Twitter: Messages For Self

As a professed Facebooker, I never really 'got' Twitter. I mean, it was there, but then again it was not there. Before this class I had or should I say still have a twitter account which has seen less action than a Hugh Heffner sans Viagra. Updating one's status or tweeting on a continuous basis was tiring to me. However, the thrill arrived when checking my friends’ tweets. I am the ultimate fascinated observer --the ultimate.

There were many tweets about midterms, socializing (and lack of) as well as emotions. Stellar time was most evident throughout my Twitter experience in that there were so many similar scenarios especially with regard to school work and the emotion and action it evoked (mainly stress and procrastination).

I also noticed that there were a lot of abbreviations for certain words. The word ‘really’ translated to ‘rlly’ and of course LOL for laugh out loud. Use of ‘emotion’ symbols was also quite frequently eg. J,L and =(

Twitter and other social networking media can be used for networking and socializing, but it can also be used simply as a venting hub. I have been guilty of even creating my own little cryptic status updates on both Facebook and Twitter, with the aim simply venting ‘aloud’ without having anyone really ‘hear’ me. Trust me it works.

For example, LMFAO usually translates to Laughing My Fat Ass Off while I can create something like TJRFS meaning This Job Really F@&*in Sucks and no one will know what I mean unless I divulge. Or simply putting ‘________________’ meaning that I’m unsatisfied with something and the topic is dead to me -- thus the flat line. If asked and I don’t want to get into specifics, I can always change the meaning according to who is going to interpret it. I can cuss a Cat in a Hat if I wanted to and not feel ashamed because I know what I mean even if you don't.

Borges’ text illustrated the interpretation of messages when sent from one person to the next. Like life in today’s social networking frenzy, one may create a message geared towards a certain individual or group of individuals. The message intended for one may not mean the same to person that it’s not intended for. Interpretation by the reader (whether it be the intended person or not) may usually conjure different meanings unless universally understood symbols.

At the end of it all, Twitter for me was a hub for expressing oneself freely -- judgement included. It was and may continue to be Messages for the Interested by the Intrested (thus the title Messages For Self).

Is life a circle or one way street?

I don’t know the answer for this question. I always thought that lives are many concentric circles that one by one surrounding and sharing a same center. The center is the beginning of the life. The purpose of life is struggling to jump out from one cycle and realizing there is another one surrounding. Since in elementary school, I always thought that there is one day I would get out from here and go to high school. I would meet new friends and had new life. It was the same thing when was in high school. I was still thinking there will be one day that I will move to college. Even I always have a good expectation for new life, what is the meaning for life? Are these just different circles? Sometime, I feel that I am locking in a small tiny cell. I just wanna get out from it and go to see the world. But, isn’t the world just another bigger cell which lock me and whole human race? Maybe, you will say we can use space ship to get out from our earth. But, how can you be so sure that the space is not another cell which just bigger?
If life is the circle as I said before, then how came we can have so many different choices for ourselves? Every choice will bring consequent. It just likes Teleological Time which we can not go back. If we use the labyrinth as an example, it will be better. Life is like a labyrinth. We don’t know where we are. We don’t know which way should take. We don’t know the effect of taking one way instead of others. We don’t even know what will be the destination? For example, when students graduate from high school, some students go for work and some go for college. In college there are so many major specialization, we have so many options. After we graduate, do we know which kind of job we can get? Do we know what kind of life we will live?
What is the purpose of life? What are we fighting for?
We are fighting for ourselves. We are fighting for the destination which we think. We are fighting for the life that we hope. We are fighting to be the men we expected.

Obsessed by social networks in the digital world

Nowadays you can't even sneeze without somebody reporting on it and posting it on some sort

of media tool that is available for free and easy accessible for whoever is interested in the life of

others.

My big problem with these social networks, and in particularly with the "status line" on Facebook

or the Tweet is that in 99.9% of the cases I am not interested in what these people have to say.

To be very honest, I have more people on my Facebook account that are really my friends, and

for that reason I'm not following up after them regularly, the people/friends/family that I really care

about are most likely to get a call from me, a massage, or a personal email to catch up and see how

are they doing. I can't say it more boldly; tweets, status updates and random statements are not

my cup of tea. But I must admit that what does interest me is the social affect of these networks

and how do people react to these posts. I think that in the world of unrestricted twittering (referring to

the rules we were suppose to follow while submitting our posts), the tweets are all about the “stellar time”

meaning, the people who posts on themselves, the one who respond to these posts, or just read them,

are constantly influenced by them with a direct relationship. You post because you want to be heard,

because you wish to arise a topic that you believe it’s important enough for other people to know about.

This kind of thinking is the exact expression for modern technology communication, borders are down,

you are no longer swimming in your neighborhood pool, or if you’d like, the ocean became your pool if

you didn’t notice.

