As a fan of stumbling, I came across this piece of awesome, then happened to read this blog post and I thought, "Wow, small world!"
I read 1984 when I was in 7th grade and I remember it scaring me half to death. That book has a pretty big impact on 12-13 year old girls, I think. The thought of no freedom, no voice, no nothing. Work, work, work. Whatever. It forged a pathway in my tiny mind. It wasn't until I was 17 that I picked up Brave New World, a book which I found horrifying, but also comical and far-fetched. Like any of that could ever happen, people subduing themselves with drugs when things went wrong, doing nothing but partying, having sex... ha, as if our social standards would allow people to have fun and be happy whenever they pleased.
Yeah, I'm a slave to the computer. And I'm fairly sure a good portion of our population pops pills to curb the real feelings! I had meant to clean my room and straighten things, do laundry and fix up my hair, but what am I doing? Blogging, because it's holding my short attention span for just now. I turned my xbox on and started media player and then decided to look at the Internetz for a while.
This is how it always starts. I will do one or two things. Stop. Get on the computer. Go straighten my hair, after prepping for 2 days to curl it all pretty (since I can't wash it if I want curls to hold). Then standing there with the hot chi curler in my hand and reconsidering because... I wonder what's going on in Lusternia!
Yeah. YEAH. THIS ALWAYS HAPPENS.
Fuck you, 21st century. No one likes you, really, because you're shallow and baseless.
Anticipation
15 years ago
2 comments:
You have to remember that most books of this kind aren’t really intended to be taken as a genuine vision of the future, but as ways of examining what the logical extreme of a particular line of ideology would be. Rather like Harrison Bergeron, which you mentioned recently: it was a parody, and the situation portrayed was deliberately taken to the point of being ridiculous. Fahrenheit 451 is another such example.
They’re partly an indulgence of the writer, and partly to make people think.
Oh yes, I meant to answer your ‘technology causes attention loss’ thing, but I wanted to get back to playing Fable 2.
It’s true to a degree, obviously. If the distractions are there, people will be sidetracked. But this has always applied: it’s human nature. How significant is it? Well, what proportion of the population were polymaths back in pre-electronics days? Did the majority of people of the 1950s spend their spare time in learning? In useful pastimes? Of course not. They may not have gone on the internet or watched TV, but they didn’t read books on science or philosophy, or indeed do much at all.
Contrary to the way most people describe it, children and teenagers generally have a more avid interest in learning a broad spectrum of things than do adults. I’ve lost my attention span and my dedication to learning everything as I’ve become older. Most people’s inquisitiveness starts to fall off in their early to mid twenties.
And as for not sparing the time to clean your room, or do anything that involves work without pleasure, that doesn’t count.
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