Twitter and time..

By checking all twitters ( including mine) I do believe we mainly run our lives on Teleological time. Most people start their days knowing how they will look like, for example, I know that every Tuesday I have to go to work, school and then go home, there are not surprises on this day unless something chaotic happens which can change half or my whole schedule. Personally, I think we all need some chaotic time in our lives in order to have a balance on it. Imaging living a perfect life where everything goes as planned and nothing disturbs our schedule? It will be so boring!! People would turn into robots doing the same thing over and over; people would not know how to confront problems and little troubles can turn into something big.

As for the Garden of Forking Paths Hypertext, it is trying to convey that there is not true beginning or end in a story and that life is a circle where one action leads to another one. I agree with this concept because most people are always looking to accomplish more and more in life, for example, having a better car, education or house. Therefore, what we may think would make us happy and settle down suddenly can become the beginning of a new story; like when people finish their college education (Bachelor Degree) most people are already thinking about going for a master or some especial degrees. This is how life is a circle where the finish of a chapter is the beginning of a new one. In addition, the word that caught my attention the most was "Future." This word makes me realize how our lives revolve around our future. How our future controls our present and how we forget about enjoying the present because we are always thinking about a better tomorrow.

Tweeter-- the adventure beings

Before signing up for tweeter I was in own world, not knowing there is so much I am missing out there. Tweeter, face book and the other forms of social networking sites, i never thought of them of as a means of communication. Now i am involve i see how much i can learn for other peoples life. Through tweeter you see how people spend there time, and see what is important to them for that day or overall. we all use our time similarly in one way or another. we live somewhat of on stellar time, which sometime lead into teleological time and hopefully we try to stay away from the chaotic time which most of the time we try avoid.

The decision we make in our live some, if not most of the time, dictate the time we fall into. Has Borges explained that when we make decisions it leads into more decision so we spend all our lives making decision, our live is like a maze, never ending. We get up in the morning, we make the decision to leave the house or stay in and from that point on we are making decisions until we are back home and in bed again. So even though we live our live in differ state of time we all decide that state of time until we are a thrown a curve ball and we welcome in chaos.

what we look at has normal for us may be chaos for someone else.

The Twitter Effect

Based on the posts I've made on twitter, I realize that I mainly run my life teleological and stellar time. 6 days of the week, I am either working or going to school or both. It's pretty simple. It actually made me realize that we all need a bit of all 3 types of time (in my opinion). Chaotic time are events that are described as random or not having meaning in life. I disagree with the partial definition of not having meaning in life. I get bored easily (too easily I think at times) and the random events always that happen in my life are usually the ones I often remember the most. Think about it for a second and compare "your" chaotic time and teleological time. Which do you often talk about to your friends, family, peers? I would say it would be more of the chaotic time. Take for example Alex's anecdote in the last class about how he ran into this guy that jumped into the train tracks for a dollar bill. Alex then proceed to tell how he threw a $5 bill into the tracks just to see if he would go into the tracks for a second time to retrieve the bill. I doubt he would choose to tell the class a story of a time on the subway where nothing interesting, a.k.a. when everything went as usual, as apposed to the story of the crazy delusional IDIOT that ran into the tracks for a fraction of what his life his worth in front of an oncoming train. Luckily for that guy, stellar time was on everyone's side that had wanted to go to where they wanted to arrive without any complications on the public transportation system. If it was not on their side, it would probably read something like "IDIOT GETS HIT BY TRAIN ON TRACKS AFTER JUMPING FOR $5 BILL; OWNER OF BILL, COLLEGE STUDENT BY THE NAME OF ALEX, TAKEN IN FOR QUESTIONING. CLAIMS BILL WAS SWEPT FROM HIS HAND BY THE ONCOMING WIND OF THE TRAIN.

Twitter's forking path to social networking!

We live in the decade where information is always at our fingertips. Including what, where, when and how every single person in our live is carrying out there day to day routine. Twitter, the streamline of babble and comments, is the newest trend of the always growing social networking community. I have become a late bloomer in this trend, but found it very fun to talk to millions as a calming way of letting people know my story. In reading everyone's post, I found that I could relate to a lot of the stories. We are all students and we all are dealing with the pressures of school, work and our own social lives outside of the box. I believe that with that said that I believe there are two timelines that could take place in tweeter. I did not find my timeline altered by anyone. So in my perspective, I would find myself going through a teleological timeline. Whereas, I could see the possibilities of stellar time could happen at anymoment. I believe just the littlest thing could change our life, by hearing something on twitter.
As for the Garden of Forking Paths Hypertext, I first didn't understand the context of the story. It seemed all over the place and there was not a basic context of a story. After playing with it for a while, it came more and more compelling on how visual words popped out for me and intrigued me to click and bring another story. This, in context, showed stellar time could be placed in a story with hypertext. It was the neatest thing I have read in a while. It showed how life is really intertwined together in the long end. It was a very powerful piece. I want to find a link to the background of the author.

1. Twitter, a place where people join in...this joining in implies community and interaction between members. What a disappointment, members join in being alone and broadcasting their thoughts and actions to an audience that may or may not be there. It is an application where all we care is "me, me, me and what I did and have to say" while claiming that we share with others but only complaining, rejoicing and expressing our indifference/opinion about things that affect us.

Entropic time affects all of us and reading the tweets, it seems that there is no connection between different posts (people). Let's take for example the latest post of our professor "drdanamilstein pardon my language, but fuck our health care system: http://bit.ly/a5GpL"; is this in any way leading to an effect on any of the readers or on her next decision regarding health care? No, because we are either too small for our voice to be heard or too busy with our own problems to do anything. The tweet is just an expression of frustration, a random event that will be forgotten if not already forgotten.

