Friends, this is a 12 minute video. A nice story with several interviews and quality production.

Favorite quote: “In my neighborhood if I hear a gun shot, some one shot a wild animal. In the cities, somebody shot somebody else.”

No french class Friday (sweet!) So, I will be observing people at the Marquette and 5th Street towers (Mpls). Thinking of urban design and the nature of conversation, dress, and purpose (if any one can know that) of the masses. Then shoving all these observations through the mind filter of Le Corbusier and Louis Wirth (rest their souls) to come up with the Cities paper due Sunday (I mentioned that earlier – Deadlines take the fun out but add “getting it done”).

Tonight: cuisinarted an orange, it made for a good juice. Especially with a dash of Angel’s custom infused orange liquor. Mmm Orangy. Seems that the day long Wednesday and early morning today made for the foggy head and stuffy nose. Hoping that OJ, yoga and sleep will fix it.

Downloaded an app called Manifesto, an RSS reader for the iPhone. Hoping to keep up with my favorite blogs and writers more efficiently. You know who you are. If you don’t, well, I will post a list of my favorite writers and blogs sometime.

Other news: saw a nice TED video (thanks Prof. Brady) about happiness. Turns out, we possess an ability to manufacture happiness. Imagining future and opposable thumbs are some of the greatest human advances. Here it is (20 mins): http://bit.ly/d2l5Xt

In 1916, four time Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Robert Frost, wrote the poem “The Road Not Taken”. Since then much has been written, debated and argued about this poem. The last three lines of the last stanza are probably the most famous and perhaps the most misunderstood. They are, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I– / I took the one less traveled by, / and that has made all the difference.” Some may take these lines to mean, going your own way is the better option or taking the less traveled path in life builds character and individualism.

This view may be overly romantic and sentimental. More than that, it may be mocking all those who are indecisive. Back to the chicken vs. the fish. I say, if either choice was equally fair because you were hungry and didn’t care, then just order. And please, end this silly affair. In Frost’s poem his speaker reflects on the choice he made as making “all the difference”. Contrary to popularly belief, Frost is having a joke at the speaker, who in retelling his story embellishes the importance of the choice.

Freelance writer and instructor at Oakton Community College and College of Lake County, David Kelly, calls the poem a “failure”. He says in a online article, “For Frost to expect readers to ‘get’ that this indecisive character’s dilemma actually is as simple as it seems shows a touch of naivete on the author’s part.” Kelly is calling out Frost for not leaving more obvious clues to his mocking intention. The reader is left to take Frost at his word: that a specific choice did have a profound effect. Not so.

Some become implicated by wanting to believe in the adventure of the speaker. Others enjoy the pursuit of the speaker’s life results as proof of the path less taken. The reader exaggerates the choice between two paths as being a grand metaphor for life and in so doing overlooks the contradictions of the poem. As if the choice to be a Noble peace prize winner or a bank robber were simple. To sink or swim. To live or die. This is not a choice of life or death.

A confused reader of the poem, Miss Yates, had wondered about the “sigh” in the last stanza of the poem and wrote Frost a letter requesting clarification. Frost’s reply admits a “private jest” and a gentle “teasing”. His reply:

Dear Miss Yates:
No wonder you were a little puzzled over the end of my Road Not Taken. It was my rather private jest at the expense of those who might think I would yet live to be sorry for the way I had taken in life. I suppose I was gently teasing them. I’m not really a very regretful person, but for your solicitousness on my behalf I’m your friend always Robert Frost

Does the “sigh” indicates a regret over a decision made or not made. Frost answers this thinking by stating he is “not really a regretful person”. If one considers the “I” of the quote “sorry for the way I had taken in life” to be reference to the speaker of the poem and not Frost himself we find the “sigh” to be the speaker pausing for dramatic effect to his future audience. 


Kelly investigates that last stanza’s contradictions and offers the possibility of a speaker, who “only wishes that he could choose “the one less traveled by.” As if that would be the courageous and “unconventional” approach.

Life is not but one choice that will make all the difference, rather the opportunity to chose and chose often that makes the difference. We live in a world of have to. Have to go to work, pick up kids, pay taxes, write an essay, get that tooth looked at, be the best man, attend funerals, put gas in the car, and on and on. The ability for Frost’s speaker to enjoy a simple walk through the woods with the option chose a path, is of greater value than the choice it’s self.

