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Facebook responds to concerns about their new terms of service.

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Shockingly, I was actually able to use knowledge gained as part of my MS program while I was at work today. (To give you some context, I work as a codegeek sort of person for a telecommunications company and my MS program was for Rhetoric.) Some coworkers and I were looking at note-taking programs, Evernote in particular. One of my coworkers started to speculate that technologies such as Evernote were helping to make our memories even worse.

At that point, I had a complete flashback to Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Long, long ago, back at the advent of that radical technology, writing, the written word was seen as leading to the decline of the art of memory, which was very important in an oral culture. Plato spent some time in Phaedrus discussing the failings of writing: “Therefore every man of worth, when dealing with matters of worth, will be far from exposing them to ill feeling and misunderstanding among men by committing them to writing.” (Which actually sounds like a quote that we should all read before we send inflammatory emails or leave ranting comments on blogs!) Newsweek even had a short article (in 2005) comparing the clash of orality and literacy to the current clash between literacy and an increasingly visual culture.

Whew! Shall we celebrate visual culture and look at a picture of a cat now?

“I thought she’d never finish, so I hit the ‘nip to make it through all of that rhetoric babble stuff.” -Chaos

Frarochvia noticed an important detail in one of yesterday’s pictures – an ASL book. Last night I started taking ASL classes through Minneapolis Community Education.

“Hey, big kitty, what does this mean in Kitty Sign Language (KSL)?” -Mayhem

“It means you’re smooshing my ear and cruising for a bruising, May!” -Chaos

ASL is one of those unexpected side effects of blogging. (Not making the connection yet? Read on!) Like many of you, I’ve developed a number of friendships through blogging and have met bloggers from the Twin Cities, from across the US, and from overseas. Spoken English has been the common language; however, it isn’t the common language of some deaf bloggers I very much hope to meet and spend time with: my dear friend Fraro, local Limedragon, and Tiphanie. I don’t want our meetings to consist of us typing frantically and staring at our computer screens – we already have that down without leaving our own living rooms.

So I’ve been inspired to go forth and learn ASL. And I find myself thinking about blogging and the direct benefits (connection! community! friendship! laughter and tears!) and some indirect benefits, such as this ASL class. What have the expected and unexpected benefits of blogging been for you? The direct and indirect benefits? I’m curious. This seems a great topic for discussion.

Speaking of discussion, recently, Deb aka Chappysmom wrote about a post she’d read on getting more blog comments by replying to comments via comments instead of via email. She was curious what we thought about it; a very interesting discussion subsequently developed in her comments as the author of the aforementioned post and others participated.

Now, I personally really like replying to comments via email because some great conversations and friendships get started that way. You know who you are! But since I’m curious to see what sort of discussion develops in the comments if I reply there and maybe some of you return a time or two to contribute additional thoughts to the discussion, I’m not going to reply to the emailed comments for this post. Nor am I going to reply to every single comment with a comment of my own. I’m just going to participate in the discussion, and I hope you will, too!

“Gee, I guess he wasn’t kidding about that one… Hey, what do you think this is the sign for in KSL? Maybe ‘Help?!!’ Or ‘Unpaw me, you wretch?!!’” -Mayhem

(Nope, they aren’t dusty or dirty – they are simply covered in catnip…)