Ethics Vs. Technological Determinism

The idea of technologic determinism is an interesting theory. The idea that culture is fueled by technological advances is an interesting one. It now only tells us how technology pushes us to be a certain way but it has implications about the intelligence of certain peoples. He idea that culture and society I pushed by technology means that more advanced societies were made by advanced technologies and the people who made these technologies.

            That is an interesting theory. I would like to think that we are independent from our technology. One way I like to think about this is advancement vs. ethics. By a long shot western culture has put advancement above ethics, speed above morals, productivity above happiness. We can see this in the industrial age when Europe started to push machines and factories over people. The people were poor, they couldn’t farm or find jobs. So the factories made jobs for them. The problem with this was when these factories that made clothes and metal came up they needed more workers, but they couldn’t pay all these workers. They wanted to expand and pay their workers less to do so. These factories started to hire children from these poor families so that they could pay their workers less and not have to worry about their workers complaining. This led to highly unclean and unfair circumstances for these children who had to work in dangerous areas where they could lose appendages and even be killed.

            If this technology defines our cultures, makes us more advanced, I’m not sure I want to be that advanced. Other examples of this are the tax we are taking on our environment with coal and gas. Another is the amount of damage we are doing to the environment through the advancement of how fast we can go. All over I don’t think technology should define our cultures and history.

Educational Technology: Keeping Me Behind

Education has been a constantly evolving subject. Even more so with the invention of the internet.  I especially have a hard time dealing with the rensition between so many technologies. The first time I had to use a computer to write a paper was in middle school. I was transitioning from fast handwriting in elementary school to slow typing in middle school. This technology brought me down because I took longer to do papers. This put me back a little in school because I could not write as fast as other students. Eventually I started to buy programs to help me with typing like Mario Teaches Typing and other programs like it.

            The next jump I really had to overcome was the idea of electronic submissions. All through middle school and high school everything had to be handed in as a hardcopy. This made my fellow classmates and I have to work on a certain schedule. We would start on homework that was due for a class as the classes came. So a piece of homework that was for a class on Monday, even if it was due for Friday, I would work on before the class that would occur on Tuesday. This was a very natural pattern. This changed when I came to college. All of a suddenly things like dropbox, email becoming a large tool in education, and things like Angel started to crop up. This threw a wrench into the works because this meant that I had to go out and actually figure out when things were due. This made me miss a lot of class homework because a piece of homework for a class on Tuesday would be due on a Sunday. The class would be completely in my blinders because I was focusing my efforts on my Monday class. The grades I got for these classes reflected less of my actual academic status and more of the systematic adaptaion I was making, and I didn’t make it well, getting a 2.3 GPA in my freshman year in college.

Signatures: Why Are they Personal?

I think the idea of the signature is strange. In the book Baron talks about how the signature becomes less and less authentic the more you duplicate it. He showed how Thomas Jefferson decided to use a signature copier called a polygraph to make signatures faster. The idea of this machine was to make the signature process faster. Now a days we have signatures we can print and so on. He then speaks about the reason for signatures. How they are to show that the person giving the signature either approved, made, or read a document entitling them to money, rights, loss of rights, owner and etc. He also stated that the secondary use of the signature was to make it more personable. To show that this letter, this document, it came from a person and they put heart, or something resembling a heart, into it.

            This is where I stop the presses and would like to think about this. Why should a signature be a personal note to anyone? It is designed to authenticate something, make it official. Any kind of personal touch that is added because of a signature is something being interpreted by the reader.

            I will say that this changes a little bit if it is a personal letter. My problem with this is that it is already a personal Letter. The personal is already implied by the format of the document. When talking about something that copies signatures from a single signature to documents, as long as they have approval from the signer the use of the signature is not needed to be a personal, singular gesture to a person. It’s just not needed to make this personal gesture when signing something like legal documents.

The Ease of Modern Writing

There is this idea stated in the book in chapter 2 Thoreau’s Pencil that particularly gets at me. It is the idea that the computer makes it too easy for people to write. I find this particularly interesting myself in being a writer. It is an idea that I have thought over because of music these days and how easy it is becoming to get into music because of the internet and websites like SoundCloud.

            This idea of the technology evolving from things like quills to pencils, allowing people to write and copy faster with the latter and write for pages instead of paragraphs is interesting. On one hand I agree that technology lets people do things like writing with ease and that is a great asset to our society. Anyone can nowadays pick up a pencil, open a laptop, and write. This allows many brilliant writers to do what they would not have been able to do before and that makes the industry grow by leaps and bounds.

            Then again growth is not exactly the best thing. The transfer from the typewriter to computer was a huge jump because it allowed people to write in type with ease. This let the amount of people able to write skyrocket but polluted the market with writers who were not up to snuff.