With my twitter experience, I did derive ideas out of other people posts, but the pattern of stellar time

is more blur and sometimes slide into the randomness of an entropic time. But only because of our

restrictions, who made the task of posting more challenging then the ordinary twitting process.

A positive thing I find in twittering is the notion you get about your life in comparison to others. You may

think that you have nothing in common with a class mate, but when posting your own thoughts or

happenings you discover that many of your interests or views are alike.

I do not think I’ll stick around twitter a lot, but I did learn something new and an interesting lesson.

Tweet, tweet, hurray.

Dror

The Twitter Times

Sometimes I thought to myself that I have no life. In fact, my life is almost the same everyday. I get so exhausted that I don't even go on the computer. I never liked using Twitter and I still don't. I am not against it, but for someone like me, Twitter doesn't affect my life much. From what I posted, I realized that everything I tweet about is about school and work. The interesting thing is I fall into the category of teleological, entropic, and stellar time.
From my posts, I tweeted "waiting for my class at 2:05... 3 and a half hour gap...". The next tweet is also about school which I tweeted "finally done with cost accounting. now its management". Again, I am following my routine where I have the three and a half hour gap and then class at 2:05. This reveals to me that my life is based on teleogical time. However, when I read Rachma's tweet, I got affected by her life. She tweeted "Had a bad feeling about the Math Exam..if only I can turn back time and do it over again... =(". Because of her tweet, I started tweeting about my exams too. I tweeted "got back my two exams. 90 for cost acc and 78 for history.wow. hope there is something I can do about the horrible grade." Perhaps this time, I am influenced by the stellar time. Although I didn't take a math exam, but Rachma made me think about my other exams and somehow I hope to turn back time to do it over again. It also made me very stressed about all the midterms that were going on.
Lastly, what all people's lives based on Twitter was the horrible stormy weekend we had. Almost everyone tweet about it and how everyone was existing in the entropic time. Rachma's mood was affected by the weather and tweeted "weihh hate the weather... why does it have to rain on the weekend.. and weekend is the only leisure time I have." William tweeted "Its also raining today. I hate rainy days. Now I can't search for the flying spaghetti monster." My life was also affected by the weather because I have to walk to the train station and work. However, the rain did not screw up my existence in the teleological time. I still went to work in the rain, but my mood was down.
In "The Garden of Forking Paths", I was very confused when the Chinese spy was jumping around in time. His experience reflected different times and thus it was hard for me to follow. The text made the readers think twice about what goes on in life. Life is a journey with neveernding decisions that could bring us to a lot of places but sometimes still come back to the same point maybe different despite the differences. I thought that the text makes a really good point that sometimes the time we live in might be the same but the things people go through is totally different.

Twitter and Differnt Types of Times

Twitter and different types of Times


Except facebook and myspace, twitter is another popular and fastest growing social networking that used by many people. However, twitter is not as well known as facebook or myspace, most people don’t hear about it before, including me. I’m new to twitter, before this I didn’t know what twitter is about. After signing up as a member, I find out it is another type of social networking service that enables people to post or read messages of each others. The messages which we post or read are called tweets. The maximum of a tweet is limited at 140 characters. Because of it’s simple and useful forms. Twitter has so many followers following it.


After a few days of using twitter to post and read others posts, I found out normally most of people are live in teleological time. In our life time, each of us has our own purpose and goal to achieve. So we all follow one kind of schedule which can leads us to make it become true. From the tweets that post by other classmates, most of them are about school and work, and assignment that need to be done. People also post special event that happen to them or to others. For instance, they tweet a lot about the horrible weather we have last week. Because of this many people’s normal life schedule has been affected. In this kind of situation, we can say we also live in stellar time. Chaotic time is not very often exists in our lives, for I didn’t see many posts fall in that categorist.


The hypertext of Borges’ the garden of forking paths is very difficult to understand. It talks about times in our lives. For me, it’s like there are many paths in our lives, each one looks the same to u; however, if you walked inside it, every one is different. We all don’t know which one is easier or better for us unless we choose one and walk to the end.

OPEN DOORS AND TWITTER

Just take a moment, and imaging yourself getting cook on a pressure cooker? Can you?
From my own way of thinking, I think the majority of 99% population are under pressure no matter what is there profession, culture, religions. Today's world time is a very big factor for everyone. For example, I am Married women also a mother. My life is very different then other 95% students in colleges. Then third is work. Need to work to survive. In addition, work for every day's expanse. Now i will move to twitter. Twitter! Yes Twitter the adventure web place. The first time i heard about twitter from our professor. I actually did not have any idea about twitter. The first time I heard about Twitter I thought it is like a messenger. But, it is not. Any way, our professor explains that what we can do on Twitter.

