Category: Assignment #2

1. On a scale of 1-10, I’d give my ability to pay attention when doing homework a 6. I’m not really addicted to my phone. It’s just that I get up several times (at least when I’m at home), to give myself several breaks. I also do get a bit impatient when researching something or having to read something, so I may rush it because it would seem so difficult.
2. It took me roughly 40 minutes to get through, though I did speed up a little towards the end. I tallied 6 distractions. There were probably several more times when my mind was on something else other than the reading, but not all of them actually had me stop.
3. “The distracted student mind” and “In defense of distraction” sound for the most part confrontational, maybe even more so in the latter, because it’s about distraction in general, and not just school-related matters. Both, however, seem to just compile external information. However, in Sullivan’s essay, while there still are external sources cited, it’s mostly about personal experience, which makes it more human. Not only that, because of personal experience used, it sounds more understanding rather than confrontational. There is an attempt of that in “In defense of distraction”, but it’s not as strong.
4. Anderson’s main arguments are that this “distraction epidemic” can’t fully be resolved, because according to him, focus is a paradox which involves distraction. He does think, however, that it can be mitigated with exercises that can train one’s brain to focus, such as focusing on a dot on a paper for a certain amount of time. I, for the most part, agree with these arguments, because we are all forced into stress, with very many responsibilities to take care of. But, I don’t think I agree that focus is a paradox, because it doesn’t make sense and Anderson doesn’t go into that point too much for me to make sense of it.
5. After reading the articles, this “epidemic of distraction” sure is real. I had a hard time paying attention and found myself having to skim through parts of them. That certainly supports the arguments made in “The distracted student mind”, which in part is about students losing sleep to usage of tech. I find myself going to sleep at unreasonable times just because I want to watch YouTube videos and in compromising sleep, I am compromising attention.
6. Invention:

• Sullivan cites statistics such as YouTubers uploading 400 minutes of video each minute, and in each minute, there are over 1 Million swipes on Tinder. He also mentions that each day there are billions of likes on Facebook. This is all to show the extremes of engagement online.
• Sullivan states that in a survey (conducted the year before he wrote the article) that 46% of respondents say that they can’t live without a phone.
• Sullivan uses the thought of someone else to build off of, which would be someone by the name Karra talking about how her hometown of Portland, Maine is disconnected.

Style:

• Sullivan often switches to 2nd person or 1st person plural to try to relate with the audience and an example is “think of how rarely you now use the phone to speak to someone”, instead of saying something like “people don’t call others anymore”.
• Sullivan repeats the same idea in a few sentences in a different way in each sentence: “Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality.” This “missing out” progressively sounds worse with each sentence.
• Sullivan, before citing a statistic, asks a rhetorical question: “Am I exaggerating?”. This was added to make the statistics he cites scary, which becomes the tone around the paragraph that this is in and in the one before.

Memory:

• Sullivan talks about how silent it feels while meditating around others without being on his phone, which could be a callback to his reluctance of surrendering it in the beginning of the essay.
• Sullivan mentions Nicholas Carr’s critique of the GPS, which is that it has led to not seeing nor remembering the environment. This could be a callback to an instance that Sullivan mentions, which was of him taking a meditative walk in a forest without his phone and him finding his way back using his sense of direction.
• Sullivan makes the point that staying away from the web allows us to let out emotions. He uses an example of a person in a car pulling over and crying when a sad song on the radio comes on. Sullivan also makes it clear that he was planning to text his friends, but doesn’t. Similarly, Sullivan cites an experience where he is on a meditative walk in the forest alone, and cries recalling past trauma. He didn’t bring his phone with him.

Pathos:

• There could be an emotional impact when Sullivan talks about his decline of health and how a doctor asks: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”
• There could be emotional impact when Sullivan brings up the concept of being “alone together”, with a whole family on their phones at the dinner table as an example.
• The aforementioned rhetorical question “Am I exaggerating?” could be used to evoke fear from readers.

Ethos:

Any example of invention can classify as an instance of ethos as well as any personal story Sullivan mentions. Also, the aforementioned relating to the reader would be another example of this.

