Forwarding

Harris’s idea of forwarding is taking someone else’s work, and sort of adding to it; making it more of your own, but still giving the original writer their credit for it, and then letting it back out for the public to view. From what I understand after the reading, forwarding is when someone takes another person’s writing, comments upon it and shows more or less the positive parts of it, then that person puts the writing back out there for the public to do the same thing, and this process can be done over and over again. Harris says that he got the term forwarding from the language of email. In email there is the reply button and then there is the forward button. The reply means you comment directly back to the original writer. Forwarding means to take that writing and push it out further into the public. So he is taking the idea of forwarding emails and connecting it to writing.

One of the blogs I am following is a perfect example of that. The political/news blog that I am following basically takes stories that interest him, and he puts a link to it, then he usually puts a few comments that go along with it too. So what he is doing is taking work that may not get as much traffic or readers throughout the day; he then posts a link to that article or blog and adds a little of his own opinion. Then he “forwards” it so that all the people that normally view his blog can check it out. It can also be like a chain. Maybe there is another blog who gets a lot more hits than the one I am using; that blog can post a link to this blog, “forwarding” its information to more people than before. And this can go on until it reaches many of the highly viewed sites and a lot of the world can be exposed to it. When linking to the whole article, nothing really changes. The only thing that differs is that the author of the blog has added his input with the comments he puts on his own blog.