For couple of years i was detach from study and technologies. Now, I am back to study again. But, now I am trying to catch up with new technologies and a lot of new websites. Twitter is the most relaxing place for me. More likely, I can relive my pressure on Twitter. Now that i have Twitter account and i am trying to using it. I feel very comfortable. The interesting part is, I can also see other peoples are writing about their every days activities. Also, how horrible were the weather was. More important, there is no time limit. I can use it anytime is convenient for me. Finally, about "Forking paths Hypertext". I actually had to read it more then 3 times to understand this story. What i have understood is there are lot of doors are open but you need to choose the right door to exit. The reason, each door will take you different places. If you choose wrong door to walk out, you will be going back and forth. In addition, miss using your time. So, you need to choose the right path and make it matters.

Twitter syndrome

In these days, the twitter is one of most popular web entertainments and communication system. Through this media, people express how or what they feel and think at a specific moment. Especially, twitter is a one’s certain different area independently separated in time and dimension, so these distinctness enable people to be free in speaking their inside.
Also, twitter effects to people in terms of a stream of time. So to speak, a basic greeting or a certain description at the specific time is one of chronological time in twitter. In the morning some people talk about how they sleep at last night. For examples, Minaraakter said, “Time change didn't start too good for me. Slept late and half a day is gone and I have so much in my list to finish”, and Vincentvinh said, “wake up.......have spent long hours in bed...”,
Mina and Vincent posted this in the morning after wake up. A usual reply for this tweet is just similarly talking about sleep or today’s plans.
Other common factors of tweet are weather; it can be defined as entropy or chaotic time. During last two days, it winded and greatly. Some people mentioned about the weather a lot. For examples, Vincentcinh said posted that “it is not rain, it is hella storm in NYC, ruin my umbrella for nothing.” At this time, actually there was a lot of rain and gust of wind, so Vincent complained about the weather.
In the category of entropy or chaotic time, exams effected to people a lot, and it made pretty heavy burdens and concerns. Saloveu said that “same thing here, my equation is 2 midterm+2 papers=madness”, Ginnyjiang said, “Finally finish my Philosophy test! I can have a good sleep la!”, and Mina posted that “I have two midterm next week. I need to hit the highest grade, so expecting all of your wishes. May I?” Besides, during the exam period, some concerns of the exams were very common topic.
Stellar time is a one of factor when people see or experience something unusual or unexpected. Alisha’s tweet showed funny happening. She said, “LMFAO!! dis lady on the train is scratching da hell out of her va jay jay lmfao n then smells her hand ughh smh (crabs)”, it was really shocking, and she seemed to feel disgusting. Also, among my tweets, I said that I went to play tennis but, suddenly the racket club was black out. Both examples show the sudden events effect to people.
Entirely, the chaotic or entropy time was mostly affect to me because I was not on the twitter all the time, so I posted some specific events rather than just general chronological events. Most positive effect is that the twitter makes a connection between people to be intimate, so that is why people are very addicted a lot. But for smart phone users, some addiction can happen, for me (just normal phone user), it does not look so interesting.

After using twitter for a few days, I have to admit that I am getting the hang of it and…as much as this kills me to admit…enjoying it. I have always been the “anti-twitter” person among my group of friends. I believed that twitters were only necessary and interesting if you were a celebrity or a musician in which case other people actually cared where you were, what you were doing and with whom you were doing it with. Why would anyone care that I was in central park with my friend? Why would anyone care that I’m excited for spring break? Why would anyone care that I’m in class? (Not that I would be twittering in class…) However, I have found that I have used twitter more so as a creative outlet for myself rather than a 411-rundown of my life. When I’m up at 4 in the morning because I drank too many cups of coffee and there’s no one to talk to…I can update my twitter. When I’m dreading going to the gym and no one wants to hear me complain…I can update my twitter. Not that twitter will talk back to me or make me feel any better, but it does allow me to put my thoughts out into the universe when I want and how I want (as long as my thoughts don’t exceed 140 characters.)

The type of time that most influences my life based on twitter is definitely entropic or chaotic time. The time that I tweeted varied from day-to-day. The events that I tweeted about were completely random. However, the type of time that I saw most influenced others’ lives based on twitter was a mix between entropic or chaotic time and stellar time. Some people would tweet about they were feeling (stressed, excited, anxious, sad, ect.) and others (the majority, actually) tweeted about the weather.

Twitter for Time

I have had a twitter account for quite some time now. The only difference between then and now is that before I used to only use it to follow celebrities and to know what they are doing at this exact moment. I had always found this quite amusing and interesting. When this assignment came along I was finally forced to post my own statuses, gain followers of my own, and read other people’s statuses that may not be as extravagant as a celebrity’s would have been. This, I must say, has grown quite addicting and all I want now is to gain more followers and tweet to the world!

