Edgeworkers

This is the story of my exploration of the Health Care Reform Bill and the discourse surrounding it, the eventual creation of the YouTube video I made to explain some of the key points of the bill, and my analysis of how through this journey I became a Hope-full edgeworker crafting a public, rhetorical space in which to talk about the Health Care Reform Bill and related issues.



I have been following the health care reform bill for months. I have been using google reader to share and read stories on it, usually from a very liberal (although I'm not sure what that word means anymore) perspective with my brother.

I also went on an internet search to find out what is in the bill straight from the source (but failed, not being able to read the bill's dense language, and ended up using summary documents provided by the government and the Congressional Budget Office online) which culminated in me creating a YouTube video that asserted provisions as stated by the government, financial results/consequences as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office, and also engaged a little with divergent opinions on interpreting certain aspects of the bill, once aligning myself with the Wall Street Journal's assesment of the impact the health care bill would have on large companies as being overstated, and once merely mentioning in passing that some politicians intend to challenge the constitutionality of the bill based on the 10th ammendment which asserts states rights.

I have used facebook's share feature twice: once to share an article, and once to share the YouTube video I made that was the culmination of months of following and many hours researching the topic. Interestingly, I have no way of knowing who is actually receiving my links, as with facebook, anyone who disagrees with me or dislikes all my sharing could have blocked me ages ago. I don't know who I'm reaching. Here are the links and a summary of the responses I received on facebook:

Literacy and Looting

Since the earthquake in Chile, the semantic argument about what to call "looting" has been revisited. Recently in Haiti the same problem arose, and both instances have brought hurricane Katrina back to American consciousness. This article addresses the question "should we call it looting," and this thread of comments from gawker shows a pretty good debate over the same thing between people completely unaffected by this disaster.

I tend to have a reaction to questions about what is literacy that is similar to how some people feel about calling it looting: as one commenter puts it, it's an empty semantics argument. I have struggled in my reader-response writing assignments for Peter Goggin's Theories of Literacy class. Some telling quotes coming from these assignments include "if we stopped calling it literacy and started calling it oxygen, there would still be people who don't have it, it would just sound weirder" and "the problem becomes the (possibly inescapable) one of simply living in a culture that is constantly divided between the haves and the have-nots," therefore the problem is with culture, not the definition. I had been assuming the term "literacy" was being used similarly to the way the word "tool" has been used: "my dictionary describes a tool as an implement used to carry out a specific function, which sounds physical and mechanical, but many people would say that meditation is a tool to help deal with stress or similar, using the understood function of a physical 'tool' to infer its properties to something more difficult to understand."