ATTN: Please Forward

Harris talks about forwarding as a way of “extending” the use of a text. When I first read this, what came to mind was emailing. When you forward an email, often times you keep the concept and everything it contains, but you add something to it, create a thread and a conversation before you send it. Not just using the concept, but actually connecting to it and making a conversation out of it. There are four ways that Harris tells us on how exactly we can extend the text; illustrating, authorizing, borrowing, and extending. I wasn’t really sure at first how on earth I was going to find an article that shows “forwarding”, but I managed in the NY Time to find an opinion article The Land of the Binge by Frank Bruni (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/bruni-the-land-of-the-binge.html?pagewanted=1&ref=opinion )

            In The Land of the Binge Bruni forwards the “message” of his friend who believes we have become a nation who is binging on anything from food to tv shows. The author manages to create a conversation from different sources that draw to his point and make a connection. The depth of the information is lost in his process of forwarding, and the reader isn’t able to fully see the meaning of the previous topic. What is gained is the perspective of the author, which like Harris says, is a form of extending the writing. What remains the same is the concept of the idea that we have become a nation who binges on things we find desirable. Bruni creates a dialogue as he connects “Netflix released an entire season of “House of Cards” at once, so that viewers could gorge on all 13 episodes”, and his friends crisis of how “foodie-favored restaurants give her no option other than gorging”.