            In the current day there is even less of a professional gap between the daily writer and the professionals writers who devoted their lives to the craft. With self publishing someone can write a book and put it on a site like Amazon with ease. No agent, no investment, barely any actual struggle to become a writer has to be participated in to become one of these famed scholars. This again is hard to completely shut down because this allows would be writers who could be great without this large professional gap to reach the masses without the funds of the classical writers. And then again, this lowers the quality of work.

A Name, A Plot

The ending of Things Fall Apart underlined how cultures change. We saw the new Christian culture of the book take over the Umuofia culture. I assume this is where the title comes from even though this brings me to a main topic. The Umuofia culture fell apart. Whether this was because of the reasons that Okonkwo thought; the betrayal of the culture by the people, or because the evolution of language and ideas left the culture of Umuofia behind.

Okonkwo’s need to cling to the culture of his father and tradition really brought him to his miserable end. Okonkwo was like a stick in the mud when it came to adjusting to the new lifestyle that was being excepted. While I feel that Okonkwo did not change with the literature and oral culture I feel that he was right in one respect to not let the Christian culture of the English to invade the traditions of the Umuofia people. I do not feel that it was right for the Christians to convert people from their traditional religion and how it worked. I think this was the real way that Umuofia was destabilized. The loss of tradition not only split the people but confused the people and their traditional morals. While this was good in the case of throwing the twin children into the forest for being evil it was bad in the case that people like Okonkwo did not do well with the change of his wives and children converting to the Christian culture. This is illustrated in the end when Okonkwo kills the messenger and declares war on the Christians. Then, when no one joins in with Okonkwo, he sees how the people have changed and realizes that the culture has completely changed. Then Okonkwo takes his life. This illustrates the final blow to the traditional culture of Umuofia, the unraveling of the cultural thread and how the old ways of the Umuofia fell apart. Okonkwo fought literature and the culture it brought because he saw this death of culture coming, but he did not see the value in it because of his clouded views by trying to stay traditional.

Evolution of Literacy: Chaos Envelopes Umuofia

The influence of words in things fall apart is huge. Not only does literacy interfere with the traditional society that Okonkwo defended but words show a kind of peace in the culture and ritual in the society.

            Words spoken between Okonkwo and the Elders show how communication of the society works. This is done in front of the tribe to communicate to the whole tribe. This turns on Okonkwo when he kills the messenger in front of the whole village. This also shows how the culture has changed from his father’s times. His father’s people fought and killed to settle arguments between people. The village at this time is an oral culture that settles things with talk, exactly the opposite way that Okonkwo was taught. Okonkwo basically gets confused and frustrated with the new cultures invading his traditional way.

            The cultures really describe the three parts of the book. The first the physical oral culture that Unoka grew up in, fighting and warring between the cultures. The second is the oral culture that Okonkwo rules over that disputes without physical harm. The third is the missionaries who bring the written culture. These cultures show how the communication and language basics change from generation to generation especially with Nwoye joining the Missionaries.

            The evolution of oral and literacy culture also shows the chaotic downfall of the Umuofia. As the village becomes oral the old ways become out of date and the village destabilizes. When literacy comes into the culture the children go to the missionaries, the women start getting drawn to this new non-violent gods and Okonkwo becomes angry and confused at it all. Attempting to go to war does not work in this new, almost democratic society where the elders shut down Okonkwo’s declaration.

Literature Leads to Abstraction

From reading through the chapters in the second half of the book and using parts of the first half of the book I have found an interesting thought; the more we advanced in literature and writing the more abstract thought becomes. This interests me because of the ideas of story and learning.   

            The first thing that comes up in the second part of Ong is the Analytic thought (89, 90 Ong). The idea that we were able to analyze things more effectively and make ideas is very interesting. This goes with the idea of abstract thought because be able to think in an abstract zone lets us applies ideas and criticism to certain parts of speech and writing.            

            Another part I find fascinating is the idea of the character (101). Ong describes it as the idea of writing to someone else. I think this is interesting, you never think of the audience as a reader, but as a writer you are constantly thinking about the reader. With orality you can see reactions of the audience and gauge their reactions, something you cannot do with writing. Therefore you have to come up with that reader, that audience, in your head to really write and have it received the way you want. This implies the abstraction of ideas of people.

            Visual description is something that has always puzzled me. It is hard to use words to describe a house or forest to someone. This is probably because it did not come naturally to humans. Pre Romanticized writing did not have much description, writing abstracted even the idea of sight, describing things that weren’t within a thousand miles of a person or something that didn’t even exist (125 Ong).