Forwarding

After reading the section "Forwarding" it was a pretty clear message of what Harris was trying to say, because he continues to use many metaphors to help get the reader involved and help them understand what he is trying to say. What I got from it is that it works how a lot messaging systems now a day work because you are forwarding someone else's work to other people, but adding your personal opinion and touch on the idea. Many things work like this now, like on forums, Facebook, E-mail, and other forms of communication because when someone posts something or send something to you, you can comment and add your own ideas to it. Harris explains this when he says “…you are less entering into conversation with him than with fellow readers of his work…You are recirculating his writing.” It is as if you are not thinking so much about what the writer has to say, but rather commenting on what others have to say about it and continuing the conversation from there. This stays with the original idea Harris talked about earlier in the book about writing being more of a conversation and rewriting others work.

This is a very common thing in blogs because they are taking ideas from the news and other places and putting their own spin and ideas in on the topic and posting it for others to read and comment back their ideas they have. Forwarding adds a huge amount to the possibilities about a subject, but does not seem to have a lot of room to expand to new different ideas, and instead just keeps you focused on one main topic. Forwarding also does a great job of spreading the ideas of others to large groups of people.