technopoly blog

While reading the chapter from Neil Postman's Technopoly it was explaining how technology is becoming a larger part into society as more and more technology comes into our lives.  It explained how technology is rapidly leaving things behind.  "Technocracy gave us the idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition."  It stated traditional things such as the wisdom of the elderly, believing and conforming to sin.  Simple things one may think as to be human.  Not only is technology taking its part in society, its doing so very fast, "Technocracy also speeded up the world.  We could get to places faster, do things faster, accomplish more in a shorter time.  Time, in fact became an adversary that technology could triumph.  And this meant that there was no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost."  This relates to "A Brave New World" in many ways.  For instance what people find weird in "A Brave New World" such as families and mothers.  Things we think of as normal and almost as a necessity, people see as a burden or unefficient.  Things such as families and religion are already lost in "A Brave New World".  "It does not make them illegal.  It does not make them immoral.  It does not even make them unpopular.  It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant."  In Huxely's world all things are irrelevant that are not permitted.  Families are unheard of and speaking of parents is something only used in scientific use.  Of course all this also relates to the idea of singularity and that technology and humanity will fuse together to form one.  But at what cost?  Is humanity willing to change our morals and lives in order for technology to continue? 

singulary theory

When I was reading the article on the idea of singularity, the whole time I felt as if I were reading something on a science fiction novel.  The idea that technology can eventually grow more advanced than us is frightening in some ways.  Especially with all these movies on apocolyptic futures where machines overpower mankind.  However it also provided not so scary ideas.  Such as just simply merging with technology instead of technology taking over the human race.  Solving many problems such as age and disease.  The one thing that continued to question in my mind was how it says "Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only."  Well, what do we really reserve for humans to do now?  For example music and autotune.  There's already the technology to allow it to make it seem like someone can sing, when they really can't.  What do humans do that we don't allow technology to do already?  It proposes the idea of what does it mean to be human? When I think of Bernard from "A Brave New World" and how he tries to look for more humane ways of life, he speaks of "being free" but does being free mean being technology free?  In the world of "A Brave New World" the humans are bred in factories through test tubes.  But does that make them less human? There's no technological advancements physically inside of them.  However the way they're raised up almost turns them into machines the way they think and act.  That had me thinking that technology wouldn't turn us into machines, we would do that ourselves.  Cause of course we have control over this whole situation of technology.  Someone has to turn on the computer, right?

the rest of my other blog...

i forgot to put this part in my blog

It speaks about technology taking over relegion, at first one might think thats insane.  They use time periods called "before ford" and "after ford" in a sense worshiping henry ford? Their god figures name is ford, or not exactly their god figure but their higher power.  One might say thats insane but we're the same way in our society now.  Religions all have names for their god's  or higher power figures.  Jehovah's witnesses call their god "Jehovah" , or the religion that worships "alah" or budhist.  If someone foreign or from another time would absolutely think we're insane to think our god's name is Jehovah.

rhetorical response blog

this is the essay on brave new world
While i was reading the essay i found it was very clear to what the writer wanted me to know.  It was almost obvious that the writer was talking about how technology affects the world we live in, also our aspiration for newer,better and nicer things.  It talked about things like technology taking over religion, and the aspiration for progress.  Which reminded me of all of our lovely class lectures about progress and striving for the perfect world.  The one term it uses is technopoly, meaning when technology is the main concern or the surrender of culture to technology.  This is a very popular idea that has been expressed through movies such as "terminator".  Which was the first thing that came to my mind when i heard the term.  Except that it is different, the machines aren't taking us over, their just our main concern, the machines and how they affect our economy.  It also said things about getting rid of repairing and only buying new things, striving for improvement or the old and irrelivant. Which reminds me of how i take fancy things i own. Example being when i brake my xbox or my ipod....i want a new one.  However other things i take on differently such as if i were to rip my shoes or something not technological id much rather try to fix it then get something new. This makes it seem the writer is writing to anyone who enjoys nice technology.  In that case, men. Another thing the essay speaks of is the way students are taught in school.  Being taught there is only one answer.  Another subject that has come up in our awesome class lectures.  Relating to when the writer speaks of the machines being single purpose machines to perform a single task each. The reoccuring idea is that we keep inventing things to improve our daily lives and our economy.