A guy and his fiance walk into a bar and order a drink. When I was younger I worked as a bar tender at an Italian chain restaurant. I served a couple that would later become my employer and his wife. My “choice” to kindly serve them dinner and drinks that night lead to me making friends and getting a job offer. I often tell the story of that moment as a turning point in my life, that it allowed me to tour (on the road), 48 states, canada, and the Virgin Islands. I say that I was talented, I say that the encounter made all the difference. Though as for that, I did not know him from the previous customer. In a non-embellished hind sight, I was just doing my job. Were my qualities as a good bartender what got me the touring job? Perhaps. Turns out I quit that restaurant job, left my boss hanging to mix drinks herself. Of what quality is a bartender who does that? The decision and its effects are often hidden from the chooser at the time of choosing.

The speaker has spare time, but not too much. Is a self defined traveler and is “sorry [he] could not travel both”. The character of the speaker is, in many ways, predetermined, so that one choice has no great impact. Further, the single choice has little reference with out considering the apparent free will that brought the speaker to the choice at hand. One path over an other.

Frost’s biographer, Laurence Thompson, documented in “Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph 1915-1938”, that Frost had written “The Road Not Taken” as a satire of his friend Edward Thomas. Thomas lived with in Dymock, of Gloucestershire, England and is said to have often gone on walks with Frost.

The University of Gloucestershire recounts the “cottage industry” of writers and poets residing there. Poets including Frost, Wordsworth, Farjeon and Brooke, were moving away from “rhetorically ornate and emotionally restricted” literary “idiom” and moving towards “inspiration in natural settings and everyday experiences.” It is with in these everyday experiences that Frost and Thomas shared ideas and built a friendship. The University credits Thomas with aiding the formation of Frost’s “new poetic philosophy”.

Many years later at the 1953 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference on August 23rd Frost provides some detail on the inspiration of his speaker. Frost clarifies, “I wasn’t thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other. He was hard on himself that way.”

When Thomas went to fight in World War I, Frost sent him the poem and received the reply, “I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them and advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.” This reply illustrates that his friend is aware of a subtile joke but knows it will be difficult to share with Frost’s audience with out knowledge of the speaker’s personally. 
 Frost is enormously successful as a poet even if one of his more popular poems is misinterpreted. He must enjoy the allusion of the poem for he does not aim to correct the interpretation. He has been quoted at the Breadwinners conference as saying, “The Road Not Taken” is a “tricky poem”. Upholding the reader’s own interpretation by not confirming or denying the specifics shows the mischievous nature of Frost. And that has made all the difference.

Works Cited

Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken” 1916. Approaching Literature: Writing + Reading + Thinking. 2nd ed. Ed. Peter, Schakel and Jack Ridl. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s 2008. 667.

Kelly, David. English Literature: Every thing about English Literature. 21 July 2009

Finger, L. L. Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’: a 1925 Letter come to Light. American Literature v.50

University of Gloucestershire. Writers and Artists Collection Dymock Poets Archive. 21 July 2009.

Pritchard H, William. On “The Road Not Taken. 21 July 2009 


Thompson, Lawrance Roger. Robert Frost the Years of Triumph, 1915-1938. Henry Holt & Company, Inc., 1966

Anyway I thought I would try out the wordpress app for the iPhone. Seems good so far. I should like to post on a more regular basis… And some pics too. I worry that facebook is the main deposit for pics these days, perhaps it is just as well. It is like hanging out at a bar that you don’t love but it happens that all your pals are there. Well ok I will see you there- will Joe, Bob and Sue be there – yeah I will stop by for one.

WhatEver

More soon.

A New York Times Bestseller, Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, tells the true story of humanitarian Greg Mortenson’s life. Through a strange series of events and Motenson’s sheer will, he is known around the world for his work educating the children of Pakistan and Afghanistan since the early 1990s. These areas are now known to the world through the Bush Administration’s “war on terror” campaign. Mortenson, in his personal experience building a school with a Pakistani village elder and friend, finds, “I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to each them” (150). Mortenson found a different yet simply effective way to peacefully combat terrorism.