1. At the beginning, there is a big natural disaster attacking Rashomon, so we find the main characters– the commoner, the woodsman, and the priest– in a broken down building. The woodsman is hung up on the murder that he in part got to witness. It involved a man killing another with his wife around. Since he was a witness, he showed up to trial. The priest was also there around the time the murder took place. More importantly, however, the perpetrator Tajomaru, tells his side of the story. He sees who would eventually be his victim (Takehiro Kanzawa) with his wife Masako riding a horse. He couldn’t get his eyes off her and wanted her himself, so he devises a plan to get her. He approaches Takehiro and tells him about weapons he found somewhere. Takehiro is interested, so he follows him, but then Tajomaru tackles him and ties him to a tree. He tricked him. Tajomaru ends up killing Takehiro by stabbing him in the chest. He may have his own recollection of events that led to Takehiro’s death, but Masako is there to tell her side of the story, and so is Takehiro himself in the form of a medium. In court, however, the woodsman said that he only found the body. In reality, though, he did see it all, but said he didn’t because he didn’t want to get involved. Toward the end, he appears to be disgusted at how everyone lies, even though he did so himself.
2. I remember how in the 10th grade, I read a book called Lord Of The Flies which had 3 main characters, which were said to represent each part of consciousness. I’d like to say the same about the main characters in this movie. The commoner represents the id, an instigator trying to cause havoc. The woodsman is the ego, trying to reason with the commoner. The priest could be the superego, who in some instances, tries to mediate between the two.
3. The main ideas are focused on who to trust when reality can be so easily manipulated. This is relevant today because of how readily available information about current events are to everyone, but we don’t know how true they are at least when they are reported, because reporters are biased, and we may get more of what they think than of what happened.
4. The structure of the film is important to telling this story to really bring to light how difficult it is to get an unbiased point of view.
5. I found the woodman’s story most believable because there are noticeable flaws in everyone else’s story. For one, in Tajomaru’s story, Masako fell in love with him, but that’s not true in the other stories that the others had to tell. In Masako’s story, she says that she fainted and woke up to see her husband dead. However, in each of the other stories, she incited violence in some way, leading to her husband’s death. In the story of the medium speaking for Takehiro, Takehiro kills himself. However, that is not true in the other stories, and in the others, he actually fought Tajomaru. Tajomaru wants to erase responsibility by almost fully putting the blame on Masako, especially by saying he originally had no intention of killing Takehiro. Masako cries, denying her role in this, to get the judge to believe her, because of how she is a woman, it would be harder to believe that she was in the wrong. Takehiro’s medium says he kills himself, because he would be immoral for fighting Tajomaru, who he was trying to kill. So, everyone involved tried to cover themselves up, which is biased. However, the woodman wasn’t involved, so he would have nothing to lose by lying, so naturally, he would be unbiased. And so, it is, because there doesn’t appear to be anything true in his story specifically, that is false in each of the three other stories. So, I believe him.
6. This scene at the end was probably added to add on to the woodsman’s selflessness. He already appeared that way in the way he told the story, but it is enhanced by showing how he’d go out of his way to take care of someone when he doesn’t have to. It already appeared that the baby was with someone who could take care of him because he stopped crying the moment he was in the woodman’s arms.
7. The film enhances the original story by showing different perspectives, which wasn’t present in the original. Also, being able to see the story take place makes it easier to follow along, because one would try to visualize a written story anyway. I guess the movie, however, diminishes the terror of the natural disaster going on, because there is no storm in the setting of the main story, and it isn’t raining when everyone in court gives their testimonies either.

Baldwin’s first point is that Black people are attacked by a Western system of reality, which as he says, spells out to them that they are worthless human beings. He goes on to say that his people helped build the country by making railroads and picking cotton and that they get nothing in return. His next point is that the country was really slow in changing the system that negatively affects them. This is addressed when he implicitly mentions the terror of lynching when he says: “If it were white people being murdered, the Government would find some way of doing something about it”, implying that there’s no action against this terror. He even talks about the 15th amendment not being honored and how this struggle was going for 400 years. Lastly, he approaches the middle ground, by stating that Black people are human too and that we all need to realize that we need each other. Baldwin even says that White people come to the “heavenly” realization that they’re not Black, which in this, he may be saying, that it’s why he thinks Black people weren’t cared for. 

Baldwin uses ethos when saying that he has picked cotton and built railroads, getting nothing in return, as if to say that the American dream is at his expense. There is the use of pathos at one instance when he talks about the aforementioned realization for White people, which would make the crowd think that it is wrong while calling White people “poor” to say that they are victimized too. Lastly, he uses logos when he addresses the crowd, saying that everyone in the room is civilized to address his point on Black people being human too.

Buckley responds to a lot of what Baldwin said and the first point he made is that he is viewed as more than just a negro in the day of the debate, because the crowd was willing to listen to him. The next point he made is that changing the system is radical and he even compares it to burning the constitution or the bible. Lastly, he states that there are already opportunities for Black people in America, and says that Baldwin just needs to use them. He uses a statistic about the growth of doctors in an attempt to support it.

An aforementioned example of ethos is when Buckley cites that the number of Black doctors increased from 3,500 in 1900 to 3,900 in 1960 and even refers to the book he found this statistic from, so that the crowd knows that he isn’t making something up. The first point in itself is logos, which he uses to say that there has been advancement for the Negro and possibly even implies that Baldwin is unaware. Another example of the devices is when he brings up Catholic and Jewish suffrage in England, which were given without overthrowing the system, as if to say that there doesn’t need to be an overthrow of the system in the US.

“Rhetorical situations”:

• Losing a job due to a mandate
• Uncertainty of the future
• Power of parents; one having more power over the other in some way
• Parental consent or the lack thereof
• Legally being an adult

• Being a NEET (Not very present*)
• Insurance
• Road blocks
• Sugar-coating
• Speaking up/lashing out

Research questions:

1. To what extent is it ethical for parents to make decisions for their child, (can it deprive the right to life)?
2. When does hiding the truth do less harm than good?
3. Is talking back always disrespectful?