This is not to say that life is completely random, our acts influence other people but the acts themselves are random. Let's take an accident for example: we surely don't mean to crash into another car but it happens and the other driver and us are now connected and our acts influenced their life, made them late to work, damaged their car, etc. Did we know this morning when we left home that we'll be involved in a crash and affect someone's life? Is there such a thing as predetermination, was it written somewhere that we will stop at that traffic light and so be in the intersection two minutes later and hit the other car? Everything starts entropic and develops teleological or stelar.

2. The hypertext reading is trying to make the point that there is no true beginning and no end. It all revolves and we find ourselves at what we thought was the beginning, but that beginning may be the middle or the end if viewed from another perspective. Was Albert's murder the end or the beginning? To some it was the end (Dr. Yu Tsun), but to others it was the beginning of a military campaign which will cascade into another series of events. Time is a straight line from which different paths fork at every step. Dr. Yu could have informed his superiors about the location of the battery in many different ways but circumstances and choice made him do it by killing Albert and allowing Captain Richard Madden to capture him.

Based on those tweets, feeling kind of like peeping others through a window, it seems that our lives are mostly influenced by teleological time. Everybody seems busy with their work, study, family, and other colorful things which are expected from us to have particular satisfactions, usually for a better life in light of individual’s needs and wants. I do not think I have been affected by others’ tweets so far; maybe the time is not long enough, or I’m too stubborn:).

We do everything purposely, more or less, to get an anticipated result. However, if my understanding to the three types of time is correct, the influence of teleological time is often interrupted by the affect of the stellar time when something unexpected comes. Our lives usually takes other path, the forking path, like the scenarios in the movie named “Crash”. Just like in Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, the relationship among people sometimes are transforming as they enter to another path. According to Borges, “you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend”. Life is full of conflicts and temptations pushing us to change our paths as people are greedy and have endless desires. For my example, marrying my wife and moving to the United States are two significant path changes in my life.

Are we changing our life paths by random, are those paths already designed for us when we were born? Atheists and theists have opposite answers. If God is the creator of the earth and all creatures on it, then it is reasonable to believe that everything we do is under control. Educated by a communist government, I used to be an atheist. However, when I see the people in that society having less and less sense of guilt when doing something immoral, I think a theist society is better for human beings, though I’m still not convinced that God created everything. Now I think since law can’t stop all the immoral activities, believing in God, or gods, at least makes people hold something in awe. With this idea in mind, when our lives are facing a forking path, we can probably choose the way of not harming others or at least making the harm minimum if there is no better choice. However, on the other hand, the world is full of significant conflicts because of the various religions people believe in. It is a crucial problem if there are conflicts among Gods themselves. Whom indeed should we believe in?

Though I’m sure that I do not completely understand the underlying meaning of this story(the spy kills the researcher, dedicating himself in researching the spy's ancestor's noval and labyrinth for decades, for just informing Germany, called by himself as "a barbarous country which imposed upon me the abjection of being a spy", the city, which has the same name as the researcher, that German must attack, to just prove to the Chief that "a yellow man could save his armies"? Too crazy for me to understand), it makes me think of the meaning of life in a new way. Yes, I often find myself running in circles, though I cannot describe it clearly and theoretically, that feeling comes back to me again and again. The words which attract me to this story are just “forking path”. What path should we choose on earth?

Going round and round.

Twitter! What in the world is Twitter that what I asked myself when we was just told about the assignment and then I get home turn on ESPN which I do every night so I think its starting to show that I live my life in a teleological time. Sorry back to the story so I turn on ESPN and there it goes Charlie Villanueva of the Milwaukee Bucks is posting a twitt at half time at a game with the Boston Celtics (kind of remind you of stellar time). So this is where I start to get intrigued I rushed onto my computer and sign on to Twitter and add Charlie Villanueva (CV31 is his twitter name) as my first person to follow. For the next three days I followed my classmates and I learned that for most part at this time point in my life I am mostly living Teleological time I wake up in the morning I get dressed I go to work and college get home and start over the next morning. What I was surprised about is that most other people seemed to live out of the loop having events pop up from no where and enjoying there time having some structure to it but for most part. I really enjoyed seen that at some point I would be able to enjoy life the same way. But on day three I saw that time affects everyone differently and that all three different times influence your everyday life. As I signed onto facebook I had to status updates from two different friends a status update is pretty much the same thing as a twit and one said “ having the best day ever” and then I scrolled down a bit and the next one said” RIP we will miss you dearly” the second post was for a friend of mine that was taken away way to early from this world and that moment it showed me that one min you can been living a linear life and out of no where everything can become chaotic where one person can be enjoy the best day of there life and another morning the loss of a friend. At that point the whole assignment meant sense to me and became real and showed me to use my time in the best way possible.

 

The hypertext activity brought to real life what the text was trying to illustrate. A story with no beginning or end with no direct cause and effect where one part of the story effect any other part just as equally. The designer tried to teach us that that for every action there is a reaction and that there could be more then one path you can take which will lead you in one direction or sometime bring you to the same point to lead you in another direction. I found myself going thru the same paragraph over and over again at first I was frustrated by it I wanted to be able to explore other part of the story but then I found myself trying to figure out the pattern that led me to going in same circle. I think that this shows just as twitter showed that right now I end up doing things in a routine not going outside the boundaries of the norm.