To understand the current relationship between the military and private corporations, it may be helpful to look through 60 years of American history. The story of the DuPont Corporation seems a relevant example in that their work was instrumental in the processing of plutonium for use in nuclear weapons during World War II and after. DuPont’s story also marks the beginning of a change with industry and the military.

Nylon and Bombs published in 2007 documents the history of the DuPont Corporation, an American company focused primarily on chemical engineering. Author Pap A. Ndiaye explores DuPont’s 1930s commercial success of nylon and subsequent military projects. Ndiaye calls, nylon [o]ne of the century’s most brilliant industrial achievements […] [earning] DuPont billions of dollars” (2). More than just pantyhose “nylon revolutionized the textile industry […] [and] led to the creation of plastics” (2). The plastics revolution coupled with mass production has made products from and for nearly every niche of the modern market for the last 50 years.

Around the same time nylon was being developed, DuPont scientist and engineers began working with the “Manhattan Project” (143). This top-secret project was formed out of President Roosevelt’s decision “to create a uranium commission composed of high ranking officers and physicists” to research the possibilities of controlled nuclear “chain reactions” (143). Ndiaye says, Roosevelt formed this commission after Albert Einstein wrote him a letter in 1939. Einstein said in the letter, “it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction […] [and] in the immediate future extremely powerful bombs of a new type may be constructed” (143). Roosevelt looked to this new type of weapon for it’s destructive power especially after the “Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into war against Japan and then Germany” (144).

DuPont was previously contracted by the military to provide every thing from explosives, paint, tires, DDT, waterproofing agents, as well as the wonder product of nylon for parachutes (152 – Ndiaye). The company was now asked to become a “partner in the problem-laden manufacture of a product [plutonium] that so far existed only as an idea” (152). Over the next five years the Manhattan Project and associated production created two nuclear bombs that were exploded over two Japanese cities with massive casualties (172).

Mighty America and its allies have the ingenuity and dedication of it’s partners, like DuPont, to thank for the victory over Japan and Germany in the 1940s. Developing and deploying the nuclear bomb over Nagasaki “instantly killed 35,000 people and injured 60,000” (172 – Ndiaye) (more by other estimates). While the creation of two devastating bombs have been credited with ending World War II, they, created an ongoing arms race. Ndiaye’s research shows, “[a]ll the other atomic bombs built by the United States and the USSR after the war were plutonium bombs” (171). The resulting arms race would go on to create the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons ever–the Cold War (2).

DuPont for better or worse “refused any profits and agreed to sign the contract only on this condition” (150). Ndiaye concludes, this stipulation was to defuse any future charges that DuPont was a “merchant of death” (150). DuPont not profiting could also be seen as public relations move or a “legal rampart that would protect it from any future congressional investigations” (151). Certainly the government did fund the expenses of DuPont during the research and development phase (150). This funding created stability and market capitalization for DuPont who seemed to have more to gain then lose.

Eight years after World War II ended five-star General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower would be President of the United States. Eisenhower’s background is military. He graduated from West Point, became the first supreme commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization and was the President during the Cold War. This man knew war, from the battlefield to the oval office.

Almost two decades after the Manhattan Project began in 1939 (143), Eisenhower would reflect on all that he had seen, heard, and experienced during his impressive career as commander of an Army and chief executive. He would warn a nation of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” overpowering democratic ideals. His famous words relevant now as they were then, have been quoted in many books, articles, and international discussions on peace and war. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

What would Eisenhower say about America today? Eisenhower saw the trends of a national defense that would require the power and expertise of private companies. He also saw the risk of a profit motive over peace that would come to drive the military. In DuPont’s history, production capacity and their knowledge base proved a valuable asset to the nation. Surely one could say the government could not have done it with out them.

