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Modern Times and V. Bush
In my reading of Bush, I see a dystopia in which man/society is
overwhelmed with facts and data, that we have reached a point in society
through technological advances where great discoveries, inventions, and
ideas are lost in a tide of information through which is overwhelming.
Bush states that man is "staggered by the findings and conclusions of
thousands of other workers- conclusions he cannot find time to grasp, much
less to remember"
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this reminds me of three analogies from literature
the first is Borges, The Library of Babel, is which all knowledge exists
in a library, yet, there is no index and the librarians spend their wholes
lives trying to find information
-
It seems that if a dystopia exists in Bush, it is that our tools have not
kept pace with the onslaught of information and so, like the librarians in
the library of Babel, we could spend our lives looking for the one
important truth, thats there, but lost- much like the internet today
-
the second thing this reminds me of, but you may not think this is
literature, is the old twilight zone episode with Burgess Meridith- we see
him in the beginning surrounded by books but he is unable to read any
because of his nagging wife- the next day there is some sort of holocaust
and his wife dies and he is the only person left- he looks around and sees
all of his books and expresses joy that now he has forever to read
whatever he wants- then, his glasses break ...
to stretch a point- his glasses symbolizing the tools we need to find
relevance in the mass of data today
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the third thing i was reminded of- the great Charlie Chaplin in Modern
Times
-
the sight of Chaplin struggling to keep up with these huge cogs and gears,
and then eventually being sucked in the machine
-
However, I think the difference between Bush and a lot of the examples we
have been discussing: Matrix, Handmaids Tale, 1984- is that in Bush,
Technology is not the dystopia, but it is the lack of technological tools
which are needed for "selection" as Bush puts it, so we may profit by the
"inheritance of acquired knowledge" - should be develop the tools, we
should be on the way to utopia
-
but now that we have reached the realization of technology noted in Bush,
I think the question is to determine if we have developed the proper tools
to keep pace with the amounts of data and information being produced or
not- is this a battle we can ever win?
-
rachel