Journal 8

The word collaboration can mean evoke different meanings from people, across genres, professions, and cultures. As the author mentions, some sects of Christianity are bothered, or even frightened, at the thought of a participatory aspect being brought into their religion. I believe that collaboration is essential to success in life, that every idea can be made better by introducing other individuals to the process. Note that this is different from the saying that extra people cannot detract from the essence of an idea, as they observably can. However, my position is that unless an idea has been added to by others, it has not achieved its full potential. A perfect way of reflecting this position, is connecting it to the realm of literature, especially everyday writing. Everyday writing is written with a local purpose and intent, and I would argue that the best way to prove the audience is local, is by including them in the process of creating the original text. We can achieve this through collaboration, or in other words, by letting the audience contribute ideas about the composition.

Now this view may seem impossible, a piece of everyday text would not be able to be collaborated on, it's too small in purpose to involve the use of others. I would counter this statement by saying the collaborations on an everyday text can be considered part of the everyday text itself. For example, I would argue that an email is a widely accepted example of a digital everyday text, however, what about the replies to the original email (assuming it is replied to)? I argue that these subsequent replies are adding to the original text of everyday writing. You may initially consider them to be separate works, but it is not far-fetched to include them together as one coherent piece, a collaboration. The concept of collaboration is, in my opinion, a much more wide-spread concept than we realize. It is after all, the nature of our schooling and work to include others in the process of learning and creating.