I really enjoyed reading the tweets of my fellow classmates. It had given me insight as to what their personalities were like, as well as their priorities and daily activities. I did observe that the types of time that affected these people were both teleological and stellar. It was teleological because of the many tweets about the weather and what people were doing as a result of it. For example it was raining so no one was doing a fun outdoor activity as opposed to it being 60 degree weather weekend which many people would like to go out and enjoy. The stellar time that I observed had to do with the weather also as well as it involving school work. It had seemed like the weather was affecting everyone’s activities and moods. For the most part everyone was upset about the weather. This was either because of cancelled plans, scenery in general, commute conditions or just not being able to make plans because of the rain and instead being stuck at home. I, unlike most of the classmates, actually liked that weather for the most part. It was soothing to hear the rain and see people scrambling around in the rain. Many of my fellow classmates also complained about school work. It either had to do with there being a lot of it or just not feeling up to doing it. In both cases I sympathized and agreed.

In the story “Path of the Forking Path”, I think that the author intended for us to realize that as time goes on in the world we can make anything happen. The world is not predetermined and there are countless outcomes that can occur based on our actions. I believe that this story is describing stellar time. The author did have me running to circles trying to understand what was going on. At the end the whole story comes together and you begin to understand what was going on the whole time. When it came to language I became drawn to military or warfare terms since I began seeing a common trend. There was a lot of words dealing with being in a war or fighting or in his case being a spy. What this says about me is that I like to look for common traits and behaviors to understand something. If it is done a lot, then chances are it’s important.

Time and Time Again

Time. We have heard, read, seen and experienced many types of time. Our three main types of time, are they independent of each other, or do they all in fact work dependently? Time, like anything based in science, is truly subjective. This poses a real challenge in trying to dissect our lives into these theories of time.

Most of us have somewhat predictable lives. We have our general schedule (especially considering that we are all students). In this instance, we generally all fall under teleological time. We go through our days, from one action or event to the next. This leads us to our degree, our promotion, our calling, etc.

As we saw last week, it does not come without disruptions. The weather disrupted our schedules and our routines, throwing a good portion of us into what some would consider chaos. But we have all heard of “weather patterns.” Arguably, one could argue that everything, no matter how “chaotic” it seems upon initial view, falls into a pattern. If this is true, then does entropic time truly exist on its own? Something can be said to the old verbiage, “Expect the unexpected.”

Somewhere in the middle lies stellar time. How many of us recognize the “random” situations in our daily lives, and the short to long term effects it has on them? But I wonder, is it random? Our mindset does in fact affect our interactions and their consequences. Does this once again fall into an intermediary of patterns and chaos that seem to somehow all work together?

I suppose I’ve raised more questions than answers. Time, to me, has no answer. It is mysterious and far beyond modern human conception. Physicists all over the world and over multiple centuries have tried to answer this. These three types of time to me are indicative of Western thought. No one’s life will ever fit mostly, or somewhat, into any of these three. For in reality, we are a constant cycle of all three.

The question remains - is time chaotic chronology, or a pattern of chaos? If there is one thing that The Garden of Forking Paths made me question, it is our one or the other mentality. We can, do, and continue to exist in many different ways. I believe, like the text, we exist in an all AND none environment, simultaneously.

Twitter Mania

Before using Twitter, I had the misconception that Twitter was for people who wanted to step out of their own lives, and just get a minor taste of someone else’s life. Are people just prying or is there really something about twitter that I’m not seeing. After using it for weeks, I have become immersed in the external world that I never knew about and while I use it more frequently, I start feel like I have super powers and I can be at multiple places at one time. At one moment I can get a mental picture of Jolanta walking to the subway in the rain and at the same time I can see Andrew sitting in a lecture hall taking a theatre final. This all seems like useless information that is just polluting our brains but really, this innovation is a powerful tool that affects the time of other individuals who hear your cyber voice. In the end, I realized that stellar time is the culprit for influencing other people’s lives and even my own.

Stellar time is greatly responsible for influencing the lives of many including my own. Throughout my recent experiences, based on what people have posted on their twitter account, my daily plans have been altered. This past weekend the weather was the worst and it rained for 4 days straight. On top of the torrential downpour, people were posting messages about going to the gym, which inspired me to start getting into shape. I recently got a gym membership because of the post and in addition another person stated that they attended a party and there were a lot of girls. This made me believe that I should improve my image.

Stellar time changes life completely. Last week there was a serious accident on the number six train. I follow many people on twitter and I found out that a speeding train had killed a girl. The girl had dropped her bag in the tracks as the train was approaching and decided to jump into the tracks and retrieve the bag on her own. This obviously was a poor decision but in the end the downtown train that I needed to ride in order to get home was suspended for a while. This one incident had an affect on all the people at the next subway stations. Everyone’s lives were delayed because of this one incident, which is exactly how stellar time works. Instead of taking the six train, I was forced to take an alternate train.

