Rebecca D Reeve's Blog

It’s 2am… the reality of my deadlines is finally hitting me (two weeks late). In my deluded state I’m considering the possibility my thesis topic is divinely inspired.

From Marita Sturken’s Technological Visions:

“Spinning technology through the Fall of Man narrative casts us as the ignorant architects of our own undoing. In this narrative, we make our artifacts but they in turn cast us out into world in which we are not suited. The narrative of the Fall reduces the dynamic relations of people and technology to a story in which technology is the cruel, decisive actor. It was a God with ultimate power who expelled humans from the Garden of Eden. The new narratives of the Fall put technology into that position. They rationalize human passivity in the face of anxiety about technology. They give a sense of inevitability to people’s feelings of impotence in the face of our creations” (Struken et al. 2004: 23-24).

“Spin is distracting. Overheated debates about computer addiction and Internet depression keep us from confronting issues raised by contemporary technology that are resistant to the oversimplification of spin…Technology does things for use but also to us, to our ways of perceiving the world, to our relationships and sense of ourselves” (Struken et al. 2004: 23).

“The world-view of most of the industrialized world remains relentlessly modern in its valuing of science, technology, growth, and progress. Yet these modern sensibilities are integrated with an increasingly postmodern sensibility – a sense of cynicism and fatigue with modernity’s hurtling forward into the future, a world increasingly defined by the digital, the computer, and the virtual… Yet this feeling of life speeding out of control is a deeply modern one, one that prevailed throughout the twentieth century. This moment in history is thus defined specifically by the tensions of living with both the heightened qualities of modernity and the shifting worldview of postmodernism” (Struken et al. 2004: 72).

Too late to comment on these strings of writing, but I think I’ve found a conclusion.

— Speaking of ’spin’… Kurt Vonnegut passed away yesterday at 84, amazed at his old age after a life-long smoking habit. After joining the army and working for the Chicago City News Bureau, he did PR for General Electric, “a job he loathed.” He published four books before be able to give up selling Saabs to support himself.

I suppose it’s stories like Dana Vachon’s that keep the hope alive for all those bloggers out there. A 28 yr. old prep-kid-turned-investment-banker-turned-blogger got a $650,000 advance to write about his insights into NYC society. The book has already been optioned to the company who produced Babel. It’s possible he provides an illuminating perspective, but not likely of the slaughterhouse 5 variety. See above for ’shifting worldview of postmodernism.’