Its kind of like... writing a book about paper waste

Hey,

My 'Art of Persuasion' class sucks. We haven't learned a damned thing of practicality I think in the entirety of the course. Last week was spent analyzing the changes in Barbie commercials from 1959 to 2008. What a waste of time. Every class there are student presentations and they all pretty well suck, like the one today about Sting and the Police. Sting? Persuasion? Like, where's the connection? There isn't one and yet we sit through it and the professor thinks its all great. Every once in a while something surprising happens. Take George Orwell's "On Politics and the English Language" (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm) which he wrote in 1946. He's political, duh, he wrote 1984. But, the fascinating part of the article is the notion that language is like clay, you mold it to your purpose. I mean, this is what I get out of reading the article. First, what is the meaning? Convey that meaning through words. Don't find words to fit to a meaning. The power of the article is in its ability to change the preconceptions of the reader, thus making it very persuasive. There is substance in this class, after all.

The other interesting bit of knowledge comes from TED.com, a very, very cool website that does for formal education what Advil did for pain. The lecture is by a guy named Renny Gleeson, a kind of modern-marketing guru and his point is a very good one... social networking should make us more human, not less human. The amazing thing is that we even must consider this, and yet, I'm afraid of counting the hours I've spent in front of this laptop 'sharing' when real life is going on on the other side of the screen. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/renny_gleeson_on_antisocial_phone_tricks.html