Final Paper

The cyberpunk genre of literature raises important issues about genius and human advancement, and the lengths ordinary men and their governments will go to achieve it. Novels such as Camp Concentration, There are, however, issues raised within the novel that question the morality in not only modifying the human body to make it reach heights not intended for it, but in the testing of these modifications on people against their will in order to reap the benefits. It also questions the uniqueness of genius as being its novelty.

Aristotle. Leonardo Da Vinci. Albert Einstein. These are three of the smartest men who ever lived, and the impact they had on our world are immeasurable. These men, each unanimously considered geniuses in their own rights, stood far above the water mark of normality, and their intelligence made them soar to great heights. Not everyone can expect to be the next great thinker, but what if one day you were kidnapped and taken to an underground facility by the government, and forcibly tested on with drugs that would make you super smart? This may sound like not such a bad thing, but what if the side effect of this testing was death?

In the novel Camp Concentration, written by Thomas M Disch, the main character and narrator Louis Sacchetti is in prison for being a conscientious objector to the war his country is currently fighting. He is then kidnapped from that prison and taken against his will to Camp
Archimedes. He is then informed that Camp Archimedes is a secret government testing facility that has been created to monitor the effects of its prisoners who have been selected to be injected with a rare strain of syphilis. This strain of syphilis, it is revealed, causes the person infected to have an exponentially multiplied IQ. The government observes the prisoners and documents all of the thoughts of genius they think up. The only down side to the project is that once the syphilis reaches the end of its life cycle, it causes death to the person acting as its host. Sacchetti’s role in the novel is to document the sights and sounds of the project in his journal as an outside observer completely disconnected to the project. As the novel progresses though, Sacchetti is told that he was injected with the drug, called Palladine, shortly after his arrival at the facility. The novel takes a sharp contrast in style as he rambles about nonsensical things short after the drug begins to take effect. This is to represent the sudden change in intelligence and his mind’s attempt to come to terms with its new rapid thought patterns, that is, his mind is racing faster than it itself can make sense of it.

This sort of scenario seems like pure science fiction. Surely our government would never do anything as unethical as experiment on people who are unaware that as a result, they will die. Except sadly, that is exactly what happened in real life with the Tuskegee Experiment. For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the United States Public Health Service conducted a mass experiment on about 400 poor southern black sharecroppers who were infected with syphilis. The doctors never notified the men they were infected with the disease, nor did they treat the men for it. Instead, they only observed them as the disease wreaked havoc on their minds and bodies. The doctors then collected data from the autopsies of the men who eventually perished from the disease. One doctor was even quoted as saying the men are much more valuable to science dead than alive. The surgeon general even had the audacity to send certificates of appreciation the men who were lucky (or rather unlucky) enough to still be alive 25 years after the experiment had begun.

Unfortunately, the Tuskegee experiment was not the only one undertaken in the name of bad science. During the Jewish holocaust, Nazi doctors performed thousands of experiments on Jewish prisoners at concentration camps to gain medical knowledge. They did everything from expose unprotected bodies to acid, to chemical and physical castration, to removing internal organs without anesthesia to monitor how long the human body could survive without say, a liver or lung. The documented results of these tests were locked away when Germany was defeated in World War II. The debate over whether or not the information garnered by these tests should be used in modern medicine is not a new one. The data gained from the tests would be invaluable to today’s medical fields. The issue however is whether or not it would be ethical to use the data gained from such barbaric and horrible practices. Taking the results from those tests and applying them to today’s patience would almost be like condoning the acts themselves, with the end justifying the means.

This is the issue the author raises in Camp Concentration (which takes its title from the camps the Jews were interned at).  Is it ethical for the doctors and government in the book to administer these tests that they deem necessary for the progression of mankind, on unsuspecting human guinea pigs? If the experiment uses volunteers, paid or not, who sign liability forms and are informed beforehand of the previous side effects, then it is a moral undertaking. But if the experiments are undertaken with unsuspecting victims, regardless of the possible side effects, the results from that experiment are nothing more than blood money and should not be used.

