't mind the blog post to much in the first half of the semester, but all of this reading and writing is really starting to give me a headache. I think I'm turning dyslexic too. Now what have I been reading about? So much that I don't really remember all of it to very much. I have read about priests who have kids and the church covering it up and the crack downs on marijuana in California. I read today about a family in good 'ol Britain who were being secretly followed by the police because they thought a mom forged her address to get her kids into a different school. First off, can't they just look up the address where she is living and see if it matches the paperwork or something like that? Second, do the police and investigative personnel in Britain really have nothing else to do? When I'm looking through the Times I'm looking for a lot of the controversial articles that relate to a lot of our everyday activities. I don't want to hear about a journalists escape from the Taliban cause it's not going to bother me. He should make a book out of it cause its a cool story but it's not news I'm looking for. I'd like to know what Obama plans on doing with the war in Iraq and stuff like that or how many were killed in Afghanistan. And I'd like to here the whole story. Not always how many marines were killed in a raid but also how many terrorists. I want the news to explore both sides and report the news and not be discriminate on what they show. With that being the case I only try to read what looks to meet those terms.

My blogs?

Was anyone else really busy yesterday? I was. I was catching up on multiple articles for this post. I was looking at my blogs and assessing them. I found out that one of the blogs that I follow really isn't a guys thoughts or even his own worlds. Instapundit.com is published by Glen Reynolds and is mainly a bunch of articles that he goes onto the web and finds that he thinks are interesting. His collection of articles particularly reflect a republican point of view, but they consist of editorials and other things. It is quite interesting some of the things that he does put on his blog. I was reading not to long ago about why some scientists believe that the baby boomer generation may experience higher cancer rates than other generations. It is because of a strontium isotope from nuclear explosions that the generation received while they were little. I find this pretty cool and what I like about it is, it isn't political. The other blog I've been following is Profootballtalk.com. It is published by Micheal David Smith and Josh Alpher. The posts of these two men briefly explain what is going on in the national football league. It covers everything from injury reports to upcoming games and who is trading who. It even covers a lot of the personal stuff going on with some players. It's not like a tabloid but it does talk about arrests and accusations against players or things like how family members who have family on different teams are going to support both teams. It's a neat website that lets you know what's going on in the league and contains a lot of facts and very little argumentation about whose team is better than the others. I would definitely suggest it to any other football fan.