“With a culture formed about the idea of redemption by the sacrifice of a Crucified Christ, just what does happen in an era of post-Christian science, when the ways of socialization have been secularized? Does the need for the vicarage of this Sacrificial King merely dwindle away? Or must some other person or persons, individual or corporate, real or fictive, take over the redemptive role?”

This quote stuck out to me the most in my reading of Kenneth Burke’s LONG and somewhat confusing rant on rhetoric. I may be missing the main point of what I am supposed to say in this blog post, but I think what I have to say is worth it. This quote brings up many great questions, especially in the godless society we have turned out to be. Our country and the people in it have turned so far away from what we were founded on it’s baffling. Our culture was surrounded by the sacrifice of Christ, but in today’s world it is so easily forgotten and ignored. Some people act as if it never even happened or believe it did but just live with it in the back of their minds. Science has changed the ways of thinking of our society. It has opened up brand new ideas and beliefs, it has caused question in religion. I think Burke is asking all the right questions above because sometimes we need to ask these questions and remind ourselves what exactly we are moving to and away from. Rhetorically speaking, I think this quote appears to have all the Aristotelian modes of appeal. Logos, in the sense that Burke is breaking down the walls and actually trying to ask the logical questions. Pathos, because in these questions is a message, which we should be willing to interpret. Ethos, because the appeal to emotion is great in the sense that it pulls on the heart strings. Lastly, Kairos because at this moment in time in our society, it has never been a greater moment to ask these questions.

In one of our readings we were assigned the article by Leo Marx titled, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept”. Without even reading the article yet, the reader would automatically assume that Leo Marx is not a huge fan of technology and its advancement in society. Well to give a little background on Leo Marx, he is very knowledgable when it comes to technology and the science of it. Leo Marx’s work examines how technology has affected the world and its relationship with it mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth century America. In this particular essay, Marx focuses on the “history of the term technology and its meanings in contemporary culture and society”. One question asked before reading the article was, “have you ever thought technology was hazardous?” And my answer is yes, not until this year though. I never really cared about technology or knew anything about it until taking this class to be honest with you. After taking this class, I have realized that technology is meant for good, but can end up or sometimes already be extremely bad for society. Technology, whether we like it or not, is practically taking over our world. Someday, technology will be controlling it if we don’t take charge now. Marx focuses a lot on the fact that technology has been running our lives for some time now even when we didn’t realize it. Technology has always had a part in our history because at a certain point, it was beginning. Technology had to start somewhere, and when it did, it took the world by storm. Even today technology is shocking people more and more each day. It makes you wonder if there is ever going to be an end to technological advancement or if it will always get better and better. We wonder that now because what we have in front of us is good enough and we can’t imagine it getting any better, but it can and that is how it could possibly be hazardous to us. Marx continues to point out that we might not realize the impact technology contains or holds on humanity and this is how it can become so detrimental to our lively hood.

Is confronting climate change necessary? Francisco Seijo seems to think so. Francisco Seijo is a professor of political science and a well-known researcher when it comes to climate change and environmental politics. In his essay, “When Worlds Collide”, Seijo focuses on “the current status and potential impact of anthropogenic climate change” and considers the types of changes in “political, social, and technological and if it is “necessary to confront climate change”. To be completely honest, this was not one of my favorite readings so far. I just have no similar thoughts to Francisco Seijo and his views on climate change, and frankly I just do not care at all. Francisco Seijo goes on in his article to examine the “implications of the geologic events for the future of life on earth” because they are seemingly unclear. Many people think climate change or global warming actually have an effect on us, but in my personal opinion I think it is all completely false. I don’t believe in global warming or climate change effecting the way we live or our future. I think we will over populate before the climate kills us. Seijo is pretty much saying he believes that we need to start taking care of our world and what we put in it, or else there will be major consequences. Although I disagree with him on practically everything in this article, I do agree that we do need to start cleaning up our earth. This is our home, and our only home so far, so we need to take care of it and stop treating it like trash. We could actually help our environment and the things we put in the atmosphere like toxic gases, or fumes, but I don’t think it really holds a threat on our lives. Finally, Seijo points out ways people are coming up with ways to detect and help the issues in our environment. Good for them, but for now I am going to stick to believing there is not that much to fix.