Morality of testing on humans aside, the novel also raises the important issue of  genius. In the book, the prisoners given Palladine are ordinary people, often times from poorer backgrounds with little to no education. However, once exposed to the effects of the drug, they are able to reach intellectual heights that rival the great thinkers in history. One character, Sacchetti’s friend Mordecai is even able to learn the ancient science of alchemy, and get it to work effectively in trading bodies with one of the managers of the facility. Without exposure to the drug, there is little chance his character could have even comprehended basic chemistry, let alone be able to create a successful experiment. The introduction of Palladine to these types of hosts, and the subsequent effects calls into question the appreciation of true genius.

While uncommon, particular genius in a certain field is not seen as something out of the ordinary. Every so often a great thinker will come along and excel in the field of physics like Einstein, or chemistry like Marie Curie, or even as Hemingway had in literature. Usually when genius occurs, it is consolidated purely in one area of interest. The one exception to this phenomenon would have to be Leonardo Da Vinci. A renaissance man in every meaning of the word, he was an accomplished artist, author, scientist, and inventor. Someone of his caliber comes along only once in three or four lifetimes, that is what makes him so special. But what would happen if someone like him came along more often than that? What if, for example, there were two Da Vinci’s every lifetime? Would we hold the original in lower regard? Would the new Da Vinci’s be held as highly as the originals?

In Camp Concentration, the drug Palladine is a byproduct of a strain of syphilis, and because syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease, then it stands to reason that the side-effect of genius caused by Palladine in the novel is also sexually transmitted. In the book, Sacchetti’s friend Mordecai secretly has sex with a former female worker at the camp, Aimee Busk, infecting her through the intercourse with Palladine. Because this fact is unknown to the superiors of the camp, she asks for a reassignment and is allowed to leave the camp, a luxury that is not afforded to its prisoners. Sacchetti’s new found intelligence and keen eye for detail allows him to see certain patterns in behavior in the newspaper articles he clips out. These are mostly articles about human interest stories, odd little happenings that are included to take the reader’s mind off serious stories like the war and give them something interesting to read. Stories like people suddenly hitting it big in the stock market, or of casinos discontinuing games like blackjack and poker because of their patrons’ unexplainable runs of luck against the house. Sacchetti sees more to them than that however. He realizes that Dr. Busk, once leaving the camp, started sleeping around with free citizens on the outside to infect them with Palladine and undermine the efforts of the camp. The people she infects with the drug then go off and infect others, who infect others and so on and so on and so on until a great number of the population is a carrier of the syphilitic strain that causes genius.

This turn in the novel leads me to question the value of genius. Diamonds are perhaps one of the world’s most expensive items to own, though not for their beauty. Diamonds are as expensive as they are because of their rarity. It takes millions of years of extreme pressure beneath the earth to turn a chunk of coal into a diamond. If it were discovered that diamonds could be made more easily than we first thought, perhaps even farmed like pearls, the supply vs. demand ratio would tip and the price of diamonds would be reduced drastically. The same is so for genius. We admire men like Leonardo Da Vinci because he stands out from the crowd. He is a diamond in a sea of coal. If everyone on earth were as intelligent as he was, the novelty of genius would quickly wear off and become as commonplace as, say, being able to drive a car. The same argument could be made in a real world scenario for sports. Athletic phenoms like Michael Jordan, Roger Maris, and John Elway are few and very far between. The natural talent for their respective sports is something special which they were able to cultivate from a young age and parlay into extremely successful professional careers. In the past few years, the issue of steroid doping has been a hot topic in the sport of baseball and is sure to infiltrate the other sports as well. Athletes who are good enough to be professional, yet cannot hope to reach the caliber of the true legends, are more and more often turning to anabolic steroids to aid them in their quest for greatness.

While the use of steroids may benefit their own careers (provided they are not discovered and banned from the sport), it does a great disservice to not only the fan’s experience of the game, but to the game itself. No where is this fact more apparent than in Major League Baseball’s homerun race of 1998 between Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs and Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1961, New York Yankee Roger Maris set a seemingly impossible to reach homerun record of 61 in a single season. Roger Maris was a natural prodigy of the game, and this record stood as a testament to his greatness. Then Sosa and McGwire come along and simply shatter the record by almost ten. While this feat seemed great for baseball, attendance and ratings were up for the first time in almost a decade, it was soon sullied by whispers of doping aiding them in the reaching of the goal. McGwire then retired, and though widely believe to be guilty of taking steroids, has never admitted to it. Then three years later, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants comes along and breaks the record yet again by hitting 73 homeruns in a season. He too has been surrounded by accusations of using performance enhancing drugs. Now that the record has been set so improbably high, the original feat of 61 by Maris seems to pale in comparison, though he was able to do it the old fashioned way of practice, hard work, and even a little luck.

