Titles aren't really my thing.

Okay, well good morning everyone! Hope you slept well and your weekend was a good one! Well I’m not really sure exactly which prompt I will be answering, it might be in-between but I guess we’ll see as I start writing, so here we go!
I just want to start out my saying that the video we watched on Friday was crazy! All this statistics they presented us, made me think about how, as a society, we really are moving into a new era. One statistic presented was “Today, the number of text messages sent and received everyday exceeds the total population of the planet.” That number is just absurd, although I am one of those “crazy teens” who spend a majority of their time texting, it never hit me the number of texts sent and received daily was that large. Also, I never knew how effective the internet was and really how much people used it to do. Like the statistic that “1 out of 8 couples married last year met online.” It’s almost like if someone really cannot find something or in this case, someone then they look online because you can find “everything” on the Internet, I just never knew how undefined the “everything” was. It is sort of scary to see how much people rely on the Internet for.
According to Dr. Alan Kirby’s the new era we are about to enter into is called Pseudo-modernism. Kirby states that “In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads.” His insight is just further confirming that we are on our way to becoming completely dependent on technology and such other things. America has transformed drastically and so has the lifestyle. Like if you ask any teenager to just give up their cell phone, computer, Internet and television I think they would have a heart-attack, myself included. We as a society have become so dependent on technology and I just hope we don’t turn into a Brave New World society at this rate.

Cat's Cradle

Hello and Good morning everyone! Well I really like Cat’s Cradle so far. It’s interesting, easy to read and is not about little 5 year olds doing the nasty so it is way better to me than the other books we’ve read so far. It is not about anything out of the ordinary; like babies being made on a factory line or a dictator watching very closely after everyone so it doesn’t creep me out and I like it! Haha so yeah here’s my blog…

Despite Cat’s Cradle being completely different from any of the other books that we’ve read so far this year; it does have its similarities. One thing that stood out to me was how alike Brave New World, Cat’s Cradle, also has a “group”. In BNW it was all the social classes that they were born into and in Cat’s Cradle they have a “karass” which comes from the Bokonon religion; “We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon...” This reminds me of how in BWN they were born into a class based on what they could accomplish and what type of person they were and to me the groups in Cat’s Cradle seem to be pretty darn similar.
Also, it is like Postmodernism because it seems to view religion as being fake and not real. For the entire beginning of the book Jonah is saying that he was Christian until he came upon the Bokonon way. The Bokonon religion more or less is a sarcastic approach of Kurt Vonnegut to make up his own imaginary religion, in a way mock people. In Bokonon’s religion it is said that we are connected through a specific karass but in Christianity we are connected by groups of people who form together to grow and learn about their religion. The way he talks about religion seems to me like he is commenting that no religion is truthful and the only thing that is true is Science and Research.

BRAVE NEW WORLD IDEAS

Well I personally think it’s going to be a wee bit difficult to write this blog to be 300 words but I will give it my best shot. So I guess here we go…

I’d like to start off and say that our Socratic circle this past week was very informative and I feel that after it I had a much fuller understanding of the text and it helped me to develop some ideas that were kind of forming in my head. An idea that really stood out to me , was the comparision of Bernard and Winston and the similarities that they share. They are both the social outcasts who act like they want things one way, but think in a completely different direction. I might compare them and link it to the discussion of morals that I will mention. Some ideas of mine that were strengthened were the ideas about moral and values in Brave New World compared to those of the 21st Century, and also the question that was presented that I really liked was “Is our society today closer to the lives of the ‘savages’ or the lifestyle of the so called ‘normal people’ in Brave New World?” I really think that I will be about to elaborate on all those ideas because they are such a wide variety that I technically have the whole world in my hands and can relate the book to anything and everything. And to be honest that sort of freedom is all terrifying, exciting and sort of nerve-wrecking.

I really think I’ll end up pulling ideas from three different books: the Bible, 1984 and Postmodernism for Beginners. The Bible I will use to pull moral standards and values from; 1984 I will be able to relate the idea of worshiping and they are similar, yet so different; Postmodernism I’m not exactly sure how I will use this book yet, but I have a feeling that by the end of reading Brave New World I will have plenty of ideas on how I could use it to compare or contrast ideas from each book.

