The Shame of College Sports

    The article discusses the payment of college athletes. Many corporations are offering money to athletes so they can profit from the winnings of the athlete and the team. Even with the country in a downward spiral towards debt, the colleges and the athletes were being paid millions of dollars to play a sport. Believe it or not, everyone supports this. People flock to big games and pay sometimes big money for these events, and  of course we all watch the games on television, sometimes not aware that we are feeding more money into the hands of the already rich colleges and the athletes.
    Many scandals have gone on throughout college sports. Many schools have been accused of dealing money under the table. Others have been accused of slavery because of the lack of payment to the athletes. Some scandals carried over to the NFL when Reggie Bush was accused of taking underhand payments; he was stripped of the Heisman trophy not too long after.
    Scholarships are also a big part of any student athletes career. Scholarships already pay for the athletes schooling and housing costs, however they still are getting paid from the profits of endorsers and ticket sales. Many people are horrified by the luxurious treatment of the players and the coaches saying that there needs to be an end in sight for paying student athletes millions of dollars.

Gaming and the World

    The world of gaming is becoming a little bit more serious. In the video, a game designer explained and used examples of how gaming can literally save the world. A lot of her examples were statistical. She explained that most of the time kids spend playing video games is equivalent to the hours they spend in school. She also throws in that the average amount of time spent on gaming is about 3 billion hours. Her point was if we can spend 3 billion hours playing games and saving fictional worlds, then why can't we spend the time saving our own. In the real world, many people become distressed and frustrated about making their own lives better, but the gaming world fills us with inspiration and gives us confidence. One of the main points I drew in my notes was the fact that optimism is closely related to gaming. If everyone had an optimistic view about saving the world, then eventually it would happen.
     Towards the end of the video, the designer showed examples of what kind of games need to be created  in order to achieve the feet of saving the world. The games were not very intriguing however if people began to play them more and more and made an effort, the games would help us through the process. Gaming has become one of the most popular things in the world. I think it is smart of the designers to come up with real world situations on saving our world. If everyone is optimistic and hopeful, then maybe one day we can save our world.

Chapter 1 Rhetorical Precis

In "Good Reasons" by Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer, the claim is that an argument can be used throughout literature. The authors use evidence of other writers using arguments in order to change the point of view and they explain why arguments are used throughout literature and why arguments are important. The authors's purpose for this chapter is to show the intended audience how arguments are used and what exactly they are in order to teach the audience about arguments. The intended audience is readers, writers, and students by the evidence used in the chapter and the tone of the chapter which is educational and persuasive.

Will the Tablet Kill the Novel?

"The electronic punditry, with their technological, elitist mindset, is now making noises that the single-use e-readers like Kindle, Nook and the SONY Reader are merely stopgap devices that will one day merge into the tablet, offering immersion reading, like the novel requires, as merely one of a million other ways to gain "information" and fill leisure time.

They argue that a single-use device is inherently obsolete in the face of the multitasking onslaught of the tablet, which packages in one carry-around-gadget everything one needs for the fulfillment of most communication activities from video to gaming to record keeping, scheduling, shopping and most other entertainment and information requirements.

Indeed, it is a powerful argument and is, from a business perspective, profoundly compelling. The convenience and choices the tablet technology offers have infinite possibilities.

Faced with such a smorgasbord of uses, what is to become of what I define as the serious novel? My concern is for the fate of the mainstream novels that offer stories of enduring interest, such as those created by Dickens, Trollope, Balzac, Tolstoy and, the more contemporary, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Roth, et al., to mention just a few of my favorites.

To engage with such novels requires time, effort, concentration, and an openness to reading these stories not only for pleasure but to enhance one's understanding of the human condition. It would be a pity if other distractions crowded out the pleasures of immersion literature, but the temptation to do so can be tantalizingly seductive, especially to young people who have not been grounded in the enhancements and benefits of reading great books.

Nevertheless, the technology addiction cannot be ignored as a competitor to reading. Indeed, some prognosticators may be right in citing the eventual rise of the tablet as a device of choice for everything under the techie sun, including reading. Perhaps I am being overly protective of the single-use reading device because of my career as an author and my lifetime love of the serious novel, but I cannot deny the threat to reading long-form stories that the tablet presents by its sheer multiplicity of competing distractions.

One may argue, as well, that the printed book, although in a steep decline, still dominates book sales. It could make a resurgence if the tablet begins to intrude on the exclusive e-reader market. I'm not sure that argument is winnable but who knows how the storefront book business might counteract its predicted demise?

There is another threat to the novel that could be even more destructive, and that is the devaluation of reading in general by technology addicts who believe sincerely in the primary importance of greater and greater reliance on electronic devices to navigate through life. I keep wondering how far up the technological benefit scale we can go before we hit a counterproductive wall.

This is in no way meant to denigrate those aspects of the electronic world that have acted as handmaidens to bettering the human condition, expanding our communication universe, organizing our time and finances, speeding up information exchanges, and widening our choice of movies.

Technological advances have enhanced our ability to create a moving record of our lives through video and still photography, helped us connect to people, locally, nationally and internationally, and have improved our research skills and medical diagnosis abilities. It has enhanced our ability to react to events, bring people swiftly together to enlist their cooperation in various causes, air our grievances, and accomplish a thousand other tasks that might have taken past generations days, weeks or months longer to realize.

Such alleged progress cannot be ignored, but neither can the concept of deep, personal reflection, thoughtful concentration, philosophical cogitation, creative imagination and aspects of insight that one can glean from literature which can only be conveyed through the privacy of immersion into a parallel world best dramatized in the imagination through storytelling.

It may seem odd that here I am questioning the survival of the novel in the face of a vast tsunami of novel writers who have taken advantage of technology to post their self-published works on the various online venues. There are millions of them out there pounding away on keyboards, creating their long-form stories, and hopefully making them available to potential readers through the welcoming ease of the Internet.

Whether or not this vast inventory of novels will enhance or multiply readership is an open question since it faces the same competition from the tablet.

Perhaps my speculations cite dangers that are not there. A part of me believes that the novel is an essential tool of human insight and knowledge and will never go away under any circumstances. But there is a part that worries that the relentless march of technology has a negative side that has not yet revealed its true destructive nature."