The issues raised in Camp Concentration about the morality of forced medical experimentation on human subjects are nothing new. The debate over it has raged for decades and it shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. The author, in showing it through his writing, has taken a stand against it. Testing on unwitting human subjects, especially when the unavoidable side effect is death, is completely unacceptable and undeniably wrong. The other issue brought to light in the book about the appreciation of genius is one I had not previously come across, let alone ever sat down and really pondered. There does seem to be such a thing as too much of a good thing. Humans are creatures of habit. They feel at home nestled in their comfort zones, taking for granted what they are used to. It is the out of the ordinary spikes of genius that we recognize as being inherently special and revere for it. Once that genius becomes commonplace, it loses its uniqueness and along with it its praise. Whether using human subjects as guinea pigs, or using drugs to push our bodies and minds to limits not intended for us to reach naturally, we are playing god by messing with nature. Things like these should simply be left alone. After all, billions of years of evolution can’t be wrong.

Final Paper

The cyberpunk genre of literature raises important issues about genius and human advancement, and the lengths ordinary men and their governments will go to achieve it. Novels such as Camp Concentration, There are, however, issues raised within the novel that question the morality in not only modifying the human body to make it reach heights not intended for it, but in the testing of these modifications on people against their will in order to reap the benefits. It also questions the uniqueness of genius as being its novelty.
Aristotle. Leonardo Da Vinci. Albert Einstein. These are three of the smartest men who ever lived, and the impact they had on our world are immeasurable. These men, each unanimously considered geniuses in their own rights, stood far above the water mark of normality, and their intelligence made them soar to great heights. Not everyone can expect to be the next great thinker, but what if one day you were kidnapped and taken to an underground facility by the government, and forcibly tested on with drugs that would make you super smart? This may sound like not such a bad thing, but what if the side effect of this testing was death?
In the novel Camp Concentration, written by Thomas M Disch, the main character and narrator Louis Sacchetti is in prison for being a conscientious objector to the war his country is currently fighting. He is then kidnapped from that prison and taken against his will to Camp Archimedes. He is then informed that Camp Archimedes is a secret government testing facility that has been created to monitor the effects of its prisoners who have been selected to be injected with a rare strain of syphilis. This strain of syphilis, it is revealed, causes the person infected to have an exponentially multiplied IQ. The government observes the prisoners and documents all of the thoughts of genius they think up. The only down side to the project is that once the syphilis reaches the end of its life cycle, it causes death to the person acting as its host. Sacchetti’s role in the novel is to document the sights and sounds of the project in his journal as an outside observer completely disconnected to the project. As the novel progresses though, Sacchetti is told that he was injected with the drug, called Palladine, shortly after his arrival at the facility. The novel takes a sharp contrast in style as he rambles about nonsensical things short after the drug begins to take effect. This is to represent the sudden change in intelligence and his mind’s attempt to come to terms with its new rapid thought patterns, that is, his mind is racing faster than it itself can make sense of it.
This sort of scenario seems like pure science fiction. Surely our government would never do anything as unethical as experiment on people who are unaware that as a result, they will die. Except sadly, that is exactly what happened in real life with the Tuskegee Experiment. For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the United States Public Health Service conducted a mass experiment on about 400 poor southern black sharecroppers who were infected with syphilis. The doctors never notified the men they were infected with the disease, nor did they treat the men for it. Instead, they only observed them as the disease wreaked havoc on their minds and bodies. The doctors then collected data from the autopsies of the men who eventually perished from the disease. One doctor was even quoted as saying the men are much more valuable to science dead than alive. The surgeon general even had the audacity to send certificates of appreciation the men who were lucky (or rather unlucky) enough to still be alive 25 years after the experiment had begun.
Unfortunately, the Tuskegee experiment was not the only one undertaken in the name of bad science. During the Jewish holocaust, Nazi doctors performed thousands of experiments on Jewish prisoners at concentration camps to gain medical knowledge. They did everything from expose unprotected bodies to acid, to chemical and physical castration, to removing internal organs without anesthesia to monitor how long the human body could survive without say, a liver or lung. The documented results of these tests were locked away when Germany was defeated in World War II. The debate over whether or not the information garnered by these tests should be used in modern medicine is not a new one. The data gained from the tests would be invaluable to today’s medical fields. The issue however is whether or not it would be ethical to use the data gained from such barbaric and horrible practices. Taking the results from those tests and applying them to today’s patience would almost be like condoning the acts themselves, with the end justifying the means.
This is the issue the author raises in Camp Concentration (which takes its title from the camps the Jews were interned at). Is it ethical for the doctors and government in the book to administer these tests that they deem necessary for the progression of mankind, on unsuspecting human guinea pigs? If the experiment uses volunteers, paid or not, who sign liability forms and are informed beforehand of the previous side effects, then it is a moral undertaking. But if the experiments are undertaken with unsuspecting victims, regardless of the possible side effects, the results from that experiment are nothing more than blood money and should not be used.
Morality of testing on humans aside, the novel also raises the important issue of genius. In the book, the prisoners given Palladine are ordinary people, often times from poorer backgrounds with little to no education. However, once exposed to the effects of the drug, they are able to reach intellectual heights that rival the great thinkers in history. One character, Sacchetti’s friend Mordecai is even able to learn the ancient science of alchemy, and get it to work effectively in trading bodies with one of the managers of the facility. Without exposure to the drug, there is little chance his character could have even comprehended basic chemistry, let alone be able to create a successful experiment. The introduction of Palladine to these types of hosts, and the subsequent effects calls into question the appreciation of true genius.
