The Reality Behind America’s Media

Andrew Hamilton

Ms. Augustine

AP Language and Composition

15 December 2014

The Reality Behind America’s Media

In the event that a question was posed, any question, today's automatic response is to discover the answer through technological innovations. We've become reliant on the ticking of clocks, the virtual universe of the web, and the comfort of our mobile devices. A troublesome concept for us to understand, conversely, just thirty years prior the vast majority of these did not exist.

So how has this influenced our subconscious? Have we transformed our minds into a living machine, or are we so dependent to outside answers that we have stopped thinking for ourselves? In today's general society, we've entered a mental state of oblivious ecstasy about how little wisdom and insight we truly have. Neil Postman (1984), the writer of "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and a teacher, handled the now evident certainty that contradictory to George Orwell's expectation that our rights to thinking would be torn away, Aldous Huxley's educated assumption that we will happily hand them away willingly has become more and more accurate. (Postman, 1984). We permit our information to be nourished to us by the TV which trivializes it, and the web which merges fact and opinion together so complicatedly that it is mixed beyond comprehension. Yet we process this material, we fabricate our thoughts and feelings around what the other deceived populous demands is reality. But we are mindful of the incomplete facts and lies out there, so when the truth emerges, it is unrecognizable.

Nicholas Carr (2008) marvels of our capacity to separate how we think and how a laptop processes feedback in his article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" He complains of a current incapability to give careful consideration to books for extended episodes of time. He places the blame on getting his data online in rapid “bits and pieces,” which has made perusing books a bore to him. Carr references Lewis Mumford, a cultural critic, who talks about the development of the clock. He degrades the clock by stating, "In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, we stopped listening to our senses and starting obeying the clock." (Carr, 2008, p. 4) Is it correct to say that we've given over our minds, as well as our bodies to technological innovations? We are becoming slaves to other people who nourish us the data we yearn for, and who tell us how and when to do what instinct had guided us to accomplish for a number of years. And now, we're paying the cost.

For a number of years we've perused and composed books, which helped pass down intelligence to younger generations. Books created unimaginable worlds we've never dreamed of, they doubted our philosophical reason, and they addressed it. From stories to manuals, books have been passed on as an accumulation of learning; but for the very first time in centuries we're raising whole generations who have never perused a short story, poem, or even a novel. David McCullough (2008), writer of "The Love of Learning" defines for us the distinction between wisdom and facts. Information is insignificant until we have made the ruling to make it essential and learn from it. We can't simply memorize facts and classify ourselves as learned; we must look deeper and discover what the facts mean to us. "Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.” (McCullough, 2008, p. 2) Without literature, we are just being fed information, words, and numbers without any genuine importance. (McCullough, 2008)

Our ability to comprehend and contemplate issues produces a capacity to see past the ordinary and think intricately on a circumstance. When told the speed of a weighted ball's fall, and the conflicting power of air battling against gravity, we can consider this and afterward ask something that never came up, "Why did the weighted ball drop? Will a ten pound ball fall more rapidly than an eight pound ball? What about if the weighted ball were rectangular?" Knowledge is based on this establishment of thought, and with our advances answering our inquiries - individuals have quit questioning all together.

In the article "O Americano, Outra Vez!" composed by Richard P. Feynman, an American researcher and instructor, the consequences of education but never understanding ideas were made evident. In Brazil, physics are taught as young as primary school, in any case, not a single pupil taught by Feynman in Brazil appeared to have the capacity to fathom what the words implied past the data. (Feynman, 1985) This powerlessness to have thoughts and inquiries over facts we learn blocks our capacity to truly comprehend what we are learning.

Due to the accessibility of data today, we have quit questioning as to whether this requires confirmation. We've become indolent in our progression, and expect that kind of work and verification to be carried out by somebody who we may say is “cleverer than me." What today's society doesn't appear to comprehend is that this mentality has hindered our development as the human race, and we are arriving at a stalemate of ecstatic lack of awareness, much as Huxley anticipated. Yet this is not to say technological innovation is the sole base of our diminishing brainpower. The blame lies specifically in our attitude towards the universe of data that lies in our devices. Instead of using this kind of asset as a layer of foundation to go past in discovery in a manner that was unimaginable before, we let the perpetual cluster of information sit there only to be used at our discretion, which is not frequently.