I just recently wrote a research paper on a specific technological advancement making way into our lives. Everybody has a phone these days, so everyone has probably noticed the effect “Night Shift” on their phones. Well, it is an effect that takes the blue light out of the brightness on a phone, and transforms it into an amber color. Apparently, this amber color is WAY better for our eyes than the blue light. Studies have shown that the blue light is extraordinarily harsh to our eyes and can actually be very detrimental to our health in the long run. The blue light has the potential to give us different types of cancers, such as breast and prostate. This blue light also has the potential of depriving us of the sleep we so greatly need and making us more prone to depression. It can also make us stay up way later than we actually should and can really hurt our learning experiences the next day. This blue light tricks our bodies into thinking it is still day time, when in reality we are actually laying in our beds trying to fall asleep but can’t get off our phones. So, is it getting healthier for us to be addicted to our phones? That is what the new “Night Shift” effect is trying to tell us. There are many advantages to this new effect and only one disadvantage which is that it will only allow us to be on our phones more than we already are. Instead of being on our phones 24/7, we should at least step outside for SOME fresh air. I got my inspiration for this research paper from one of the readings we read in class by Neil Postman and his article “Five Things We Need To Know About Technological Change”. He expresses five ideas throughout the entirety of the article, but the first idea is the one that really grabbed my attention. In his article his writes, “for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost”. This quote goes along perfectly with my research topic on “Night Shift” because it offers so many benefits to our society, but everything always comes with some disadvantages whether we like it or not.

“It is time to stop taking sides with regard to the promise and perils of Internet technology and begin working together to imagine what the Internet could be and to work for those possible outcomes.”

Is it time to work for a better internet? Douglas Schuler thinks so. In Douglas Schuler’s article, “It’s Time to Work for a Better Internet”, he discusses the benefits of improving the Internet and how it is time to start changing it. He points out how this battle is pretty much a battle between pessimists and optimists. The pessimist naturally assumes for things to go badly, while the optimist expects everything to turn around. Regardless of the optimist or pessimist point of view of the situation, Schuler thinks the future holds so much for the improvement of the Internet. The Internet has a lot of potential to be greater than it already is, so who would be against improvements? In my opinion, Douglas Schuler is definitely an optimist because he sees what the future can hold and he has a word for it too, meliorism. Meliorism is “the belief that the world can beamed better by human effort”. I like this word a lot because I agree with it. If every human actually lived up to their potential, this world would be great. Schuler explains that if the Internet could be amazing and improved if only people actually work for those possible outcomes. “We have the imagination and the resources to build the Internet”, so why don’t we start? Someone needs to get the ball rolling and stop talking about it and actually make it happen!

“My worst fear as a parent was that my kids might lose an alternative frame of reference — that growing up as Digital Natives, they would swallow the pancake paradigm whole and forget there were more nourishing ways for friends and family to connect.”

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if your parents never let you be on social media or not have a phone??  Or, taken a break from all social media for a long period of time? At first it would be horrible, but in the end, so refreshing. Imagine all that time you would have! Susan Maushart, in her article “When My Kids Unplugged, did just this and unplugged her children from all social media for six months as a test, and came up with interesting results after the experiment. She begins to describe her children (like most children) “inhabit media” instead of use it. It’s a part of who they are and their way of living and without it there is no life to live. One of the reasons she took social media away from her children was because it ruins meaningful relationships. I completely agree with this argument because social media does take away from the relationships you have in REAL life, and gives you false lives through the internet. That is NOT how you learn to be sociable and build a relationship with someone. When you’re caught up in social media all the time you tend to “slack about getting together with friends the old-fashioned way, in a high resolution reality”. Being on social media all the time takes away from all the good times you could be having in the here and now. Technology and its advances are interesting and we want to be a part of it all, but we have to remember that there is a real world outside of it that we need to experience. I for one don’t want to look back on my life and regret not doing things I saw other people doing through social media. We see cool videos and read fascinating stories online, but when are we going to be the ones to experience them for ourselves? The answer is when we unplug from social media and step outside to live in actual reality instead of a virtual one.

Michio Kaku’s article “Physics of the Impossible” embodies exactly what you think…the impossible. He talks about his fascination with Science Fiction and how it relates to his career today as a scientist. He focuses a lot on the relationship that Science Fiction and science actually have. He begins his article with listing some impossibilities and what would happen if they were indeed possible! He was apparently so intrigued by the impossible ever since he was a little kid to his career as an adult. Kaku states that over the years he has learned that the word “impossible” is nothing but a relative term. People in the past never thought that certain things could eventually become POSSIBLE. But back then, there were not as many resources as there are today. Kaku states, “the serious study of the impossible has frequently opened up rich and entirely unexpected domains of science.” There is a constant search for improvement and inventions. He even points out that there are improvements in today’s society for the impossible becoming possible. I really enjoyed this article because I love knowing that there is room for new things that you never thought would become a reality. I feel like we are all dreamers and imagine these crazy inventions and see them in movies, but to actually know that some of them can possible be real…is next to impossible!