While uncommon, particular genius in a certain field is not seen as something out of the ordinary. Every so often a great thinker will come along and excel in the field of physics like Einstein, or chemistry like Marie Curie, or even as Hemingway had in literature. Usually when genius occurs, it is consolidated purely in one area of interest. The one exception to this phenomenon would have to be Leonardo Da Vinci. A renaissance man in every meaning of the word, he was an accomplished artist, author, scientist, and inventor. Someone of his caliber comes along only once in three or four lifetimes, that is what makes him so special. But what would happen if someone like him came along more often than that? What if, for example, there were two Da Vinci’s every lifetime? Would we hold the original in lower regard? Would the new Da Vinci’s be held as highly as the originals?
In Camp Concentration, the drug Palladine is a byproduct of a strain of syphilis, and because syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease, then it stands to reason that the side-effect of genius caused by Palladine in the novel is also sexually transmitted. In the book, Sacchetti’s friend Mordecai secretly has sex with a former female worker at the camp, Aimee Busk, infecting her through the intercourse with Palladine. Because this fact is unknown to the superiors of the camp, she asks for a reassignment and is allowed to leave the camp, a luxury that is not afforded to its prisoners. Sacchetti’s new found intelligence and keen eye for detail allows him to see certain patterns in behavior in the newspaper articles he clips out. These are mostly articles about human interest stories, odd little happenings that are included to take the reader’s mind off serious stories like the war and give them something interesting to read. Stories like people suddenly hitting it big in the stock market, or of casinos discontinuing games like blackjack and poker because of their patrons’ unexplainable runs of luck against the house. Sacchetti sees more to them than that however. He realizes that Dr. Busk, once leaving the camp, started sleeping around with free citizens on the outside to infect them with Palladine and undermine the efforts of the camp. The people she infects with the drug then go off and infect others, who infect others and so on and so on and so on until a great number of the population is a carrier of the syphilitic strain that causes genius.
This turn in the novel leads me to question the value of genius. Diamonds are perhaps one of the world’s most expensive items to own, though not for their beauty. Diamonds are as expensive as they are because of their rarity. It takes millions of years of extreme pressure beneath the earth to turn a chunk of coal into a diamond. If it were discovered that diamonds could be made more easily than we first thought, perhaps even farmed like pearls, the supply vs. demand ratio would tip and the price of diamonds would be reduced drastically. The same is so for genius. We admire men like Leonardo Da Vinci because he stands out from the crowd. He is a diamond in a sea of coal. If everyone on earth were as intelligent as he was, the novelty of genius would quickly wear off and become as commonplace as, say, being able to drive a car. The same argument could be made in a real world scenario for sports. Athletic phenoms like Michael Jordan, Roger Maris, and John Elway are few and very far between. The natural talent for their respective sports is something special which they were able to cultivate from a young age and parlay into extremely successful professional careers. In the past few years, the issue of steroid doping has been a hot topic in the sport of baseball and is sure to infiltrate the other sports as well. Athletes who are good enough to be professional, yet cannot hope to reach the caliber of the true legends, are more and more often turning to anabolic steroids to aid them in their quest for greatness.
While the use of steroids may benefit their own careers (provided they are not discovered and banned from the sport), it does a great disservice to not only the fan’s experience of the game, but to the game itself. No where is this fact more apparent than in Major League Baseball’s homerun race of 1998 between Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs and Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1961, New York Yankee Roger Maris set a seemingly impossible to reach homerun record of 61 in a single season. Roger Maris was a natural prodigy of the game, and this record stood as a testament to his greatness. Then Sosa and McGwire come along and simply shatter the record by almost ten. While this feat seemed great for baseball, attendance and ratings were up for the first time in almost a decade, it was soon sullied by whispers of doping aiding them in the reaching of the goal. McGwire then retired, and though widely believe to be guilty of taking steroids, has never admitted to it. Then three years later, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants comes along and breaks the record yet again by hitting 73 homeruns in a season. He too has been surrounded by accusations of using performance enhancing drugs. Now that the record has been set so improbably high, the original feat of 61 by Maris seems to pale in comparison, though he was able to do it the old fashioned way of practice, hard work, and even a little luck.
The issues raised in Camp Concentration about the morality of forced medical experimentation on human subjects are nothing new. The debate over it has raged for decades and it shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. The author, in showing it through his writing, has taken a stand against it. Testing on unwitting human subjects, especially when the unavoidable side effect is death, is completely unacceptable and undeniably wrong. The other issue brought to light in the book about the appreciation of genius is one I had not previously come across, let alone ever sat down and really pondered. There does seem to be such a thing as too much of a good thing. Humans are creatures of habit. They feel at home nestled in their comfort zones, taking for granted what they are used to. It is the out of the ordinary spikes of genius that we recognize as being inherently special and revere for it. Once that genius becomes commonplace, it loses its uniqueness and along with it its praise. Whether using human subjects as guinea pigs, or using drugs to push our bodies and minds to limits not intended for us to reach naturally, we are playing god by messing with nature. Things like these should simply be left alone. After all, billions of years of evolution can’t be wrong.