The hypertext Forks Path was very interesting and time was twisted throughout the story. I believe that the designer of the story wanted to teach readers that time has a way of working itself out and I believe that the author wanted to show us that time is related to fate. I’m saying this because in the end of the story the main character, the spy, ended up completing his task and relaying the message he wanted to send to Germany without the any suspicion. He gave up his freedom but the main character no matter what obstacles were in his way, completed the task without even realizing it at the time. I didn’t find myself running in circles throughout the story and I believe the whole story was like a cat and mouse hunt. Out of all the words throughout the story, the word that was most appealing was the wordlessly. For some reason this word sounded strange but expressed so much at the same time. I wanted to start using this word but it seems like a tongue twister. I think that this word may mean that my personality isn’t as clean cut as I may portray it to be. A book shouldn’t be judged by its cover. This word seems like an easy word but its quite complex and difficult to say out loud.

Searching For the Right Time

A sad reality in today’s society is many people consider themselves too busy to engage in relationships outside of business, sex or marriage. This reality in my opinion is the reason why the creators of twitter and other social networks are geniuses. Twitter seems to the friend many people need or want. Twitter allows each member the time and opportunity to share with the world anything he or she thinks is relevant or irrelevant. Also twitter uses the word follower to convey to members there is someone who actually uses his or her time to read other people’s feelings or opinions. In addition twitter effectively influence time by controlling the amount of words used in one tweet which helps others to respond after a five second glance at postings or ignore those posts and move on to someone who appears more interesting.
However stellar time seems to have an obvious influence on my life which is concerning because it means that many of the events that takes place in my life is out of my control most of the time. For example Vikram Pandits suggestions and actions have the power to influence my time with Citibank negatively or positively which shows I do not have maximum control of my employment with the bank. Furthermore a classmate’s post seems to be affected by stellar time. He says, “Right be careful guys~ this gusting could blow you up~ in front of my house, a huge tree is totally crashed.” Though he is concern with the safety of others he does not have total control of his own safety because of the strong winds in his area. His experience shows every second of each day majority of our experiences are influence by a force or factor that affects our daily living and concerns.
The Garden of Forking Paths shows as human beings we spend our last minutes searching for an opportunity to define our existence or we conclude early in life that our calling must have a relevant impact on others. A style of time which is evident is teleological time which shows one character using his final minutes of freedom to find himself through his history but while he finds his self he accepts guidance and advice from others and shows his appreciation by giving his last nickel. Another factor of time that affects this text is stellar time. An example of this is Borges use of the term “Labyrinth” which explains the difficulty of discovering our desired paths and the factors that affects us while we are in desperate search. For example the president is determined to pass a health care bill that gives many people who live in America proper health care coverage. But the war in Afghanistan and Iraq will directly influence the success of the president’s vision because the same resources –money, medical equipment, transportation- the health care industry needs to stay afloat are a necessity for the success of finishing the war in these two countries. However “Labyrinth” also plays a frustrating role in my life which makes my decision making very critical to my success. I guess I must take a hint from Captain Richard Madden and dedicate my life to one goal. But dedicating myself to one goal means I am settling for one outcome so I guess I will be frustrated for the rest of my life because I refuse to set one goal.

Birds Can't Fly in the Rain

I never seem to understand why people are so interested in tweeting about their everyday activities. Now that I started to use it, I can see why. Twitter lets their users vent their frustration or share their happiness with the online community. But the same thing can be done with other social medias. Twitter is essentially the same as a blog. The difference is that Twitter only allows a maximum of 140 characters to write your thoughts and events. Generations today don’t want to read anything that contains a lot of words. They want information quick and it to be condensed. Twitter appeals to this generation because all tweets are limited to 140 characters. It’s short and straight to the point. They don't have to read six paragraphs just to see the author's viewpoint/thoughts.

As I was reading every tweet from the people that I follow, I noticed that their lives are examples of teleological time and stellar time. Everybody planned out their weekends. They knew what they were going to spend their time on. What they didn’t expect was the weather. The weather was the intermingling scenario that affected their normal daily activities. Some people had to cancel their plans and find something else to do. Others continued with their activities but the weather forced them to complete it differently than originally planned.

The only thing that disrupted my usual routine was the weather. It was raining the whole weekend. Because of this, there were fewer clients at Baruch Flushing Vita site which results in fewer points. I only got to service four clients netting me a total of five points for the day. Usually, during a sunny day I would get around 12 points. The weather also forced me to stay home most of the time because none of my friends wanted to go outside.

For the story “The Garden of Forking Paths”, it is trying to tell us that the choices we can make are endless. Life itself is an endless loop and the path that we chose to walk will be followed by another set of diverging paths that we have to choose. It is similar to the quote “There is no beginning. There is no end”. I agree with this notion because people are given a set of choices to choose from. The choices people have to face are infinite. For example, after graduating from high school, students are given the choice to either attend college, or find a job. If chose to attend college, then the students will have to choose which field of study they want to specialize. There is no end to the choices we have to make. Every path we take is a new beginning.

