(Pre.Script. I never explain to you what Value P is,
get curious and do some exploring once in awhile why don’t you)
Walker Percy’s short essay entitled ‘The Loss Of The Creature’ was a remarkable yet difficult text for me to get through. While I was enthralled by the points I was able to understand, I was at the same time baffled by things he talked about which didn’t register with me.
What was most intriguing to me was Percy’s notion of how a person’s individual perception about something buried or even lost due to the expectation and organization of preexisting methods of though. Percy talks about an individual viewing a place for the first time with fresh eyes and dubbing it to be beautiful. Perhaps the person then goes home and tells everyone how beautiful the place is, or takes photos of it to showcase it’s beauty. Soon, many people are traveling to this place to see for themselves how beautiful it is. Percey says that when people do this they are not seeing that place at all and the only way they can truly see it is to recover it. This concept reminds me of certain places along the interstate that are marked as “scenic views”. Naturally you will want to pull over because it MUST be a beautiful and scenic sight, especially if it is marked with a sign.
An example of this would be any of the infamous world wonders/sites/landmarks including (but not limited to): The Grand Canyon,
Niagara falls, the Egyptian pyramids, The Statue Of Liberty, The Eiffel Tower, The Golden Gate Bridge, Big Ben, you name it. Percy argues that tourists will travel to these sights with the intention of viewing it, but because they arrive at the place with a preconceived “approved circumstance” that the place is beautiful, then they are not really seeing it but rather measuring their satisfaction and perception by things like “Why it is every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!”.
Here is how I relate Percy’s ‘The Loss Of The Creature’ to what we have been learning about/exploring in this New Media Studies class. People need to change (or relearn) their perceptions of how they look at something. In our class’s case, people need to approach computers and education in a different and fresh matter of perspective/way of thinking. Perhaps if we go out of our way to approach a concept differently then we can discover something amazing and beneficial!
Ehmm, by the way I have a slight problem with something that Percy says. Percy claims that to photograph something is to not experience or confront it in a new way at all. I disagree (most probably because I am photography freak!). For me, photos give me a fresh way of bringing my own perspective to something I experience. I like to think that my photos are the way I am seeing something in a way that no one else has seen it before because it is through MY eyes and MY perspective. Perhaps this is self righteous statement, but it was not my intention for it to be PERCIEVED that way.
***Ok ok so I am breaking my own blog photo rules by once again posting a photo not taken from my cell phone camera and also posting a photo that was taken last summer and not recently. Anywayy, here is how I photographed the Washington Monument when I visited it last summer. Just looked straight up at it as a horizon into the forever.****
***Here are some photos that I DID take with my camera phone, from THIS summer. Here is a bulliten board at the University of Mary Washington that caught my eye***
***I come back a few days later and the same board now looks like this:****