What makes the use of private companies by the defense departments before World War II and after different is the change in government’s role as motivating hub for production. In Gordon Adams’ 1982 book The Politics of Defense Contracting Adams quotes a few representatives of different top defense contractors. The quotes fully acknowledge, with a certain amount of arrogance, the unfortunate state of Eisenhower’s vision. Adams quotes Peter Schenck of the Raytheon Corp. as saying, “ there are highly placed military men who sincerely feel that industry currently is setting the pace in the research and development of new weapons systems” (98). Adams then quotes a Pratt & Whitney/UT (United Technologies) official as saying, “[w]e have the technical superiority and are on the offensive. We spoon-feed [the government]” (98). Another quote comes from Lockheed’s director of corporate planning who says, “we recognize it is the Government agency that must prepare the “’Mission Element Need Statement,’” but […] we tried our hand at drafting MENS ourselves” (98). These quotes provide a glimpse into the minds of America’s top defense contractors but more so tell a relationship between industry and military.

In Eisenhower’s farewell address he warns “misplaced power exists and will persist” referring to not only to corruption but to a systematic need to maintain the defense industry’s status quo. The New York Times published an article April 20th titled, “Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” which explores the measures of “misplaced power” maintenance. Times writer David Barstow uncovers American “military analysts” with conflicts of interest. The analysts often play the roll of war and foreign policy experts within media outlets with the “appearance of objectivity” (para 4). Barstow says, “[m]ost of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess” (para 5). The “hardly ever disclosed” ties are in the forms of “lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants” to military contractors (para 7). Barstow identifies the motivation of the “Pentagon information apparatus […] [is] to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance” (para 4). With so much money involved through the agencies of government, contractors, DoD, and the administration, how does “we the people” have any say over how progress is defined?

The founding fathers of America purposefully set up three branches of government to check and balance their growing democracy. One of these branches is legislative, with much power over where and how the budget of the federal government is spent. Seymour Melman in his book The Permanent War Economy explains “a serious conversion process [that] would necessarily involve a major alteration in the function of members of Congress who have become involved in a complex agent-client relationship “(228). What Melman refers to is defense contracts being awarded to congressional districts and job creation within those districts. Therefore to limit the funding of the defense industry is to limit jobs and growth of the people within the districts. The Rise of the Gunbelt authors Markusen et al. discover, “[t]he lack of these dollars helped create industrial wastelands in cities that had once been the industrial core of America” (3). The people need jobs to maintain lifestyles, educate themselves, and save for retirement. It is partially the role of the legislation (per the founding fathers) to insure this: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Eisenhower also mentions in his address having an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” is the “only” way to prevent abuse and essentially corruption of war. Adams describes part of a military contractor’s costs of research and development of proposals (not weapons) as being “reimbursed,” totaling amounts “nearly $1 billion a year” (99). Adams says, the funds “escape detailed Congressional, let alone public scrutiny” (99). The lack of oversight by the people and their representatives to the developing plans of the war industry is a tragedy. With out restraint and direction of and by the citizenry, contractors will continue to bill the commonwealth of the people via the Department of Defense.

Through intended specialization of labor, defense contractors have become more and more dependent on the budgets of the DoD. Adams says, as a way to consolidate and maintain the defense industry, “[h]alf of the total spending each years goes to the top 10 DoD contracting companies” (99). Or is it the other way around? The DoD has become dependent on the contractors.

Needless to say there is a relationship. One of mutual need and benefit. Adams quotes John Finney of the New York Times as saying, “ The Defense Department [is] largely populated by business executives in mid-career, passing through the Pentagon on the way to bigger and better jobs in industry” (100). The security clearances earned working for the state can be transferred to private companies which allows the companies to be in on the development of confidential DoD needs.

Some may argue that a military-industry relationship is the best way to go. Others may argue further that America should let capitalism and the free market economy create the best weapon. For example Lockheed Martin, a major military contractor, produced a bomber that could fly nearly undetected by radar: the F-117A Nighthawk or Stealth Bomber as it is commonly called. Perhaps Lockheed and the DoD made the best bomber in the history of bombers. Surly the engineering and performance was the best money could buy. Isn’t “the best” what America is all about? Of course it is! Interestingly, CNN’s web site reports, the F-117A Nighthawk will be retired this month because better models are in production.

