In y'day's NYTimes, Ethnic Differences Emerge in Plastic Surgery: "the city’s many immigrants to get tucks and tweaks that are carefully tailored to their cultural preferences and ideals of beauty....the results can seem less like science than like stereotyping....A century ago...the bulk of those operations were targeted at assimilation issues....Today...many immigrants reshape themselves to their home culture’s trends and tastes."

Noise vs. Information is an interesting idea, because it ties neatly into the label discussions we've been having; if you don't have a label for something, you don't have a translator for it.  Does that make it just noise?  If we achieve Haraway's utopia, murdering the Goddesses and championing the Cyborgs, will our own identities become so much static?  Haraway says she would rather be a cyborg than a Goddess, but I'd pick the opposite.  These women have exact labels, which is a sight more than the rest of the undecided world.

 I was very intrigued by our last discussion on the role of Critical Thinking, as provoked by Katherine Halyes' essay, "How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine."  Overall, I agree with Hayles; I do not think that close reading is necessarily the best way of reading.  (As a side note, I really wished she had further defined the term "close reading."  Is she equating "close reading" to critical thought?  Or is close reading simply what it sounds like: reading slowly and paying close attention to all of the words?) While I think that there is a difference in the way that we read digitally and the way that we read physically, I do not believe that digital reading is necessarily a bad thing.

Comic strips are short narrative drawings displayed in a sequence. Although they are usually intended for entertainment and quick comedic relief, they often portray important messages concerning issues related to employment, religion, politics, or everyday social problems.

 Generalized descriptions of reading styles are kind of difficult to grasp... Hyper reading might be different from ‘close reading’ but the definition of ‘close reading’ itself is shaky. If it means reading every word, can you both hyper read and close read a very short text? And can the outcome of ‘critical thinking’ then the same for both methods? Assuming critical thinking to be the formation of some kind of opinion of the text, another layer of variation is added due to the reader’s subjectivity.

 I found this week’s classes to be particularly interesting. After reading both Katherine Rowe and Paul Grobstein’s essays I’ve found the concept of information to be more complex and abstract than I had originally thought. I found the notion of information’s transactional quality to be the most intriguing aspect as it introduced the necessity of a decoder in the processing of information. The idea that information requires a decoder reinforces its transactional nature.

Our discussion of information and meaning related to what I have been discussing in my social theory class. We have been reading the work of the early 20th century social psychologist Hebert Mead who posits “meaning arises and lies within the field of the relation between the gesture of a given human organism and the subsequent behavior of this organism as indicated to another human organism by that gesture.”[1]For Mead a gesture, or to put it in terms of our class a certain code, only takes on meaning when the person to whom the gesture was directed responds in an anticipated manner.

From the conversation we've had in class, I think that we are primed to hyper read, we are always in search for a "sign" to lead us to the right direction. Therefore, when we use hyper reading, we are in constant search for a key word to help us get to the main point we're looking for. From my personal experience, hyper reading has turned to something I automatically behave like, when looking through notes i took for a class, I always wish there was a way to type i the key word i'm looking for to make it easier and faster to find the information desired. Hyper reading has some advantages, however, that it leads us to more information and leads  us to discover more areas to be explored, which adds to our knowledge.