Technology Narrative. Word. (literally)

Technology has always been a big part of my life. My earliest memory with technology and writing was probably when I was about 10 years old. We had an old no-name computer in my house, and when I say old computer, I basically mean an ancient computer that was little more than a simple word processor. It ran off floppy disks and made the most obnoxious whirring sound for as long as the power was on. We had three games for it. One was Robocop for my dad, and the other two were Playskool Math and Reader Rabbit for me and my brother. The Reader Rabbit game is the first experience I had with technology and writing. It was all about teaching spelling and sentence structure, so I’ve been using computers to write for almost as long as they’ve been around, and certainly before they were commonplace in peoples’ homes.

The next computer we got was the Apple Macintosh, which had way more abilities and memory than our first computer. In my early teens I would spend hours writing extremely cliché angst poetry and bizarre short stories about former presidents getting in fistfights with other dead celebrities, and saved them to the hard drive, only to be found and deleted promptly by myself a year or two later when I realized how horrible they truly were.

Right after this time was when the internet boom began, and AOL lead the way with its technology that allowed people to email and instant message each other. It was such a novelty at the time, that after my friends and I had hung out all day and had to be inside for curfew, we’d spend ten minutes signing online through our 14k modems to sit in these new things called “chat rooms” and talk about the exact same stuff we had been discussing all day, only this time in a fascinating (and sometimes nauseating) array of fonts, colors, and sizes to emphasize our points in a way simply speaking never could. It was also about this time that internet lingo was invented. At first it was simple abbreviations to save time while chatting, as at the time we despised our keyboarding/typing classes and swore a solemn oath to ourselves that we would never stray from the two finger “hunt and peck” typing method. It started off slow, a simple “lol” to stand for “laugh out loud,” the self explanatory “f u,” or the most frequently used “pos” that alerted other cyber junkies that there was a “parent over shoulder” so don’t say anything inappropriate, and has evolved into it’s own dialect that only the 1337 (or elite “L e-e-t”) can decipher.

