Humanity versus Virtual Reality Essay

Corresponding to Bradbury's predictions of the future, it’s been commonly argued that the advancement in technology will bring permanent results that will be passed on in history as “The Great Extinction” or “Humanity’s extinction”.

Technology has had many positive and negative effects in both Fahrenheit 451 and the real world.

He references the story of the Oji-Cree people, nomads who relied very little on technology. It was not until the nineteen-sixties, when technology, such as engines and electricity, was introduced to them. After this advancement, the threat of dying in the winter due to starvation was eliminated; however, obesity and diabetes emerged throughout the population. This raises the question of whether the technology caused more harm than good. He presents this story to model how our society is not much different, “When it comes to technologies, we mainly want to make things easy. Not to be bored. Oh, and maybe to look a bit younger” (Wu 4). Technology, while intended to help us, allows us to be lazy as a society, which introduces a whole new set of problems. He furthers his point by saying that we are “comfort-seeking missiles” (Wu 4). This theory causes the reader to reflect on themselves to notice if they have fallen victim to the misuse of technology. By inserting this study into his article Wu is able to persuade the reader to agree with

William Wordsworth existed in a time when society and its functions were beginning to rapidly pick up. The poem that he 'Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye', gave him a chance to reflect upon his quick paced life by taking a moment to slow down and absorb the beauty of nature that allows one to 'see into the life of things'; (line 49). Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey'; takes you on a series of emotional states by trying to sway 'readers and himself, that the loss of innocence and intensity over time is compensated by an accumulation of knowledge and insight.'; Wordsworth accomplishes to prove that although time was lost along with his innocence, he

“I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots” Albert Einsteinʼs once said. Even though he lived in the 1900s, he predicted our predicament that we are heading to. Ray Bradbury did the same thing.

For this essay I chose to write on the article, The Illusion of the Control in a Virtual Setting. The article was collaborated on by: David S. Kreine, Christian N. Hobbs, Matthew W. Honeycutt, Ryan M. Hinds, and Callie J. Brockman at the University of Central Missouri and was originally published in 2010 in the North American Journal of Psychology. The paper is focused around the concept of illusion of control or the perception that events or situations that are uncontrollable are somehow able to be controlled, that we covered in the third chapter of the textbook. More specifically the authors wanted to see if it were in fact plausible to convince people to think they are in control, when they are truly not.

In 1915 the talented Albert Einstein introduced the General Theory of Relativity, which people still use today and helped reform many other inventions. What is ironic is that the man who helped revolutionize technology also said “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”(Albert Einstein) This statement is especially true in the novel Fahrenheit 451 written by Ray Bradbury. Where technology slowly created ignorant society, false family connections and people to lose the value of human life. In other words technology eventually decreased humanity.

People of all ages suffer from the negative effects of long-term exposure to technology. As technology continues to evolve, the human brain struggles to keep up, and ultimately loses a multitude of once valued abilities, such as the ability to focus, and deep intellectual thinking. People grow severely attached to these new artificial intelligence, that they forget there are other real people whom they can communicate with and share thoughts with. As Fahrenheit 451 has illustrated, our society has evolved to interact with technology on a more personal level, change the way humans interact with one-another, shift the way political subjects are dealt with, and change what the roles of certain people in a community are and how those communities function.

William Wordsworth uses different groups of words in this poem to connect nature with human beings: the pattern of their

When one is reading about the world in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, immediately the goal of society is seen: technological progress. Instead of the manner in which society acts today, with love, family and success being important focuses: technologic growth and improvement is at the forefront. Technology, in many ways, can produce a positive impact; however, when taken to an extreme, the consequences could be devastating, as shown in this book.

However, according to Shannon himself, what really launched him into the theorization of information was Ralph Hartley’s paper Transmission of Information. This paper developed “a measure of information that could in principle be used for discrete or continuous signals.” Hartley’s publication also proved that a channel’s bandwidth defines how much information can be sent through it. Since a channel’s bandwidth was limited and since continuous signals could be broken down in small steps before being sent through the channel, Hartley concluded that if the steps were small enough, the approximated signal would be not only close but identical to the original signal. Finally, Hartley realized that information could be the “resolving of uncertainty.” He developed a mathematical formula according to this concept to quantify the amount of information in a message but unfortunately, this formula was not complex enough and could not be applied to cases in which the constituents of a message did not have all the same chances of being selected. Indeed, “in written English for instance, some letters are used more frequently than others.” Hartley’s formula would not work when trying to encode sentences for example because he couldn’t model the fact that the letter E had more chances to be selected than any other.

Technological advancement and social "progress" were steps backwards for Wordsworth and thus he looked to the past for his inspiration.

Today’s science fiction is often tomorrow’s reality. As the pace of change has quickened, so it appears that we are actually living within a science fiction movie. Programs on TV continue to amaze or frighten us with yet more technological break through and with clever new products and gadgets. Over the last decade and certainly through the rest of this century, the major agent for these changes has been and will continue to be electronic computer and its derivatives. The Digital Age exploded into existence not with a whimper but a bang. The globe still shakes from its entry. The journey was long, but the impact is immediate. Now, for instance, the breath of an unborn baby can be captured and rendered visible, the

Virtual reality defined as to produce and create the effect of an interactive 3D world in which the objects have a sense of spatial presence by using computer technologies. Our perceptual and cognitive system will be presented by precise clues in order for our brain to interpret and understand those clues as outside object in 3D world. In addition, virtual reality suggest a lot of benefits and advantages to education of technical such as delivery information through multiple active channels, addressing of dissimilar learning styles, experiential-based learning and so on ( Bell & Fogler, 2004, p 217).

Where Wordsworth focused too on love and nature at first, he then took on more spiritual subjects. Further, if we assume that Wordsworth’s imitation of “The Retreat” was intentional, then Vaughan may have even been a poetic model (in some sense) for Wordsworth later in life. True, Wordsworth is not generally considered a religious poet; he would never have originally considered Vaughan a model because of the latter’s extreme religiosity. Yet if these two poems don’t echo in godly gestures per se, they do in a more spiritual sense—and perhaps Wordsworth, as a man confronted with his own mortality, found Vaughan’s treatise on the spirit’s immortality a sympathetic sentiment. Thus by comparing the two, we also might better understand Wordsworth’s poetic progression.