Owning the best-equipped military is impressive and ideally leads to lives saved through better management of the theater of war. Markusen et al. quote a defense contractor as saying, “You face demands for time, performance, and cost. You can have two, but not three” (35). The policy formed from DoD funding private contractors to build an advanced military, Adams says, “raises serious questions” to a “republic that has prided itself on the public participation [of] national policy” (100). Melman comments on the monopolistic ways of the industry-military arrangement “[t]hese military goods […] do not compete with civilian goods in any existing civilian markets, and can be made obsolete […] thereby ”creating” fresh demand” (261). Economic interests mandate the continuation of armament production as a means of market stabilization.

Money, money money. Barbara Harriss-White is a Professor of Development Studies at Queen Elizabeth House, and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford University, UK. Harriss-White, within an essay titled “Globalization, Insecurities and Responses” writes, “[i]n 1997 worldwide military spending amounted to $740 bn [billion], making arms officially the biggest manufacturing industrial sector worldwide” (17). In June 2007 Reuters, the world’s largest international multimedia news agency, reported that “[g]lobal military spending rose 3.5 percent last year [2006] to $1.2 trillion”. Investing in the last ten years of growth in the war industry would prove to be quite profitable.

The argument that “because it pays the bills” is firstly immoral and secondly is an argument based on the perpetuation of global instability. The arms industry feeds itself from the wealth of its host. While this production may look from the outside as creating jobs and increasing gross domestic product, the effect is, from a worldview, a net loss. Harriss-White comments on this dichotomy, “[a]rmaments are commodities with the unusual distinction of being in their essence both a cause of insecurity, destruction and abuses of human rights and a means of protection against insecurity (17). The global cycle of weapons and weapons systems production indiscriminately arm both side of a conflict for the sake of private gain.

Susan Willett, Director of the Cost of Disarmament Program at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva Switzerland notes the thinking of pre 1995 was “economic interdependence renders war unprofitable” (184). The market based on supply and demand was thought to equalize opportunity and replace war with trade. Willett comments, that the logic of a free market in reducing “tensions and conflict” while it “enhances the living standards of the poor” is flawed (184). The objectivity needed to form peaceful stabilizing policy measures is diminished through codependence with the defense industry. Willett claims there is “a tendency to grant less importance to arms control and diplomacy in favour of the use of military instruments” by super power nations. Would one pick the same fight if the military were less advanced or less funded?

Greg Mortenson, as told in the book Three Cups of Tea, picked a fight; the balanced education of children (33). Mortenson, with very little money or advanced means, is able to change the lives of thousands of people in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mortenson is quoted in Three Cups of Tea saying, “I’d gotten to the point where I could put up a school that would educate a village for generations for about twelve thousand dollars” (230). In a meeting after September 11th 2001, Mortenson would recommend to “top military planners” the “next steps” to rebuild Afghanistan (293-94). His words:

Now take the cost of one of those missiles tipped with a Raytheon guidance system, which I think is about $840,000. For that much money, you could build dozens of schools that could provide tens of thousands of students with a balanced nonextremist education of the course of a generation. Which do you think will make us more secure?
Mortenson speaks to a cause of conflict. By providing education Mortenson aims to give the power back to the people and enable people in the world of ideas and global commerce. He also calls out the absurdity of public wealth going to expensive weapons that produce a false sense of security.

Mortenson’s cost estimate on providing balanced education to children seems inconsequential relative to current defense industry spending. Mortenson does not seem to be advocating the creation of a surrogate welfare state, rather the empowerment of a people to take on their own challenges via their own means. Willett calls, “[p]overty, the basic factor undermining human security, [in that it] not only leaves basic needs unmet, but creates the conditions for conflict and violence” (190). As a matter of cause and effect, Willett implies “[t]he pervading culture of violence undermines attempts at conflict resolution and peace-building” (191). Changing the manufacturing focus from production of arms to the fulfillment of basic needs may do more to promote peace than all the bombs in the world. Willett contrasts the “traditional notions of security […] preoccupied with weapon systems and balance of power politics, [with] human security [that] is concerned with the basic right to life and human dignity” (198). Unless the commonwealth of the people is redirected from the defense industry to true human needs, instability will cycle into collapse.

Will the persistent destructive nature of people ever cease? Reducing the availability of weapons may not change human nature: eliminating profit from war will reduce the temptation to fight it. A reallocation of resources is needed from defense to a focus on long-term stability of the human race.
———
Works Cited

Adams, Gordon. The Politics of Defense Contracting. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982.

