Nothing Comes Of Nothing Book Review

What if our life becomes fully dependent on the electronic devices in the future? “In Into the Electronic Millennium”, Birkerts discusses his concerns with the oncoming electronic world. Birkerts provides lots of cons about the electronic devices that can affect people's lives. The author’s intention for writing this essay is to make the audience aware of the significant changes that have started to occur as electronic technologies have developed. He uses various rhetorical devices to convey his arguments to the readers. Through this essay, he is trying to inform the academic community that the culture of printed words has ended in the society, while electronic technologies are starting to dominate. Birkerts uses anecdotes, juxtaposition,

3. Personification- “The Internet, powerful as it is, has hardly slain the beast that is information asymmetry”

In today's culture people use technology to their advantage all the time. They use it to hack, to learn the latest gossip, or to see breaking news around the world. But, sometimes they get obsessed and instead of a handy tool, it becomes a necessity and a lifestyle. In the story, The Veldt, Ray Bradbury uses imagery, symbolism, and internal conflict to express that misuse of technology can lead to unforeseen disadvantages.

In his essay “The Net Is a Waste of Time,” novelist William Gibson analyzes the hidden potentials of the Internet in both its vastness and affect on society. He writes this piece at the dawn of the Internet, and during this undeveloped phase, he discusses its multitude of facts as is and will be. As hinted in the title of his essay, Gibson takes the stance that the Internet at its early stages is a waste of time -- an impressively large and complex waste of time -- but a waste of time nonetheless. He is ultimately concerned with how we are choosing to procrastinate through the Internet, and that our growing attachment and dependence on the Internet reveals a “fatal naïveté” (697) about us. Gibson also brings up the true enormity of the Web even at its premature standing, detailing how “the content of the Web aspires the absolute variety. One might find anything there. It is like rummaging in the forefront of the collective global mind” (697). Despite his concerns on what the Web might become, Gibson realizes that at the time of his writing, the Web was at a stage much like the larval stage of a butterfly’s life -- seems unassuming, but as he himself puts it, “The Web is new, and our response to it has not yet hardened” (697), and that there are “big changes afoot” (696).

There are few places on this Earth, if any, where the possibilities are truly endless. However, if you detach yourself from the physical world and emerge into the “online” world, you find that this just might actually be accurate in this realm. The World Wide Web has had so much to offer to us since the early 1990s, but with this comes controversy. Unleashed onto a plane of seemingly immeasurable freedom of anonymity, was the world ready for such responsibility? Since those early days when new emerging technology changed our lives immensely, have we at all become a better place, or have we bitten off more than we can chew, and doomed our human relations forever? Exploring these concepts are three in-depth articles, including: “Growing Up Tethered” by Sherry Turkle, “The Loneliness of the Interconnected” by Charles Seife, and “Cybersexism” by Laurie Penny. Although it is thought that the Internet brings the world together, it actually does not help us politically, culturally, and economically like one would believe, as it makes us unable to be independent, isolates us from different points of view, and encourages real-world violence against women and other minority groups.

The rapid expansion of technological advancement is engulfing our culture. The author of IRL Fetish, Nathan Jurgenson argues that people have a weird interest in the world of offline. Technological advances are leading people into the realm of online, but Jurgenson also realizes the glorification of movement to offline. People who believe online world is destroying the real-life connection and many writers lament, “Writer after writer laments the loss of a sense of disconnection, of boredom (now redeemed as a respite from anxious info-cravings) …” (Jurgenson 127). People who are saying technological advances is removing people from the real-life so they think they can create a world where online does not exist. This new movement is educating the world that phone must be put away and boast about being offline. In IRL Fetish by Nathan Jurgenson, the author illustrates the practice of fetishizing of the offline world creates a misrepresentation of online and the offline world.

