Critical Summary 1- "The Flight from Conversation"
Flashpoint- “We are tempted to
think that our little ‘sips’ of online connection add up to a big gulp pf real
conversation. But they don’t. […] They do not substitute for real
conversation.”
In
her article, “The Flight from Conversation,” MIT professor Sherry Turkle breaks
down and analyzes our societal transition from face-to-face conversation as a
means of communication, to communication through snips of dialogue we
accumulate throughout the day through means such as email, text, and social
media. Throughout the early parts of the article, Turkle tends to stick to more
of an observatory approach; simply reporting on what she has seen in her
everyday life, and how the communication progression has looked through her
eyes. Later on in the article, however, Turkle changes her approach to actually
analyze this progression on what it says about society as a whole, and even
gives some advice on how we can overcome this social “issue.” To me, as seen in
my flashpoint quotation above, Turtle seem like she is trying to dive the point
home that, contrary to popular belief, the rise of abbreviated communication
methods such as email and social media is not increasing our interpersonal
connection, but actually driving us apart and leading us to become more
isolated from the people around us. As a MIT professor of the social studies of
science and technology, Turkle is more qualified than anyone to dig out the
underlying effects of our social evolution within the last few decades to one
that revolves around not the people around us, but the screen in front of us.
Over the years, our advancement to a technology-dependent society has been
obvious and unavoidable, but what hasn’t always been so obvious is what this
really means. For this reason, the value of this article, to me, comes not from
the societal observations it possesses, but the analysis it proposes. As
relatively innocent as social media and the like may seem, it is hard to ignore
the disastrous effects that show up during the last half of this article. There
is no stopping the ever increasing landslide of technology that lines store
shelves year after year, but buyer be weary, with every new version of IPhone
that comes out, our society will continue to progress down a path that cannot
be reversed.
Turkle, Sherry. "The Flight From
Conversation." The New York Times. The New York Times, 21 Apr.
2012. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.
Critical Summary 2: "As Technology Gets Better, Will Society Get Worse?"
Flashpoint- “Will technological
evolution take us in desirable directions, as we usually assume biological
evolution does?”
In
the article, “As Technology Gets Better, Will Society Get Worse?” Columbia Law
School professor Tim Wu writes of an all too likely scenario in which our
technological ambitions lead us into a life of complacency and ease which could
very well spell the end of human civilization. Within the article, Wu contrasts
greatly the difference between technological evolution, where we are propelled
forward based on what we want, and natural biological evolution in which
favorable genes evolved based on what we needed to survive. He says that while
biological evolution is still at work, and always will be, the technological
variety actually has a much larger impact on the future of the human race
because of the rapid pace at which it is evolving. For the sake of his
argument, Wu uses the example of the Oji-Cree people, an isolated Canadian
tribe that, until recently, still lived according to the ancient traditions of
their ancestors. Wu notes how over the past 70 years, a rapid increase in their
access to technology and other modern accommodations have transformed this
tribe from one of the most physically and mentally healthy cultures in the
world, to one of the least. Because of a rapid decrease in required exercise
and self-dependence, drug and alcohol addiction now runs rampant amongst these
people, and nearly half of the population now suffers from type one diabetes.
The
most important thing I took out of Wu’s article is that there are many very
well educated people who believe the current path of technological development
will not lead us to the future we imagine, but to “a future defined not by an
evolution toward superintelligence but by the absence of discomforts.” In a
market economy, the technological path of our society is defined by what we as
consumers are willing to buy, and as long as we continue to seek out technology
that is only designed to make our lives easier and more comfortable, we will continue
down the path to hopelessness.
Wu,
Tim. "As Technology Gets Better, Will Society Get Worse? - The New
Yorker." The New Yorker. N.p., 06
Feb. 2014. Web. 01 Feb. 2016.
Critical Summary 3- Clip from Wall-e
Flashpoint- Scene from 1:00-1:03; when
the fat man falls off of his chair and is helpless to do anything about it.
During
this snippet from the well-known film, Wall-e, we are exposed to future much
different than the one represented in films like Star Wars, but just as likely. Coupled with my second source, taken
from the New Yorker magazine, one can
see that if we continue down our current technological path, we could “approach
not a singularity but a sofalarity,” or a state lacking any discomforts; as opposed
to a state defined by its hyper-intelligence and unimaginable wealth of
knowledge. One may wonder what’s wrong with a future where any of our craziest
discomforts are magically taken care of, but does this movie clip look like a
future we should aspire to? As we continue to become more and more dependent on
the technology industry year after year, we are not only asking them to make
our lives easier, we are relying on them
to point the direction of our evolutionary progression. This clip from Wall-e
shows one possibility for the future of mankind, but is it really all that
different from how we already are? Over the past half century as technology has
become a larger and larger part of our everyday lives, the obesity rate here in
America, and around the world, has run rampant. Over this time period, the
number of daily steps taken by the average American has declined severely,
while daily calorie consumption has increased by as much as 20 percent over the
same time period, according to livestrong.com. One step into any large superstore
and the dystopian future we see in Wall-e doesn’t look quite so abstract after
all; the film characters are, after all, strikingly similar to the stereotype American
as seen by many foreigners: morbidly obese men and women riding around on motor
scooters drinking big gulps and eating mass produced junk food. Only time will
tell what the true technological future of mankind will look like, but if
humanity continues to progress down the same path it is currently traveling,
it’s hard to ignore this scene as a possible future scenario.
"Human Dystopia."
YouTube. YouTube, 30 Aug. 2011. Web. 04 Feb. 2016.
Critical Summary 4- "The Technological Singularity and Merging with Machines"
Joshuah Samuels,
ReplyDeleteI thought that your fourth critical summary was very unique and definitely much more origional that what I myself did. I liked all the sources that you chose and you summarized them well.