Instant messages and emails allowed anyone, anywhere to be able to communicate instantly with people from around the globe, turning our planet from an enormous sphere that used to take months to traverse, into something you could access in a matter of seconds. Talking to other people isn’t the only advance technology made in writing. About 7 years ago, internet blogs started to appear. Blogs are essentially online journals that people can post their innermost secrets in, or simply to broadcast their daily exploits to anyone in the world who is interested and has a few minutes of spare time. I have had a livejournal for almost eight years now, and at first I loved it. I was never able to keep a handwritten journal, and writing with a pen seemed to take too long for my hand to be able to keep up with the thoughts in my head and get everything down, not to mention the money spent on buying a journal, and the handcramps excessive writing would cause. Online blogs offered me the opportunity to type my thoughts as fast as I could think them in a secure space that couldn’t be found by a sibling rifling through my room, and I could even do it at the same time as I messaged my friends, so I didn’t have to designate a specific amount of time each day as “writing in my journal” time. However, as blogs became more popular, and LiveJournal in particular, more of my friends signed up for them and befriended me and were able to read my posts. On one hand, this became another good way to keep in contact with everyone, especially if they didn’t have internet in their homes and could only get on for short periods of time at internet cafes or the library. On the other hand though, because sometimes my posts contained thoughts or feelings or rants about the very people who were reading my journal, and for fear of offending them or ending friendships, I was forced to censor myself in my own journal, which no one should EVER have to do, and now I only use my LJ to post pictures or poetry I’ve written that I specifically want my friends to see.

As many inherent problems as technical writing tools presents, it offers just as many, if not more benefits. I write poetry, short stories, and screenplays. The quality of these is questionable, but my computer allows me to keep track of all my writings. What used to take up boxes upon boxes of notebooks, paper scraps, napkins, post its, basically anything I could use to jot down quick ideas when I became inspired, can be neatly organized in one or two word documents; easily accessible and ready for editing, printing, or even posting online or emailed to potential publishers. Not only that, but computers have become a literal NECESSITY for college and even high school, having to do internet research and writing papers to hand in for class, not to mention checking emailed assignments from professors. As handy as this all is, I still keep paper copies of all my writing, just in case my computer ever crashes or some catastrophic event happens to cause the loss of all my files. It is always a danger when working with technology, especially new technology that hasn’t had all the bugs worked out yet, and I had to learn that the hard way.

Technology and writing go hand in hand, and are mutually beneficial. If I didn’t have my laptop to be able to be creative and write whenever I need to, and have it instantly accessible when an idea strikes… I would literally go insane. Thankfully for everyone, I DO have the ability to write with it, so you’re safe… for now.

*cricket* *cricket*

::tap tap::

is this thing on?

Maybe Teddy Was Right…

If I were to seriously sit here and list all of the technology that I use on a daily basis, this post would still be being written 5 years from now. So instead of giving a comprehensive list, I’ll instead list the ones I use most frequently. The examples of technology I use most often are (in no particular order): my television, my laptop (with internet, e-mail, instant messenger, etc), my xbox (with xbox live), my cell phone, and my ipod. I grew up living on the cusp between Generation X (the slacker generation), and Generation Y (the computer generation) so television and video games were like surrogate parents for me. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying they were a substitute by any means, but they definitely played a big part in my childhood. Some of my very earliest memories revolve around waking up by myself at 5 am, walking into my parents room and turning on the TV to the Disney channel to “Mousercize” with Mickey, or the family getting the brand new state of the art Nintendo Entertainment System for Xmas and being able to stay up two full hours past my bedtime to beat Super Mario Brothers with my Dad. As innocent as it seemed at the time, however, video game and entertainment technology has advanced so fast that literally, one cannot exist without it.

