September 19, 2014 - 12:03
Last week for our Friday assignment, we both wrote papers regarding the psychological connection we believed is missing between people of different backgrounds. We felt that tracking our purchases as suggested in Taking Back the Economy wasn’t necessarily going to bridge the gap that we seemed to struggle with, because to us, it lacks a true connection. Although we interact with the same product as the producer in an act of consumerism, we interact with the product in a way so different that we’re not acting together or understanding the other party any better. We decided we wanted to get to the soul of people and considered how we best connect with people determining that more personal communication than our limited consumerism was required to better understand those across the globe from us.
We began to consider what else we consume. And being in an academic environment, we found that we are exposed to varied literary sources, and determined that, for us, this is a way of learning about different people and places. Despite it not being a two way connection, it still provides some soul of the writer and a perspective of someone outside our immediate social circles. By analyzing reading materials required for our classes we will try to understand how globally diverse people communicate their messages in an attempt to reach the reader.
Our purpose:
By identifying the places of the world whose viewpoints are presented to us, we can attempt to break social barriers between ourselves and people of different backgrounds than us. Likewise, by determining what is lacking in the variety of our classroom culture, we have the power to act to expand our global perspective.
Plan:We plan to make a chart categorizing each of the pieces we’ve read to easily access a simple profile of each piece. For Example:
The aspects of the chart can reveal proponents of the writer’s identity. By determining the story’s theme and intended audience, we are able to understand the writer’s purpose. These aspects help us understand how we the importance of interpreting the different texts.
We also plan on visually representing the global diversity (or lack there of) of these pieces by putting them on a map and drawing lines between our location (Bryn Mawr) and the locations of the authors. For fiction writing we plan on representing its place on the map with a circle, and non-fiction will be represented with a square. Different pieces we read will be represented in different colors to allow the viewer to more easily track the movement of ideas from one area to another. If the author of a piece writes of a place other than where they are, we plan on representing that through a dashed, rather than solid line. By placing most of the information on the chart instead of directly on the map, we hope to reduce clutter.