Associated Press. “Air Force’s Stealth Fighters Making Final Flights.” CNN on the Web 11 Mar. 2008. 14 Apr. 2008. <http://edition.cnn.com/2008/
US/03/11/stealth.fighter.ap/index.html>

Barstow, David. “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand.” 20 Apr. 2008. 20 Apr. 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/
20generals.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin>

Farewell Address. 15 Apr. 2008. National Archives. 17 Jan. 1961. <http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/speeches/farewell_address.html>

Harriss-White, Barbara, eds. Globalization and Insecurity: Political, Economic and Physical Challenges. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Harriss-White, Barbara. “Globalization, Insecurities and Responses:
an Introductory Essay.” Harriss-White 1-42.

Markusen, Ann, et al. The Rise of the Gunbelt. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991.

Melman, Seymour. The Permanent War Economy. New York, Simon and
Schuster, 1974.

Mortenson, Greg, and David Oliver Relin. Three Cups of Tea. New York:
Penguin Books, 2007.

Ndiaye Pap A. Nylon and Bombs. Trans.Elborg Forster. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

Reuters. “Global military spending hits $1.2 trillion –study.” Reuters on the Web
11 June 2008 15 Apr. 2008 <http://www.reuters.com/article/
latestCrisis/idUSL11196461>

Willett, Susan. “Globalization and the Means of Destruction: Physical Insecurity and the Weapons Industry and the Turn of the Millennium.” Harriss-White 184-202.

During the last 100 years civilization has engineered and developed a multi-media revolution. Life, however, was not always so modern. People have long used symbols such as words, sounds, and images to represent and convey ideas. In the play My Children My Africa playwright Athol Fugard, uses his main character, a black teacher in 1980s apartheid Africa to say “[w]ithout words a man can not think” (58). The statement begs the question, what does one think about all day? The unending association of words to their meaning is a possibility. Words to think by are the result of language, which has come from advancements in communication. Neil Postman’s 1961 book Television and the Teaching of English searched for ways of approaching the teaching of English during the age of early television. Within the book Postman, suggests, “that men adapted organs of breathing and eating to the purpose of talking and have probably been making meaningful sounds at each other for at least 100,000 years” (6). As a matter of survival then, humans as well as earth’s multitude of sentient creatures developed an ability to communicate with each other.

Cave pictographs of early sapiens, for example, would require their understanding of sign representing the signified. Postman defines communication as “a process of exchanging symbolic meaning” (14). More than the utterance of sound or the act of action, communication becomes an exchange; meaning is transferred and society is born. Postman establishes, “by the middle of the fourth century B.C., the Ionic alphabet of twenty-four letters had become standardized” (7). Furthermore, Postman says, it is this advancement that marks the beginning of civilization (6). The power of comprehending meaning from symbolic shapes is great. However, the keeping of written records and the subsequent preservation of knowledge multiply what is available to know. The product of this preservation is an accelerated development of culture, technology, and a vast wealth of meaning tied to symbols.

As a result of the magnitude of information available the question changes from how one reads to how should one accesses the book. Postman forecasted a trend that perhaps author, Ray Bradbury, was also aware of. Postman states, “that because of the multiplication of the sources of symbolic experience a redefinition of “’literacy’” is required” (12). Using a cell phone, navigating the Internet, or catching a flight to New York all require various symbol cognition or literacy. In some cases the ability to navigate the interface may prove to be more valuable than the information sought. Pierre Levy, author of Cyberculture published in 2001, explores the impact of modern communication on society. Levy, who has PhD’s in sociology as well as information and communication sciences connects, “[t]he natural result of the inflation of information [to] its devaluation” (134). Similar to Fahrenheit 451’s fictional world, the world of 2008 is increasingly stocked with 50-inch-panel-televisions, interactive audio and video devices, and the 24-7 news cycle.

