Cerulean Cordillera

Posts Tagged ‘Essay’

Originally posted on Thursday, November 27, 2008

Yay! Just finished my first University essay!

Looking back, I could have started the readings a bit earlier. I definitely underestimated them. They’re thin books, but the Castells book can be very difficult to understand at times. Speaking of which, it’s about a month overdue at the Library… I wonder how much I owe…

Even more did I underestimate the length. At first I thought: “2500 words? That’s nothing! I used to write emails longer than that!” Then I realized that it’s five times the length of any essay I’ve ever written before, meaning that I won’t sleep early tonight.

The thesis isn’t the best. In a nutshell, I said that Castells is more detailed and has better insight than Tim Berners-Lee’s book, and I attributed the cause to the fact that it was published a few years later and the Internet is a fast growing entity. Hopefully the TA buys this argument. Though, I doubt I would have came up with a better thesis even if I did read Castells more in-depth. Castells is an academic analysis on the Internet’s socioeconomic impacts, but Tim Berners-Lee’s book is totally different. It’s like… a third of it is an autobiography of his life, a third of it is a biography of the World Wide Web, and the last third were visionary statements, plans, and philosophy. It’s not exactly an academic book. The language is really toned down too, it’s more like a book for popular reading. I don’t think I would have drawn better parallels than I already have for this essay. Bad choices of books? Maybe, but how would I have known? Provided, of course, that I spend a reasonable amount of time on this, thus rendering reading through dozens of books first before choosing not an option.

I hate and love Castells at the same time. His writing style is so annoyingly verbose, and I dislike anyone who actually uses vis-a-vis in writing. But at the same time, I have to agree that some of his ideas are pretty amazing. The most impressive, though, is his seemingly endless amount of knowledge pertaining to the Internet, and to think that this book is supposed to be a watered-down version of a trilogy…

For the record, I finished at 5AM.