There was a time when the pony express traveled hundreds of miles for weeks at a time on horseback to deliver mail to secluded outposts in the wild west territories. Then as cars and planes became invented and used, mail could be delivered within a few days. Then came the advent of the internet and a brand new concept called electronic mail (or e-mail as we are all familiar with now). Computers and the internet (rumored to have been invented by Al Gore   haha! anyone..? no one? ok moving on…) used to be reserved for only the very affluent and hip, but slowly computers infused themselves into the common household. Now one can barely function in society without the use of the internet or computer, and for a college student it is simply impossible. What once took weeks is now instantaneous, and as beneficial for us as it is, it is just as damaging. When was the last time you took a vacation without a computer, or television, or (brace yourself) your cell phone? There was a time when we lived quite comfortably without any of these, and yet today we see them as vital to our everyday survival. I am not pointing fingers by any means. I am just as dependent on my text messages and buddy list and xbox as a lot of others out there. And I do not hate technology. I enjoy and respect it for what it is and the benefits that come with it, but I really start to worry when the power shifts and technology stops becoming dependent on us, and we become dependent on technology…

Timetraveler, party of one, your table is ready.

The way in which H.G. Wells constructs the dinner party as a sort of bookends to the narrative of the actual time travel adventure is an interesting one, and stuck out in my mind during the reading. The best I can figure it, this device serves two important purposes. One, it sets up the time period in which the novella was written. In the 1890’s dinner parties were quite common, and the after dinner discussion was a popular form of entertainment (before the technological inventions such as the radio, television, computer, etc which we rely on so heavily today). Therefore the dinner party setting gives the reader a firm grasp of the era in which the story is being set. The second purpose this serves is setting up the author’s social commentary, that is, his critique on politics (communism and captialism are metaphorically represented and critisized throughout the novel) and technology. Dinner party conversation, especially in the 1890’s, revolved heavily around discussions on politics, with every man at the table being able to throw in his two cents. It is also in this type of conversation that abstract ideas, such as time travel, could be discusses objectively as a lighthearted relief from the more serious subject matter.

The hypothesis Wells puts forth through his character of the Time Traveler about time being a fourth dimension is nothing new in this day and age. However, in his time, this idea was an earth-shattering, ground breaking discovery. The idea that one could move in time as easily as he moves in space is an abstract one, but utterly fascinating one. Victorian readers of this concept would be skeptical, as are the dinner guests in the novel when presented with it, but ultimately I think they would accept it as it was, an abstract idea worth pondering, as this was the time of the industrial revolution when ideas and inventions pervaded just about every facet of everyday life.

Other technologies which appear in the novel are the above ground ventilation systems for the underground inhabitants of the earth, the Morlocks, and the inventions that appeared in the abandoned museum. Other than these, I expected a great deal more technology and inventions, it being 800,000 years in the future, but the future Wells projects is not one of technological advance. His future is more of a regression, a dystopia whose technology forced them into a life of weakened helplessness, then abandoned them to live in their neo-egyptian world. This is a serious social critique on the direction Wells thinks technology is headed.

FOOSBALL ANARCHY!

Football is life… train ’em young.

Blogs: Post #2

The things that I feel most draws people to blogs is the trend in our society towards voyeurism. Not voyeurism in the sexual sense, but in the mode of entertainment. With the rise of reality tv from the predecessors Cops and Real World, to reality tv giants such as Survivor, American Idol, and Dancing with Celebrities to name a few… the curiosity of how “the other people live” is too great for most to ignore. Blogs are another way for people to be able to glimpse into the lives of other people, to find similiarities with others and make emotional connections without the fear of being face to face of the stigma of being labeled weird for what you enjoy. Blogs offer the choice to watch or not to watch. Whether or not blogs will last remiains to be seen. Many other trends both in television (who wants to be a millionaire-esque gameshows) and the internet (the dot-com boom) have suddenly risen to outstanding heights only to decline just as quickly. Only time will tell. But in the meantime, the cybercommunity has strongly embraced this type of outlet and communication, and it shows no time of stopping anytime soon.

3 Characteristics of Blogs

1. Most blogs have an overall theme, such as a person’s day to day life and the events that happen therein, or a blog  updating progress on work or project the host is working on (such as a blog to mark the progress when filming a movie).

2. Most blogs have a comment feature that viewers of the blog can chime in with input or reactions to the posts the blogmaster makes.

3. Most blogs have a list of backposts so new viewers to the blog can go back and read older posts that were made before they started reading.