The modern race is entering a time when over stimulation of symbol rich environments may cause fatigue. Levy explains a relationship between humans and interfaces as fundamentally abstract. He says, “[w]e can only directly interact with its actualization, through […] [c]omputer codes, which are illegible, [until] actualized as readable text, visible images on computer screens or paper, [and] audible sounds in the atmosphere” (30). Does the human race succumb to apathy when faced with the myriad of virtual realities? Robert Cringely believes this is the wrong question. Cringely, who’s work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Newsweek, and Forbes, writes a weekly blog for Public Broadcasting Service about personal computers. Cringely blogs, “let’s be clear about what we’re measuring here. It has very little to do with specific technologies and everything to do with our adaptation to technology as a culture” (para 5). The active mind may become so entirely busy processing the stream of information that it losses the capacity for genuine thought, potentially resulting in passivity, apathy, and ignorance.

In comparing the cognition skills of mankind’s cave dwelling forefathers to today’s quantum physicists, one may speculate there is a something of a generation gap. Cringely suggests, [t]his happens not at the rate technologies are developed but at the rate we are capable of broadly absorbing them” (para 5). Advances of absorption have yielded a youth culture that is as removed from cave-people as they are from the very generation that birthed them. Cringely goes on to say, “the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal” (para 6). A more interactive approach to thinking is replacing the spectator model of the last 75 years.

It is said a generation is about 30 years. Gordon Moore, a founder of the computer chip maker, Intel, forecasted in the 1970s that “the number of circuits […] printed on a chip would double every eighteen months” says the 3rd Edition textbook of How to Read a Film by James Monaco. (447). What Moore is effectively saying is that computer processing power, the power the drives the information age, is growing at an exponential rate. The simple math of Moore’s Law produces roughly 30 cycles of doubling within a single generation. Grandma and Grandpa are left in the relative stone age. Fahrenheit 451’s depiction of a world in which apathy reins high and television is substitute for real thought may, however, be a passing phase or a fiction all together. Melissa Boweman, in an essay titled “Semantic Categories in the Language-Learning Child”, says, “[t]he growing child […] is socialized into the locally prevailing system of categorizing largely through his acquisition of language” (288). One generation builds the jet, the next flies it, and the generation after thinks of a trip to the moon as no big deal. Boweman further comments on modern children saying, “they live in a world in which events are presented to them in all their complex immediacy” (75). Now more than ever, people must take an active roll in their evolution by looking beyond the mechanical distraction of hyper-reality. Remembering that communication produces the framework for language while thought is built with language.

Is it not the thought, which counts? The development of the technology driven interface may be simply the infrastructure of an infant communication revolution and not a life-sucking-robot. Colin Cherry, in the essay “The Communication Explosion”, writes that “when interactively operating a computer, [one] is not in conversation with it. Cognitive effort is required on [one’s] part, which involves considerable training and skill, but the machine has no such powers” (262). Postman wrote about some of the pending shifts in teaching and learning, caused by the introduction of television, notes in 1961, “a five-year-old listening to and watching [television] is able to learn an incredibly large number of facts, perhaps more than he can profitably assimilate”. Postman recommends a change in the “fact centered curriculum” to a process that can make “significant use of the information” (35-36). A model of information coming from a commonwealth with the education system focused on access and interpretation may be more useful to society then just presenting information.

The intuitive quality of the interface will determine the success in the marketplace. Devices, displays, monitors, and the interconnected systems that enable them that create obstacles in the path to communication may be pass up by those that don’t. Cherry looks at teaching saying, “[technology] will gradually “’fade away,’” and the pupil will be in more human contact with human teachers. If not, technology will have failed” (263). Technology, like many methods of communication, needs to find a niche or die trying. Cyberculture’s author Levy, offers uses for modern interfaces, “[t]hese intellectual technologies promote the following: new forms of access to information […] [and] new forms of reasoning […] that [are] based neither on logical deduction nor on experience-based induction” (137). The idea of technology serving as simulation of reality should not be confused with simulation replacing thought. Cherry and Levy both view the roll of technology optimistically, as a medium to live with as compared to through.

Cringely suggests the mass acceptance and use of technology is what gives it appeal. Another way to look at this is that the loss of ubiquity would make a technology obsolete. For example, having a “telephone” with no one to call would reduce the value of the “telephone”. Cringely explains this value of technologies as “only empower[ing] us when they can be gracefully used by large, productive segments of our society” (para 4). Perhaps humanity will have growing pains as different gateways to information are brought to market. Glitches and failures are bound to occur as humankind misunderstands language and meaning.

