Technology and Literature for the Future

ENGL 1420 Tech+Lit

March 9, 2014

Midterm-1

1. Utopian writers agreed that engineers and technocrats were extremely important to the future.  Engineers are the inventors that can create the means for the future.  They are the basis for improvement.  But in order to have good engineers, they need to have a good education.  This is why a good education is so important and such a big part.  It teaches the people about the past so we can improve on the future.  Education also gets people thinking and informs them about the problems we need to fix.
2. The Chicago and St. Louis fairs were so different from the New York world fair.  The Chicago fair had buildings that were very elegant and classical.  In this fair they had Tesla and Edison showing off direct and alternating current.  This was the first fair to use electricity.  The Chicago and St. Louis fairs were a huge cultural and social event.  Then, that brings us to the New York worlds fair.  The buildings were designed to be very modern and they have some interesting names.  This fair had themed areas that almost catered to everyone.  The eyes of this fair were on the future.  This fair had the ideas, materials, and forces of work to make the world of tomorrow.
3. The biggest miss in the prediction of the computers of the future is that people thought we would only need three or four.  But as we know today, that is completely wrong.   Computers and the Internet are so important to the development of our future.  A lot of our knowledge and information of the past is on the web.  That is why we have smart phones and personal computers.  So we can access the information really easily.  That same assumption of the past can still happen in the future.  We have just discovered nanotechnology.  Nanotech can lead to so many different opportunities for medicine, science, and engineering.  That is why it is hard for us to predict.   Nanotech could go in so many different directions because we are still so new to it.
4. Taylorism is also called scientific management.   It is making a plant more efficient, eliminating waste, and standardization of the best practices.   This made people look like tools on the assemble line.  The drawback of this is people could simply be replaced with robots or a machine.  That machine would get the job done no matter what and would never have any human error.  In the videos we saw in class, there was a huge emphasis on gears and timing.  And because of gears and timing, the job was getting done faster.   That meant more money and product.
5. In that chapter Tichi described how animals/systems/gadgets work.  She then said that housewives are not housewives anymore.  They are homemaker engineers of the factory.  I feel like that same shift in metaphors is going to happen again.  We can see this as more and more people shift to using more technology and computers.  We also had the invention of the smart phone.  That technology has taken over a big part of our lives today.  It makes some people very unsocial because they would rather be on there phones then carry on a normal conversation.  That is why people are forgetting how to socialize face to face.
6. They were cheaply printed dime novels that were written to appeal to young boys.  They surrounded engineering and technology that came out of the 1800’s.  They are stories of inventions and there inventors.
7. Most of what was at the worlds fair showed up at Coney Island in one way or another.  Coney Island took all of the best technology and used it to create never before seen rides.  They were all run by electric and this was the first park of its kind.  Workers were a little skeptical at first because they had to use machines at work to make products.  They did not know machines could be used so they could have fun.  Another big perk of Coney Island, was that it was pretty cheap fun.
8. Charlie Chaplin’s movie showed that in order to be more efficient, people need to be more organized.  And people need to do a specific job that they are skilled in so they can get the job done right. The movie also emphasized a lot of gears and machines.  It showed people that if they used machines, they would be more efficient.  Machines are the future.
9. The most negative view I have seen so far this semester is that machines could become more powerful then us.  Or that we become too lazy and let the technology and computers do all the work.
10. Gibson’s story relates to the photos he took and how the future could have been, but has not.  We can see this in all the world fairs and the videos we have seen in class.  Some of the technology at the world’s fairs did come true.  But a good amount of the technology and concepts that the shows portrayed never came true.   An example of this from the New York worlds fair was the picture phone.   It never caught on but had a vision in the future.  Instead someone invented software called Skype that almost does the same thing.  
11. Two major assumptions we have talked about for the future have been time travel and flying cars.  People keep giving both of them dates on when they will be completed.  But we will never know that.  In class we watched a movie with flying cars.  We also, got an ad about a time machine.  It asked people to invest so that they can reserve their own.  Or people ask for others in invest money see we can research more about flying cars.  Both of these examples are ways we are being sold those assumptions.  They allow us to by a stake into the future. The funny thing is that most of us don’t ever realize that we do this.