Technology Free For 24 Hours... Only not.

So, being tech-free for one whole day!! It actually wasn't as hard as I thought it would be :) I was with Grace all day, and we listened to recoords and went for a really long walk and saw horses and then sat on the swingset and then came in and drank hot chocolate and ate... And then we went to "Singin' In the Rain" at Pothole Pictures, which was legal because it was projected with on of those projectors from the thirties with the little flame inside... That was fun...

However, when we got home, we started playing with the remote control bumper cars my mom got for Christmas, and then after about 15 minutes we went... Waaaait a minute. They didn't have these in the fifties :( So we had to stop playing with them and go to sleep. Then, the next morning, we woke up around 9:30 and we only had to go until twelve, so we didn't do that much. But we messed up and used my graphing calculator for our chem homework, so we just drew and read and stuff until noon and then we rejoiced while drinking more hot chocolate and watching "The Phantom Of the Opera"...

So all in all, it was a pretty good time. We listened to the Beatles, and Blondie, and other stuff that I don't remember. And we talked so much more than we usually do, and we sent a lot of time outside and just telling funny stories and drawing and making kaleidacycles form the M.C. Escher book... I think it wasn't as much of a challenge as it could have been, if we had done just one level higher, it would have been much more... enlightening. I think the level we were at served only a vague purpose, and didn't actually make us appreciate our technology, or appreciate life without it.... which, generally, was the point of the exercise. :P

Response to Technopoly!

The Class: Response to Modernization. Or Lit 1, as it says on our schedule :)

The Purpose: To numb our brains with essays written by a scarily pessimistic and pretentious author who likes to torture his readers with extreme run-on sentences.

The Book: Technopoly, by Neil Postman, above said pessimistic pretentious man.

What I think: I think that Technopoly is a fine collection of essays, and if read in small doses, would be very enjoyable. However, being not having had that experience with it, I’d have to say that this has been one of the least enjoyable reading experiences of my school life... Long winded and self-important, this book is as dry as its cover makes it out to be. The few parts that I enjoyed were short, very far-between, and not highly important to his main ideas. I think my favorite part was the first two paragraphs of “The Great Symbol Drain”, in which he describes two advertisements, one real, one fictional, but frighteningly plausible. My least favorite part? The entire chapter (possibly chapters) that he devoted to bashing sociology, and social sciences, writing them off as useless. This seemed an uninformed and, honestly, stupid conclusion to draw. These things are anything but useless! They serve a surprisingly large portion of the population, and are only depended upon (he despises “dependency”, and often mistakes it with “addiction”) because they are so useful and in modern day life. However, although I mainly disagree with him, I think that his ideas have a lot of basis in reality! They aren't actually that ridiculous, but the way that he describes them, with such an extreme and unrealistic attitude, make me want to cry and tear the pages from their spine.