What if Bradbury was on to something? What if television really is an appealing life-sucking-robot? Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451, creates Beatty, a character that is a government employed burner of books or viewed symbolically as an exterminator of commonwealth transferable knowledge. Beatty preaches, “People want to be happy. […] That’s all we live for, isn’t it. For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of [this]” (59). Beatty uses this logic to explain why diverse opinions are so toxic that they must be destroyed: “[b]urn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean” (60). Bradbury establishes pleasure and not knowledge as cultures highest calling. The effect is viewed as chilling: a medicated, “[y]ou took all the pills” (19), mono-culture hypnotized by virtual reality. Cringley also acknowledges this potential for passivity in non-fictional society. Cringley says, “[t]he increasing use of digital technologies and interactive communications networks has engendered a profound mutation in our relationship to knowledge” (152). Perhaps due to the speed at which information now arrives people are unable to fully process and contain knowledge.

The counter culture magazine Adbusters prides itself in providing commentary on humanity’s addictions to passive media, drugs, and stimulation. Kalle Lasn contributed an essay to the magazine in an early 2007 issue titled “Rewilding”. Lasn worries about the affect on modern society from too much “consumer cool machine”. She states, “[f]rom when we were babies crawling around the TV set in our living rooms, we’ve been lied to, hyped, propagandized, [and] branded (para 2). The long-term effects on cognition from exposure to virtual communication interfaces may not be realized for some time. What Lasn believes is a measurable effect of exposure she finds and cites in a report called “The Global Burden of Disease (1999), [in which] doctors predicted that depression will become the second most debilitating disease in the world, right after heart disease” (para 2).

If happiness, like Beatty says, is what humans want most then why are they so sad? Margaret Mead, author of Culture and Commitment published in 1970, attributes “our present crisis […] to the overwhelming rapidity of change, […], the triumph of a soulless technology and […] [the] breakdown of the Establishment” (64). This cultural breakdown Mead refers to may be directly related to the generation gap from technology As well as the resulting disconnect of children from their parents that Boweman and Cringley allude to in their work. Mead goes on to say, parents expect their children to learn from other adults and their more knowledgeable age mates” (81). As Cringley puts it, the “adaptation” rate of the parents may not be able to keep with the children (para 5). Yet.

The 40-year-old parents of today, who have grown up with television, exchange text messages, and use the Internet to track their investments, will the be grandparents of tomorrow. While the problem of the generation gap may never be resolved completely, the elder-youth relationship should change in part as interfaces are designed more intuitively and as people adapt their relationships to them. Humankind has had a treacherous past, wars fought, ruthless dictators, culture clashes, and parents not understanding their children. Language and the ideas expressed thereby have been the problem and the solution of nearly all of this world’s populations. As the information revolution proceeds at a high mach speed, one can only hope civilizations will honor knowledge and build information systems based on equitable dissemination. The present owes much to the commonwealth of symbolic meaning developed by those before now.

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Works Cited
Boweman, Melissa. “Semantic Categories in the Language-learning Child.” Brandes and LeCron Foster 277-97
Brandbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. Random: New York, 1950.
Cherry, Colin. “The Communication Explosion.” Brandes and LeCron Foster 249-65.
Cringely, Robert. “Friday, March 21, 2008.“ I,Cringely 4 Apr. 2008
<http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080321_004574.html>.
Fugard, Athol. My Children! My Africa!. Theatre Communications Group Inc.: New York, 1989.
Lasn, Kalle. “Rewilding.” Adbusters Jan.-Feb. 2007: 33.
LeCron Foster, Mary and Stanley H. Brandes, eds. Symbols as Sense. Academic Press: New York, 1980.
Levy, Pierre. Cyberculture. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2001.
Mead, Margaret. Culture and Commitment. Garden City: Natural History Press, 1970.
Monaco, James. How to Read a Film. Oxford University Press: New York, 2000.
Postman, Neil. Television and the Teaching of English. Appleton-Century-Crofts: New York, 1961.