voices

Greetings, I'm Holly Grams, a student at Anoka Ramsey Community college, at the Cambridge Campus. As far as my interests, go, I won't bore you with them, because there are too many to list. As for other traits, well, you'll simply have to hear my words or meet me in person. Description nearly always falls short of the fact, especially when it's yourself you're attempting to describe yourself. But, let's move on. I have made my intro, so now I intend to dive into a more interesting subject. ( at least, it is for me. ) that subject would be voices. If you're wondering what I mean by that statement, that's natural. It's a statement designed to make you think, to make you curious, to open your mind to what I'm about to say. What I mean is that, out of all of the people talking, out of all of the voices speaking online, in the papers, on the television, and, frankly, everywhere, what separates the good from the bad? What makes a voice worth listening to? True, we all have our faults. We all have our assorted biases, our aims, our varying, often opposing worldviews and philosophies, not to mention our natural laziness when it comes to the subject of media. Even when we find something worth looking at, it's hard to take the time and effort to sit down and dig through the text. Of course, we need good writing and visuals to show that it's someone who cares enough to put work into whatever outlet they speak through. Whatever it may be, it's that something the eye and mind searches for to show that it's someone who knows their stuff, an expert, instead of some common college kid doing a school assignment, or a hoax. I'll give you an interesting example of that later, once I find the time. (and if, of course.) So, how we choose depends in part upon the quality of the presentation. True, we might miss some good stuff because of this, but we do this, mostly because we see what low-quality websites look like and don't want to waste our time on them. but what about the actual content? What causes a few voices to resonate more clearly than the multitude of speakers we passed over with a quick glance? And, if a voice does, indeed, merit attention, who's to say that that voice will ever be heard among the thousands of others who say the same things remixed that you hear everywhere? As for me, it's a question I've long pondered. And I'm not sure I have a solution. I would be lying if I did. But I would say that that is one of the dangers of our age and, indeed, of the Internet itself. So many people say so much all of the time, and most of it, from what I have seen, is simply redundant. If you go to 20 news pages, chances are you'll see the same stories on almost every page. They're all saying the same thing, just in different ways. What would happen to media if we didn't all grab for the same stories and issues that everyone else spoke on? What would happen if we posted a subject that there were no links on, that we had to do all of the research by hand, sifting through obscure documents and interviews ourselves, what if we did the work before we took our right to say our piece and spout an opinion, not gained by secondhand info, but by first hand experience, instead of reading a few good sites or books and repeating what you heard in your own words? I intend to be a separate voice, if possible. Someone who works to find something worth saying and tests the truth of her opinion before burdening others with it and expecting them to take my word on the matter, when it's not my word at all, but that of others, and even they pulled it from somewhere else. True enough, I don't expect to succeed. I know that there's no way to avoid it, and I welcome the opinions of others, they often catch what I would miss, but that, I think, will be my aim in this class: To speak separately. Now to live up to those words... that's my problem. Let's see if I can do it.