This week in my Advanced Writing class I am supposed to write a Critical Review over any movie or article of my choosing…so naturally I choose a movie. Not just ANY movie though, but the one and only movie Romeo + Juliet. This is one of my all time favorite movies that stars Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio. There have been many renditions of this story, but this is the only one that has ever caught my eye. I cannot wait to share in my Critical Review paper how much I enjoy this movie and why others should watch it. It is a modern take on Romeo and Juliet, but it uses the same lines from the play. I want to show readers the differences between all the other attempts of the play versus this movie, and why I think this is the best one yet. I could go on forever about how much I love it, but I should wait and just start my paper!

This week’s reading assignment revolved around Jon Turney’s ideas on Technology and the place it holds in Science Fiction in the essay “Imagining Technology”. A little background information about Jon Turney is he is a British science writer and editor who has several books. This short essay that I am going to talk about explores “imagining technologies and societies in which they are used makes innovation more or less likely” and the relationship between that and Science Fiction. I really enjoyed reading Turney’s perspective about the two and the relationship between them. He starts off with defining Science Fiction for the reader, but first lets them know that it is extremely impossible to define. He notes that there is only one definition that does the job well enough. “Science Fiction is a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.” He emphasizes to the reader that a simple version of Science Fiction is the depiction of “another world, a future world, or a different version of this world”. When watching a Science Fiction film or reading a book, you can obviously tell that there is a lot of technology being used. Without the technology, there would literally be no movie or no book, or a good one at that. But, Science Fiction is not only just spaceships and robots, it has more to it. I really liked how Turney put it when he said that Science Fiction is an “arena for imagining he effects of technologies, existing and yet to come”. It allows for our minds to wander and imagine what is coming in the future. Our minds consistently keep getting blown away with the technology portrayed to us through movies and books, so to think there is a whole arena where your imagination can continue to broaden is unbelievable! Our lives are run by technology, so when it continues to perfect and grow, it is hard to believe what is to come. At the end of the essay, Turney writes, “just as technologies have always come with stories, there have long been fictional stories about technology…[they] symbolize the perils and rewards of innovation”. Our world is evolving with new and improved technology, just as the stories presented to us evolve as well.

This week in class we were assigned readings from a textbook called, “Technology: A Reader for Writers”. In this textbook, it provides tips and facts about how to be the best writer you can be online. Within the textbook, there are different sections written by various people who cover topics that every online writer needs to be aware of, and helpful hints to make he or she’s blog the best. This textbook can come in handy for me since writing a blog is fairly new. One of the sections assigned for reading this week is one by Eric Schatzberg called “What is Technology?”. According to the textbook, Eric Schatzberg is a Professor of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies. So pretty much this guy knows what he’s talking about. He starts off the section by telling the reader that technology is a very broad term, and his goal is to discuss the “term itself rather than what the term refers to in the world”. Schatzberg begins to tell the reader that “technology has become as important as science”. Many people might disagree with that statement, but I fully agree and understand where he is coming from. Technology is used in our everyday lives whether we like it or not. We simply cannot run away from it, unless you live on a stranded island or something, but even then, it is still out there. In the end of his section, he expresses that technology can be a problem when we look at it and use it wrong. He asks, “is this a problem?” and he answers it by saying, “It is if we take technology seriously as a concept for understanding our modern world”.

Another section that was assigned for our readings this week was one by Evgeny Morozov called, “Machines of Laughter and Forgetting”. According to the textbook, Evgeny Morozov is a journalist who has been published because of her work in technology, democracy, and society. She apparently believes and considers that technology can change the way we think and behave. I can definitely agree with her on that because a person can watch something for hours on end and progressively turn into a character and take up some of their characteristics. In my opinion, technology definitely has an influence on your mind. Morozov’s main point throughout this section is that technology has an invisible impact on the user, but we know about it and let it happen. “Technology can save us a lot of cognitive effort, for “thinking” needs to happen only once, at the design stage.” Morozov is pointing out that people surround themselves with all this technology that does the thinking and work for them, rather than doing it ourselves. What I find extremely interesting is when Morozov keeps expressing to the reader how much technology has an effect on human society. An example is shown by saying if you were to take away a kitchen appliance, you would pretty much be lost without it and have to worry about cooking that particular food on your own, therefore putting thought and effort into it. Technology allows us to not worry about a particular thing, and go on thinking and working on something else. Last, but not least, Morozov states that technology will most likely continue to slow us down and not be able to think on our own, but we at least have time to “stop and catch a breath on our way to the abyss”.