Sometimes I find myself running in circles repeating the same thing I did previously. Every week is a repeat of the previous week but with some minor differences. It’s the same routine but the weather, scenery, and the people I encounter are different. Work, classes, hangout, eat, sleep, and wake up. Even though it’s the same, every morning is a new story about my life and every night is the ending.

The Twitter Experiment

My professor assigned us to create a twitter account, in which we are expected to post statuses, read what others are saying, and following herself and other classmates. Although i had a twitter before this assignment was given, i barely used it. I feel as though social networking is kind of overrated, me having a facebook, myspace, aim, and bbm can say that.I felt like twitter is just a waste of time and the only reason i have it is because my friends are constantly sending me outrageous party pictures that involves me being a member to see them. If it wasnt for this assignment I probably wouldn't have posted anything. During the twitter project I did realize something very common with alot of other social networks. These common things were people posting things that happen throughout their day and what they hope and want to happen. The assignment asks us to identify what time affects people the most from reading their statuses telelogical, chaotic, and stellar. From the statuses I've read, it seems that stellar time has the most affect on people.

Stellar time consists of intermingling scenarios that affect our daily lives. It’s also our past, present, and future being connected. The majority of tweets also had to do with major plans for spring break, summer, going away, and activities they wanted to do and something gets cancelled because something else came up or the weather, ETC. using myself as the first example I post things about things that happen on my way from and to school or work. Attending a party but can’t because the storm that occurred on Saturday. “It’s also raining today. I hate rainy days. Now I can't search for the flying spaghetti monster. 9:44 AM Mar 14th via web," although I am not sure what a spagheti monster is, it"s obvious that because of the rain he can't search it. Another example of chaotic time is " on spring break have nothing to do now cuz the stupid ass rain yo about 15 hours ago via web,” he’s on spring break and obviously had plans but got cancelled or on delayed because the weather we experienced over the weekend. “Think I'm gonna go hit up the gym.... Working out makes me feel better too bad Pilates class was cancelled 6:37 PM Mar 11th via mobile web,” she feels satisfaction from working out at the gym and planned to go that day but couldn’t because of a cancellation.

In conclusion from reading the hypertext reading of Borges text I was able to identify his concentration on time and its many approaches. Although I found it quite confusing it seems that the point he’s trying to convey is having control of the events in our life. He mentioned something’s that remind him of his childhood, things about ancestry, and events that were happening.

Twitter in My Life

“What is Twitter?” After Professor asked us to open a Twitter account, this question appeared in my mind immediately. Actually, I never use Twitter before. If I don’t take this class, I won’t have this chance to know about Twitter. During these days’ experiences about using Twitter, I realize that Twitter becomes a useful tool in people’s life and also affects life. People like posing their status through twitter, which means twitter is a good place for people to express emotions such as happy, sad, and exciting, depress and so on. Maybe some people think using twitter is a wasting of time, because there is no purpose or meaning to life. But I am really interested in it now, and even get used to it already. For example, when midterm is coming, I always feel stress and nervous. How can I release my emotional tension? I know there are various ways, like talking to friends, exercising and eating. After I tried many ways, I found that using twitter is the soonest way. I can express my emotion during any time. This is the way how twitter affects my life and also my status will affect others at the same time; on the contrary, others also affect me. It can be considered as stellar time, which I think is the type of time most influences people. For example, people complain a lot this weekend because of the bad weather; many classmates feel tired because of their homework and tweet at least twice a day because this is a requirement. The other two types--- teleological time and chaotic time are seldom appeared in Twitter. I don’t think people like posting their status in a liner time everyday or tweeting something without purpose.

I also observe that people like using cyber language rather than written language when they tweet. Some words are really popular such as LOL, FML, OMG and etc. Those words make our posts more funny and simple.

The Garden of Forking Paths reminds me to think of a religious word “samsara”, which means life is coming again and again. This is almost the same point of view in the hyper text which is time and events can be circular. Maybe also seems like the infinity numbers and infinity universe. The other thing which I am really interested in is life is choices. “When a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others”, I am strongly agree with the author said. In our daily life, we always have to make choices. Different choices make different results; even a choice can change a person’s life. As a normal human being, what can I do is thinking twice before I act and trying not to regret about the choice I made before. If you want to achieve your goals as soon as possible, remember don’t look back, just look forward!

