Forwarding

Joseph Harris, in his book Rewriting, describes a term he calls “forwarding”. He describes this as the process in which new ideas are being added to a text. I don’t mean that the text continues to grow in length but that every time someone analyzes that text they will add their own ideas or if someone is discussing a book in a literature class they will talk about what it means to them and then put those ideas in a paper. By responding to the articles we have been reading for this class we are forwarding all of the author’s ideas. We are looking at a quote and producing our own ideas about the idea that the author has already written about. Harris describes forwarding in relation to academic writing by saying that “the goal of such writing is not to have the final word on a subject...but to push it forward, to say something new, something that seems to call for further talk and writing”(35-36).

When I first thought about a blog post or news article that is an example of forwarding I thought about social media in general. Through Facebook, Tumblr, or Twitter, people share personal experiences or the latest news story. What is lost in this process is perhaps the depth of the original story. We might read a status on Facebook about a shooting at a school and think that it is terrible but might not look it up and read an article about it. Social media sites shorten everything so with this kind of forwarding depth is lost.

Social media is not the best example of forwarding but is a very common version of it. I was looking through Andrew Sullivan’s blog The Dish and found a good example of forwarding. Sullivan is not bringing his own ideas into the argument but uses three different peoples ideas to get his own point across. Sullivan is using forwarding because he is adding to someone else’s idea. Here is the link to the blog post.