This document contains information about an English course at BIU including the course name, number, instructor contact information, and assignments. It includes sample essay prompts about social media and friendship and excerpts from related readings. The document provides context and material for students in the course, including upcoming assignments and due dates to read selections from James Joyce's Dubliners.

1. BIU English 106
Introduction to Literary Forms and
Critical Writing I
Dr. Daniel Feldman
danielb.feldman@gmail.com

2. Writing Blurbs 1
Recent research demonstrates how effectively and
efficiently writing can improve comprehension of content
in any discipline. Writing also enables students to
practice analysis, synthesis, and other skills that
constitute critical, creative, and even civic thinking. If
writing provides one of our best means to enhance
learning outcomes across the curriculum, then more
writing equals more learning. Why would we design
writing assignments with obstacles that discourage
students from learning? --Curt Schick

4. Before we begin…It’s not all bad!
Programming is a whole new kind of problem. Even if we
spend half our time looking at those busy screens, most of
us would be none the wiser. Watching The Social
Network, even though you know the filmmakers want your
disapproval, you can’t help feel a little swell of pride in this
2.0 generation. They’ve spent a decade being berated for
not making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music
or politics. Turns out the brightest 2.0 kids have been
doing something else extraordinary. They’ve been making
a world. --Zadie Smith, “Generation Why?”

5. The Facebook Phenomenon,
or Friendship in Crisis
1. Friendship all and nothing: friendship
characteristic relationship of our day.
2. Friendship means nothing in an age of
Facebook and hundreds of friends.
3. Fr-ship was once subversive and rare.
4. Friendship suppressed by Christianity
and Medievalism.
5. Friendship redux with classical revival.

6. The Facebook Phenomenon,
or Friendship in Crisis
6.
Friendship becomes quintessential modern
relationship, for good and ill.
7. And with it an enervation of friendship --no longer
about frank criticism, but shallow affirmation.
8. Aspect of modernity: circle of friends
9. But all false: Facebook friendships a mirage
10. Ubiquity of friendship hides a hunger for
relationship in an age of solitude.

7. The Facebook Phenomenon,
or Friendship in Crisis
11. In truth, crippling isolation prevails.
“The more people we know, the lonelier
we get.”
12. Exhibitionism: no privacy means no friends.
13. Shallowness: “People doing their best to
impersonate themselves.”
14. Other FB vices: warps memory and
cheapens identity by reducing it to tags and
posts.

8. The Facebook Phenomenon,
or Friendship in Crisis
Conclusion:
“Posting information is like pornography,
a slick, impersonal exhibition.
Exchanging stories is like making love:
probing, questing, questioning,
caressing. It is mutual. It is intimate. It
takes patience, devotion, sensitivity,
subtlety, skill—and it teaches them all,
too.”

9. Before we write…maybe all wrong!
World makers, social network makers, ask one
question first: How can I do it? Zuckerberg
solved that one in about three weeks. The
other question, the ethical question, he came
to later: Why? Why Facebook? Why this
format? Why do it like that? Why not do it
another way? The striking thing about the real
Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the
relative banality of his ideas concerning the
“Why” of Facebook.

10. Before we write…maybe all wrong!
He uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if
it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the
site helps everyone connect with people and share information
with the people they want to stay connected with….” Connection
is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the
information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship
that connection permits—none of this is important. That a lot of
social networking software explicitly encourages people to make
weak, superficial connections with each other (as Malcolm
Gladwell has recently argued), and that this might not be an
entirely positive thing, seem to never have occurred to him.

11. Doesn’t fiction say the same thing?

12. In-class sample essay assignment
Facebook and social networking media
are corrupting the institution and
experience of friendship.
• Do you agree or disagree? State and
support your opinion in a brief, wellreasoned essay.
• Use Deresiewicz’s essay or your own
knowledge to support your argument.

13. For Next Week 21.10 & 23.10
Monday: Sample essay and peer editing
• No writing assignment for this week!!!!
• In-class writing and revision drill Monday
Wednesday: Begin James Joyce’s Dubliners
• For next week: “An Encounter”
http://www.literaturecollection.com/a/james-joyce/