The use of technology has catalyzed society into an era that is increasingly interconnected yet impersonal at the same time. Despite technology’s endless list of assets, many fail to acknowledge its shortcomings when mentioning what is lost as a result of using it. Although in “Great to Watch” by Maggie Nelson, she is not afraid to share her skepticism of technology, as well as the role it plays in desensitizing individuals on a day-to-day basis. The internet is an invaluable resource to many because it is a public domain for sharing ideas, opinions, and knowledge that any and everyone can have access to. In a sense, it does not restrict what someone may see or do, and this can either be a good thing or a bad thing. The booming use of new media

The Internet has proven itself to be helpful, but it can also be a scary place. When the Internet first emerged, it was difficult to gauge its full potential. The Internet was actually created as a “military communications network in the 1960s” (Campbell et al., 2016, p. 41). However, the Internet became a more integral part of society around the 21st century when it transformed into a hub of information and entertainment. The film, The Net, features the early years of the Internet and the dangers that came with it. This film took a radical stance about how the Internet can damage a person’s life. The film remains relevant today since it inspires paranoia regarding the fragile safety

In her call to action, The People’s Platform; Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, Astra Taylor addresses underlying social and economic forces of the internet and differential perspectives towards it. Taylor discusses the new internet in which content is king and, people are now the product, this is called Web 2.0. She discusses this topic from a couple viewpoints; those who would believe that the internet is truly the new people’s platform and that it is the golden age of sharing and collaboration, called the Techno-optimists. The counterparts of this interpretation of the internet are what she calls the Techno-Skeptics, who have a similar mindset in that of Nicholas Carr, an author about technology in the modern age, with the

At the beginning of his essay, Carr describes his interactions between reading and the internet: “I’m not thinking the way I used to think... Now my concentration starts to drift after two or three pages... For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online” (150). In this passage, Carr depicts how the internet has changed him; he used to be able to concentrate for a long time, but with distractions from the internet he is unable to hold his focus while reading and can only concentrate for “two or three pages.” By including himself in the group of people who are afflicted by the pitfalls of the internet, Carr appears more honest and credible, which makes his argument believable.

Technology has deprived the citizens in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and “The Pedestrian” their freedom to think with depth and the meaningful, social interactions that make up the quality of life.

Technology is everywhere, from your house, to your car, to sometimes even yourself. It is a wonderful thing that makes life a lot easier sometimes, but it also has many downsides. Due to technology, many morals have begun to decline and some disappear. It has slowly begun to take over the society that we live in (Zipes). Ray Bradbury’s

“Complete darkness, not a hint of the silver world outside, the window tightly shut, the chamber to tomb-world where no sound from the great city could penetrate” (9). In the novel, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury compares this “tomb-world” to the modern society we live in. The imagery of the restriction the room has to the real world metaphorically explains how technology can weaken and infect a person’s awareness of their surroundings. To most, technology is viewed as advancements in society, as we develop more knowledge to improve our lifestyles for pleasure. However, technology is destructive to the mind as it instead, deceives a person which makes them lose their purpose. Bradbury expresses his trepidation of how obsession with technology and entertainment will make people become mindless and inhumane through figurative language, symbolism, and imagery.

In the end, while Lyon and Hafner give us an entertaining story regarding how the Internet was discovered, we are still left wondering about what effect the Internet is actually having. True, we see all of the hard work that occurred behind the scenes in the making of the Internet in this book, but now the question must be asked: where does the Internet take us? This is a very important question in the context of where technology takes our culture, and takes humanity in general. Indeed, every piece of technology has an effect on the people within the culture. There is, after all, certain political and social consequences to the progress in technology. In his essay "Do

In the article “You Are Already Living Inside a Computer” Ian Bogost confronts society as his audience over the apparent addiction to technology that is taking over the world. Bogost depicts characteristics of an egos approach simply by the context of his area of writing, he is writing for a well-established website called The Atlantic. By that alone he is already providing his audience with reasons to believe what he writes, he also makes references to his previous publishing’s. Ian Bogost successfully conveys his thoughts and opinions about technology by correctly using the appeals of logos, pathos, and egos throughout his article with the help of a few assertions.