Teleological time, stellar time and chaotic time aren’t separated

After I finished reading the Garden of Forking Paths Hypertext and have used twitter for a week, I found out teleological time, stellar time and chaotic time aren’t separated. We can consider time into three parts, but you couldn’t divide into three pieces alone. Why? Because these three parts are intervened with each other, you can’t break it like you couldn’t separate salt water only used your eyes.
Twitter is a really reflection about these three kinds of “time”. First, teleological time is the time we embody only for ourselves. For example, we will sleep in the night to have a rest but everyone maybe sleeping in different time. So we can define teleological time as effect, beginning leads to end, linear time that relates to a purpose life. Secondary, stellar time is considered as in which our life consists of intermingling scenarios that affect our daily lives. But you may ask how Twitter tell ask stellar time. These days’ raining also is a good instance for us to explain stellar time. Because we also talked about the heavy rain, moreover we stay the same time which the rain was falling down. It’s very clear that we are in different places but share the same rain. That means rain is stellar time we embody together. The last one is chaotic time. I think chaotic time is a special thing take place randomly. Because of chaotic time, we can’t separate three kinds of “time” alone. It means that we can sleep in a raining day, but there will be something happened to stop or enhance our sleeping. For instance, alarm’s ringing, relax music, or dreams. So chaotic time is something happened by accident. Nobody can forecast when entropic will happen.
“He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time一the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries一embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist.”—the sentences come from Garden of Forking Paths Hypertext. It’s a direction for us in order to understand why we couldn’t separate three kinds of “time’. We are all running in circles—every year, every month, every day, every hour, every minute, and every second.

Twitter and Hypertext

I've been using Twitter account since 2009, but I rarely use it because I always thought the purpose of the Twitter is only putting your status update and knowing the other people's status that we followed. The words that are used for Twitter itself are also limited, so we can't really say anything much unless it's within 140 letters per post. As time passed by, I really think that Twitter is a great social networking after all, because I've been addicted in using the Twitter account now.

I've bassically wrote everything that has been happening with my life recently and it is just a great way to pour all my feeling and emotions so that I don't have to feel the pressure anymore. Observing what I had post in my twitter and what my classmates had posted too on their twitter, makes me believe that almost all of us are influenced by the teleological and stellar time. Most of us put their status that are related to school and makes me believe that we all have one purpose which is to graduate from Baruch College with a good grade. I've been observing this, because I had posted a lot about what I want to achieve from school and the tough time that I had from the assignments that I am assigned to do in order to achieve my goal for the future. It seems everyone that I know experienced similar situation as me. This makes me realized that I'm not the only one that is struggling on my school activities. In addition, every tweets that my friends had put on their twitter affected me in different ways. For example the bad weather that we had a couple days ago. It was raining on the weekend, and it seems most of the people had their leisure time only on the weekends. Many of them were complaining about it, expressing their anger and obviously it makes me upset too, because I was hoping that it was going to be a beautiful sunny day since I had made plans with my friends to go out but then it turned out to be raining the whole day, which causes my planned being cancelled. There were also a situation, where one of my friend tweet about the foods that she ate in one of my favorite restaurant, she even posted a link so everyone could see the picture of it and seeing her tweet makes me crave for the foods, although I'm not that hungry but in the way that she mentioned about the food makes me really want to go to where she was.

The hypertext reading of Borges text is very difficult for me to understand, I have to read over and over again just to get what the author's trying to say to the reader. When I read this, I felt like I'm in the maze trying to figure out the way out from the maze, but then instead of finding the way out, I kept on running into the same way over and over again. I think what the author's trying to say about this reading is to make us realized that we have our own life and its up to us on how we make our life into the way that we wanted to be for the future. We also have to remember on how our sorrounding is like, its not easy to pursue the life that we wanted to achieve, there will always be barrier everywhere we go, but in order for us to get what we wants is to learn over and over again from the previous mistakes that we made. As an example, if we failed for one course, and the course is a requirement for taking other courses that are ralated to our major. We shouldn't give up and throw away our hope, as long as we have an oppurtunity to take the course over, we should do it by learning more and not making the same mistake that we'd made from the same course that we did before.

Twitter and Garden of Forking Paths

I never really understood the fascination with Twitter. I remember when it first started becoming poplar, I thought of it only as Facebook, just without the “face.” To me it was just status updates, which I am not very fond of. Ironically, as my New Year’s Resolution, I decided that I would make more status updates. So to my surprise when I found out that I would have to create and post updates to a Twitter account, I thought of it as a challenge. When I first created my account, I remember how against it I was. I procrastinated creating an account until the very last moment. My biggest obstacle was choosing what to post about. I am a very private person and do not like others, especially those that I do not know as well, knowing my business. It was mind-boggling to think that people would post every minute detail about their life. Although I never really got into the posting aspect on my side, I have become very interested in what others have to say. Even elusive celebrities are on twitter! Knowing what they have to say and realizing that they are real people was most intriguing.
Entropic time seemed to most influence my life based on my Twitter updates. My posts were about random events that happened to me that day. No one can really predict what is going to happen or even the outcome of a decision with 100% accuracy. I felt this was most evident when an unexpected event, as a death in my family, happened this past week. However such events as the horrible rain storm that has hit the city this past weekend, would suggest that our tweets follow stellar time, since a majority of the class tweeted about the weather.
The author, Jorge Luis Borges, has created a story that loops back on itself. It changes time and place and introduces characters that vanish and reappear (madden). The main character in beginning is later convicted of the crime in the end. He believes that we exist in a time that loops back and forth. It loops back into the garden of forking paths from his childhood later on in the story, that comes out of nowhere. The entire time, the main character is trying to escape from a terrible act that he does as a spy. No matter what he does, moving time and place, he still gets caught. The author is trying to make us question the fluidity of time. Is time fixed and set like a single place, or is time fluid like your memories of life (chaotic time)? I assumed that he was describing the memories of your mind are like a dream; you can float from one point to another, like the ebbs and flows of the ocean.

