Activity is starting to pick up here on the blog, and I'm glad to see a few of you moving into the Postman text. Here are some stats taken just past noon on July 14: 1787 page views; 28 published posts and 51 comments; 11 followers, 27 registered participants, and 18 open invitations.
I posted a video on the blog a few days ago, and yet only 11 people have viewed the video. No one has posted a comment. May I gently point out that I am your teacher, so when I post content on the blog, I do expect a response.
Also, many of you have been posing questions to your classmates like this, "I noticed that they [fill in the blank] in Brave New World. Do you think this is good or bad?"
The world rarely breaks into these simple good/bad, yes/no, black/white, left/right categories. "Good/bad," in particular, is a over-simplified value judgment that doesn't really matter in the context of our work here. I think we can all agree that the citizens of the brave new world have abdicated many of their personal liberties in exchange for comfort and entertainment. Sort of like Facebook, right? We sell our identities and our privacy so we can participate, socialize, play.
Rather than asking your classmates these super simple questions, "Do you think it's bad that children are trained to hate nature?," (I mean, really. Who would say this is a good thing? An advancement? An enlightened way to live?) -- instead, engage with the ideas behind it. What happens when you raise a generation completely disconnected from the natural world? What about all of our suburban and inner city kids who have never seen the stars splashed across the night sky, hanging low, millions right in your face? What about kids who have never noticed or watched something grow from a seed? Does nature even matter in our technological world?
Keep thinking, kids. Pull your nose out of BNW, and look out at own culture. Are we amused to death? What is our soma? In what ways do we undermine family?
Ms. Fletcher, I found that throughout the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman made several references to Brave New World and pointed out the truth behind Huxley's warning. He even took it upon himself to answer the question, "What is our soma?" in order to display the effects that television has on our society. Postman believes that television and technology are the drugs that change our modern society and enable us to amuse ourselves into oblivion as soma would, and I would have to agree with his argument. Whether we awknowledge it or not, our society is being transformed by a welcomed form of control that is not oppressive at all, entertainment.
ReplyDeleteTo address your questions about nature, I believe that nature is important to our world, even in this age of technology. Although, we can always look up pictures of the night sky, the Grand Canyon, or a green forest on the internet, it is not the same as seeing it in person. Nature has a calming effect on human beings, and that cannot be transmitted through a computer screen.
Although I didn't read the book Amusing Ourselves to Death yet. I would like to pose my opinion regarding the question "Does nature even matter in our technological world?". Yes nature does matter in our technological world but only to a certain extent. taking myself as an example, if I had a chance either to take a walk in the park or stay at home and play a video game, I would definitely choose to play a video game at home. Because for me video games seems a much more interesting task. That doesn't totally mean that nature doesn't matter to me, I mean every now and then I would go outside for a walk or even a little soccer game in the park. It is just the fact that in this technological world of ours, technological entertainment as in watching television or playing a video game tends more entertaining to do and therefore teenagers today usually set it as a priority over nature.
ReplyDeleteI think nature does matter in today's world, although not as much as it used to. Back when our grandparents were kids they definitely has more of an exposure to nature, but I think that if we could get the kids of today's world to put down their cell phones, to leave Facebook for a couple hours and have them go out and see the hills or the mountains it would definitely change their choices. In my family nature plays a big part as we take our dogs to the beach every other weekend, and go on hikes in Malibu every Sunday. We are always trying to see more, and do more things involving nature because its such a beautiful moment to stand around and find a place of land untouched by skyscrapers or pollution. I think that if we could get more people to see the beauty of nothing polluted, or restrained we might be able to save some of our land. It all depends on how exposed a certain person is to nature.
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