Goodbye Weekend :(

Can you imagine life without the internet? Having the internet as a resource has changed the way people of this world will function forever. We have become dependent on it in everyday activities and relied on it for school work and entertainment. I can remember back to the time we had dial up, where I would sit there for 10 minutes just waiting for one page to load. Now the internet is becoming more accessible and is growing to contain more and more information. Google is the most widely used way to access this seemingly infinite amount of information. At first seeing the title, Is Google Making Us Stupid I would have answered of course not. I mean how can having so much information at the tip of our fingertips make us stupid? I would think that it is only making our lives easier and actually improving the amount of knowledge we obtain cause we are constantly exposed.

Carr argues that the internet is shortening the attention span of users, “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.” I guess I can agree with this idea.. But what about other means of technology? Television, radio, just any electronic is constantly giving us stimulus. We are always busy with something and so when we sit down to read a book of course we are going to have a short attention span. Google is not the only thing shortening our attention span, but I do believe it is training us to discover information in a specific way. Carr hits on this saying, “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.” Although this maybe true, I don’t think I would want to go back to the days of researching through books in the library. Our world moves so fast pace that we need something like the internet that can search, analyze, and summarize information.

Done

Okay so I really don’t know which topic to write about so I might be a little unorganized. The video we watched on Friday was pretty crazy to think about. It listed a number of statistics, including one of my favorites, “by the year 2049 there will be a $1,000 computer that will exceed the knowledge of the whole entire human race”. So this brings up the questions, why do we need all this technology? What does it mean to our lives.. and the lives of future generations?
This can be explained by the idea that we have started a new era, an era of post-postmodernism. But does this mean were headed towards a world described in 1984 and Brave New World? I sure hope not. According to Dr. Alan Kirby this new era is called Pseudo-modernism. His article states that, “In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads”. The lifestyle of Americans has changed drastically. It has evolved into a technologically centered world, and now everyone is pretty much dependent on electronics. I mean I know for me I could survive without my computer, phone, and internet. But I definitely wouldn’t want to. The amount of information and stimulus we receive is almost overwhelming. Dr. Kirby talks about how this shift in our culture, “I believe there is more to this shift than a simple change in cultural fashion. The terms by which authority, knowledge, selfhood, reality and time are conceived have been altered, suddenly and forever”.
I’m not sure if this progression is good for society, especially if were going to end up in a Brave New World state. But overall I think the growth of technology is inevitable. No one is going to be able to stop the research and development of new things so we have to continue to adapt and change culture.

I always spell Cradle wrong

So far I think Cat’s Cradle seems to be a very interesting book, different from that of 1984 and Brave New World. Both of the other books we have read describe a futuristic society noticeably different from our world today. Cat’s Cradle however seems to be written closely after the atomic bombs being dropped, and has a viewpoint into the past.

Despite a different setting, Cat’s Cradle still exhibits many postmodernist themes and views. One thing that quickly caught my attention was the idea that people are arranged into different social groups, which in Cat’s Cradle is called a Karass. The author says, “We bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a Karass..." This goes along with the idea that we join a group or faction based on who we are most alike and feel comfortable with.

Also, the part I found most important, was Dr. Hoenikker's phrase towards the end of chapter six, which he follows his invention of the atomic bomb with "Science now knows sin," and then goes on to ask "what is sin?" Hoenikker seems to have no moral concerns, and shows a lack of interest in the reason for why he is doing it. They go onto explain that he was allowed to do pure research, “We’re on the few companies that actually hires men to do pure research.. men are paid to increase, to work toward no end but that.” This is a very postmodernist idea and goes along with the thought that science does not unravel a universal truth, but is just part of narratives. Overall, Cat’s Cradle shows a lot of postmodernist ideas and I am looking forward to reading more.