stellar time & Twitter

I never had a twitter account before, so when the professor told us we had to make one I was a little confuse I didn't understand what was the purpose behind it. I always though of twitter as a Facebook where you have a status and people comment on it. However, twitter is different I mean it serves the same purpose to inform other people about whats going on in your life at the moment but it has a twist to it. with facebook you can comment on peoples status and it would show up on your wall if those are your settings,there are tons of apps that I find somehow ridiculous. For example play tennis with so and so or put your top ten friends in order. really? and the stuff that you can write on your status can be as long as a book, well maybe I'm being over dramatic but seriously there are people out there that actually do that and I find that annoying. So I guess the thing that makes twitter unique and in a way so catchy is that you don't have the privilege of writing a book as your status. you only have 140 words max, therefore you only write your main points and what you want people to know. I still don't understand why people want to tell the world whats going on in their life. well I guess we as humans we want to express out what we feel without anyone telling us to shut up, and we want people to hear our problems without them ignoring us.in conclusion, I think that's the purpose of twitter to scream out loud our life so that everyone knows about it and so in a way we feel better. I mean it does feel better when we get things out of our chest=)

The time type that I saw the most on Twitter is the Stellar time. I found out that most of the people on twitter talk about how nice the weather was and how they couldn't wait for summer to come. also, they were making plans to go out or to do something special outside because the weather was going to allowed them to do it. as a result they were changing their plans to do something different. Also, most of the people talk about how horrible was the weekend because it rain, and their plans got unexpectedly change because of the cancellations, last minute. And then when this kind of stuff happens you can only think what would had happen if it didn't rain and our plans hadn't change? we are only left to wonder.....

Twitter and the Garden of Forking Paths

First time using Twitter, I was wondering why people could be so addicted to the status-update site such as this one, which limits your message to the world in 140 characters. Later I figured out it was the game nature of this website that makes it so special and addictive. You have to follow the rules: type whatever you want to say in less than 140 characters and that only, otherwise it won’t be posted. This rule brings in the most randomness, or a little sneak peek into people’s lives. Through my experience with Twitter, I can say that most people use the site as their emotion outlet, happy, sad or bored. These tweets, which can be categorized as chaotic time, reflect their emotions about the events that already happened, are happening and will happen. People get into an exciting situation, they tweet “Yay”, and horrible situation brings out “F****”. Those are the most two common words that I’ve seen on Twitter. Teleological time happens less often just because people find it boring just to post the regular events of their lives in order for others to see. I haven’t seen stellar time either, or it’s because to obtain a perception whether stellar time is happening, I would have to travel the road of tweets, pick up the seemingly irrelevant ones and connect the dots afterwards.

The Garden of Forking Paths gives me a nagging feeling. I imagine there are parallel universes in addition to the one that I’m in, with parallel selves of me living in it but walking different paths than mine. That thought is disturbing, in a way, if I ever find that I’m the enemy to my dearest friends in other universes. It’s like when I’m having a dream that I cannot control, no matter how much I want to. Thinking about different universes makes me feel like I’m waking up in great doubt about whatever decisions I have made in life. There are also events, in which I strongly believed in one way and after so many years accidentally there is a light shed upon the matter which shows me a whole different side of the story and tells me the path I took wasn’t what I thought it was.

However, I told myself that the path is what I have chosen, and there should be no regrets. The maze consists of many exits, and there’s no exit that I “must” reach. Whatever exit I reach, I will be glad that I have exited the maze that is my life, with grace.

To quote my favorite hip hop Korean band Epik High:

Three blind mice as we're lost in the maze route, lookin' for the easiest possible way out.
Day in and day out, you run into a closed road.
Turning into old folk, chasing after rose gold.
What they don't know is that it belongs to a fool.
Choosing wants over needs, singing songs of a mule.
Carrying their burdens when you barely know the person,
And that is the difference between a pharaoh and a servant.
…
Break down the walls of the maze and run through the finish line.

Life is like a maze, try to keep track of the days that take us from place to place.
Awaken and face-to-face.
Too many choices, possibilities, indecision is killing me.
And if you lend a helping hand, then I will follow willingly.

Life is like a maze... when I'm flippin' through the pages.