Rhetorical Analysis Blog

The article I am doing my rhetorical analysis blog about is called “Brave New World and the Threat of Technological Growth” by Derek Miller. I thought this would be an interesting blog to choose because not only does it discuss Brave New World and a lot of the same concepts and ideas we have discussed, but it also uses the Technopoly resource as well. Overall, the article talks about the book and what the world that Huxley created was like. A great majority of the article is summarizing what the novel was about.

         Right away I notice a few things that are a lot different than the “high school standard” way of doing things. Just by skimming the paragraphs and looking at how they are structured I see a few differences in the way quotations are placed. This author really uses them wherever he sees fit. I have always been told to start with a quotation that grabs the reader’s attention and ties in with the story while Miller begins building his thesis right away. Also, I have always been told that the paragraph structure needs to go CD, CM, CM and repeat. However Miller begins some paragraphs with quotes and ends them with quotes; he even ended his whole article with a quote.

         After really reading the article I noticed a few other things. I found the tone appropriate and consistent. Miller really used facts and knowledge to make his argument. There was a lot of support from the book and from supporting text and I thought that he was making a very valid point while talking about the expansion of technology.

         I think by ready this article and skimming through a few others I learned that the accepted standard way of writing that so many of us have been taught isn’t necessarily the only way of writing. A lot of writers have their own style and a lot of the time it seems to be successful. I do appreciate learning a foundation for writing though because it allows us to stray from it while still having a solid structure to a paper. (granted, my blogs might not be that structured, but it’s the one time I can really write and ramble, woot!) 

Things Fall Apart Through a Lens

Given the choice between a post-colonialism lens and a feminist, I have decided to look at this story though a feminist lens. This is not just because I am a girl and sticking up for my gender is the right thing to do or whatever. I mean, woo! Go women’s rights! But I just think it can be taken too far. We should be treated mostly equal; however, there are just some things a woman probably shouldn’t do. That doesn’t give men the right to step all over us though. In the Bible it says that woman was made from man’s rib. That is the side and support of a man and we are meant to work and stick together. Woman wasn’t made from a man’s foot bone to be walked on or man's stomach to be a slave in the kitchen. Anyways, I digress. My point is I just felt like this would be a better lens to look through because I can more easily relate to it and I really do not have a strong grasp on things that have to do with history or different time periods that deal with postcolonialism.

In my essay I will write about the way that women are treated and the roles that they are expected to play in society. For example the idea of how women shouldn’t plant certain crops like yams because they are a “man’s crop”. Also there is the scene where Okonkwo beats his wife during the week of peace because she wasn’t there to make his lunch. The men in this culture expect certain things from their women, nothing more and nothing less. One of the biggest points is how Okonkwo spends to much time and effort trying to be the exact opposite of this dad because his dad was too feminine and in that culture being considered feminine is shameful.

From the feminism text I will probably use seomthing "Century after century, male voices continue to articulate and determine the social role and cultural and personal significance of women" (Feminism 171) to support my argument. I will find more quotes, but that’s a nice one. :) 

Singularity.

So just to make this clear at the beginning, this post is not going to be very structured because of all of the questions I have about this topic. The ideas and theories presented in 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal are so interesting. I find this sort of subject fascinating; my brother and I talk about it for hours. How would life be different if man really did merge with technology? If "the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today," how would our daily routines then differ from today's society? We really can't even comprehend this sort of intelligence. There are so many questions I can think of that won't receive answers until the time comes. We can only hypothesize and create theories. Huxley was well ahead of his time when he wrote the book A Brave New World. He essentially created a reality in which humans in a way did merge with machines. They were born from bottles. Can this even be considered 'authentically human’? I don't believe so. I believe that physically, yes, the people of Huxley's society are considered human. But human intelligence consists of new ideas, creativity, individual thought, personal morality, self-expression, and so many more things that these people are trained not to have.
      Another parallel between the article and the book is about prolonging life. I personally think this is a terrible thing. It is so unnatural and if we were meant to live that long I think we would already be doing so without the help of machines. Kurzweil says “we'll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots.” This will lead to being “functionally immortal”. Immortality? Holy cow. What would really happen if we were immortal? What would we be giving up to become this way? If we were really transferred to machines like Kurzweil says, what sort of thoughts would we be giving up? Maybe things said to be human like simple thoughts and emotion. Possibly anything that is not said to be logical and that will make sense to a computer? I am all for technological advancement. I love my smart phone and I love my MacBook. However I don’t love the idea of losing the things that I consider to make me human.