Mars Is Heaven

These days, all everyone can think of is the latest gadgets and gizmos. Who has the best iPhone, tablet or Android. In society today people are considered outcasts if they have last year’s tech. In the short story “The Veldt”, Ray Bradbury uses satire to demonstrate that technology can be destructive if it’s not controlled.

Furthermore, I agree with Turkle that technology is overtaking our lives in a way that we might not even notice. Most everyone has one has a cell phone. Whether we are texting, reading emails, or playing Angry Birds, we are so absorbed into a virtual world. Even though we may not realize it, many of

Projections that have been made about how today’s society and culture will look in the coming years, decades, and centuries, all have yet to be seen in how valid they are. If you look in any sort of media: television, social media, or radio/music, you will see people giving their interpretations of what will become of our world down the road. Yet, few people look to see how our the current state of culture and society reflect the projections made by people in previous years, decades, and centuries. In looking at the visions of the future presented by both novelas, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, and The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, each story presents aspects of society that prominently appear today. Written during the Industrial Revolution, a time where technology and human innovation was at one of its highest points in recent history, both stories explore the possible effects of the machinery that was becoming evermore present. Both authors present aspects such as omnipotent technology, decaying human independence, and destruction of real communication, to create the artistic statement that complacency is rising within the human race, and that complacency will eventually lead to the fall of mankind. In both stories, the authors speak against human complacency and deference to technology, warning that it will lead to the creation of weaker people and society that will ultimately destroy the human race, yet that complacency is present in today’s culture and due to the

Technology today has advanced and impacted our way of living and the dependence on it has become a natural habit for our society. People today depend on their phones for numerous things such as, talking, messaging, driving directions, surfing the web or even to update their current Facebook status. Many people say that since they rely so heavily on technology, it has been known to weaken our society’s ability to open a book or newspaper to find information instead of looking at your phone. Technology has become a crutch for our generation today and without it we would fail. There have been inferences that technology will ruin us and lead us to extinction. In Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains”, he purveys speculation that technology is the cause of downfall in society and that nature will outlast man’s creation.

Nathan Jurgenson effectively convinces his audience of the impact that technology has caused to our current society by using a variety of rhetorical tactics to prove as well as convince his audience. Throughout his article, he uses a variety of rhetorical tactics, for example, Pathos, Logos, and Ethos by giving strong ethical background information to prove his argument. Jurgenson argues that in our current era is overly exposed to technology. Technology has taken over the typical American. We have come to the point that we have to take our cellular devices everywhere we go in order to feel complete.

Technology may not be everything it seems. Although worldwide use of various devices and applications has revolutionized the way we live and our culture in a powerful and helpful way, there are many ramifications to be considered. The consequence to this revolution of culture and way of life is carefully observed and portrayed by M.T. Anderson in his novel Feed. Anderson uses the literary art of satire to create characters that are exaggerated versions of people today to reveal their uncontrollable obsession with technology.

In E.M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops”, he portrays a dark dystopian society that is encapsulated by the Machine in which they all worship; this is analogous to society today being so attracted to technology. The story takes on a very dark and dull tone to help convey his purpose of pointing out that society is too dependant on technology. Forster develops his dystopian society by showing their social norms and what happens when the said technology fails them. He connects dystopian factors in the story to common day things. For example, he alludes to God, satirizes society’s dependence on technology, and shows the effects technology has had on humanity to help emphasize society’s reliance on technology.

The evolution of technology is constantly occurring in order to be more helpful in society. Therefore, a new gadget comes out within months or a year because of how it’s constantly evolving and how clients always ask for more. Andrew Sullivan wrote an essay in 2005 and talked the once popular iPod. In his essay, “Society Is Dead, We Have Retreated into the iWorld,” Andrew Sullivan uses the rhetorical triangle, visual imagery, and one of the rhetorical appeals, logos, to achieve his purpose of how technology has impacted human interactions.

Technology is viewed as revolutionary, inventions that make our lives simply better by the touch of a screen to the click of a button. However, in the short story “The Veldt”, Ray Bradbury portrays that technology, despite its benefits, has many significant flaws. The improper and overuse of technology in “The Veldt” causes the characters to forget how to live for themselves. The technology takes over their independence as well as their personal lives and relationships. In “The Veldt”, Ray Bradbury asserts that becoming reliant on technology causes a strain on family relations, and can be dangerous to the way one functions as a human, taking away one's purpose in life.