Well I hope that made sense I’m not too sure if it did and I’m way to tired right now to pick it apart. Goodnight bloggers! 

Myths

Does anybody else feel like Postmodernism for beginners is more complex than the title suggests? Because I sure do. It seems like the more we read for it, the more confused I become. I’m just hoping it’s partially due to the fact that I have selective hearing and only hear what I want to hear… but any who back to my blog. Since postmodernism is new and super confusing to me, I just wanted to point out that it’s extremely interesting. To me challenges make life all the most interesting, so I cant wait to continue on reading and developing a more deeper understanding of the complex ideas.

Well in class this past week we've spent time covering what myths and narratives are. And we can to the conclusion that in a way a myth is a form of a narrative because it originates from the discourse of the person who is stating the myth. It is said in Postmodernism "the myth defines what has the right to be said and done in the culture." Meaning that whoever is telling the myth more than likely has been a told a different version than someone else, only because when we retell things we often tend to speak with a different type of tone or level or just react differently which is all drawn from our own personal discourses. Also, for most people to fully understand a myth or point of view they must have a general idea of what their discourse is because your discourse is what ultimately influences your decisions and thoughts. Myths are also affected my discourses because they are passed down from generation to generation and who is around to say that everyone remained completely unbiased in their viewpoints and accurately retold the story because without the influence of outside sources the myth looses its overall sort of impact. Myths set the bar for shaping the early stages of moral development and are normally as explanation for how a fact has came to be.

Lastly, the novel can be considered a warning about the dangers of postmodernism because it is showing us an alternate view and possibility of what could happen if we make certain decisions and just let our world’s fate fall into the hands of the wrong people.

I hope all my thoughts made sense cause they did is my crazy head, but who knows.

its my birthday on THURSDAY :)

Brave New World is unlike any other book in literature. It’s a rather dark book that presents an alternative version of the truth in today’s society. Although it is a rather dramatized version of what the world is like, it still has some truths. It is a rather crazy book and I personally would not want to be a part of it. The main reason is because they reject any emotions that a person has. They want you to an emotionless machine, which is brought up in a surrounding that focusing solely on the work that they were put on the earth to do. When the Director was talking to the boys he mentioned “parents” and the kids almost had a heart attack and had to flinch away because they were not used to people saying such “sexual” words. Also, in the book family is something that is looked down upon because it is excluding people in the population, when everyone is supposed to be the same. Romance was not sought out for in this society. They don’t ever say that they like a person, but instead they simply say, “You should try her” as if the girl is nothing but an emotionless machine who doesn’t deserve love and care; nothing is emotional, everything is done with logic.
One thing I don’t understand is how A.F. came into part. Like what makes Ford so great that he has to be worshiped as God? Like I really wonder if they have a pledge of allegiance where they say, “…one nation after Ford” instead of “one nation under God.” I just do not get why Ford was chosen…was it to show that machines took over in sense? Since after all Ford was a factory that was based off of its machine and relied on them to get the job done. So it’s a time period that marks from after when machine took over trying to show how life is better when everyone is just a cookie cutter; just like everyone else.

Is neutrality possible?

There is no way to write a history book so that it remains completely neutral. History is recorded and passed down through generations but it is only told from one side’s perspective; because nobody wants to show their bad side. Therefore they only tell the good and forget about the bad and ugly. Thus, everyone’s history slowly looses more of its reality and truth; the more its told and passed down because with each person that history is passed down to the story changes ever so slightly until it has became completely biased to the party who’s retelling the events. And no matter what you try to do like, take the history from both sides of a war, the history will still be seen as wrong to certain people because the people who are involved in the issue but on opposing sides both will see what happened in different lights.

Also, history cannot be objective because no two people have the same opinions and no matter what history has a slight bit of opinion contained in it. Because like they say, “there are two sides to every story.” So nobody can explain a certain piece of history without leaning more towards one side and we do not have the right to say that what we did was right and the other side is wrong; and that is what a majority of history books today do. They take terrible things that people did to either prove a point or to begin a revolt and turn them into positive and highly praised actions just because their own personal side may have either came up with the idea or because they practiced it; either way they are trying to justify something that they had once done in order to get a more positive public appeal. Consequently, history cannot be taught in a neutral or objective way.