Within the prominent novel feed, M. T. Anderson contributes his beliefs to those who have already challenged the fate of humanity with his phenomenal characterization, ingenious formatting, and heartbreaking setting to expose man’s most renowned disease, technology. This monstrosity may prevail if we as humans continue to accept technology into our daily lives. Schools resorting to online assignments instead of pen and paper making it impossible to succeed without the proper technology. Billions of factories and cars pollute the environment; the world falling apart while we listen to ads on the radio for sales on TV's. And now over ninety percent of adults leave home with a cellphone on their person. Anderson’s feed may take place in the future,

The author eloquently expresses these views in quotes such as, "Secularism, materialism, and the intrusive presence of things have put out the light in our souls and turned us into a generation of zombies," (Tozer 15). The ever intrusive presence my generation of Christians must succumb to is technology. Society promotes technology as a form of idolatry, ever dependable and omnipresent. Advertisements display overnight improvements to inform everyone that technology is quite an unstoppable force; which increases our belief in humanism that just as machinery progresses, so do our own capabilities. This is despite the fact that all electronics have battery lives shorter than the time it took to type this paper.

Humanity has far surpassed anything that was seen as impossible. However, as society progressed did we get distracted on the way? Did we seem to lose track of the important things that mattered in our lives? In the mid-1980s Neil Postman wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death which talks about how technology and media has reshaped our culture and he makes predictions on how it will shape our future. The purpose of this paper is to update Postman's perspective to the present. Throughout the last chapter of the book Postman talks about how technology has distracted us, and how it has changed our social lives. This paper will provide information on how Postman's perspective examples connect to society today, and how many of us are influenced by it without even noticing it.

Within the last couple of decades, technology has become a huge part in everyone’s daily lives. Everyday we look at our phone almost every five minutes and when we get home we all hop on some other form of technology such as our computers or televisions. However, this is almost exactly what Aldous Huxley and Neil Postman fear. There are some truths and some falsehoods to the statements that Postman proposed such as the idea that we will begin to enjoy our oppression, we will be ruled by the very things that we love, and that we will eventually be thrown so many lies that we will seize to know what the truth is and we will be exploring both sides of these assertions.

Society today possesses an over-reliance on technology. Advancements in technology paved the way for the formation of new applications and forms of social media that potentially lead to the loss of the intimacy of communication and personal relationships among users. As a result of the ease of communication through technology, face-to-face interaction rarely occurs anymore. Long before technology began advancing at a rapid pace, authors used their medium of writing to comment on the dangers of relying on technology too excessively. E.M. Forster’s short story, “The Machine Stops,” written in 1909, highlights a dilemma that society’s over-reliance on technology created between virtual connectivity and face-to-face interaction. That over-reliance, perfect for the futuristic, dystopian society in “The Machine Stops,” also serves as a cautionary tale for the technological culture of today.

Bobina, Katrina. "Wall-e Essay: Technology vs. Humankind." My Life in Just a Few Words. 28 Nov. 2011. https://kreppell.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/wall-e-essay-technology-vs-humankind/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2017. What did we ever do before technology? We should live our own lives without the use of technology but have become so dependent on it, it’s like an addiction. “Wall-e” is a Pixar movie based on humans that have destroyed the planet because they don’t care for the environment. Now, we tend to not be able to go a whole day without a phone or laptop. Like the humans in the movie Wall-e, we are controlled and driven by technology. Don’t get me wrong, technology has help us in many good ways, but it has been a major distraction. When was the last time you went outside and spoke to a neighbor? People do not go out and socialize face to face anymore. Instead, they hook up to Wi-Fi and get on a social media site, email, or text. Faces are always buried into phone screens. If we were ever to have robots do everything for us, cutting grass, picking up trash, etc., and technology were to fail us, people will be too lazy to pick back up where we left off. The reliability of technology and the effects it has on us and our environment has got to come to an end soon or later, or we will no longer have a planet that is fit for the human population to live. I believe that this