The News Today?

I find it so ironic that after we read all about Postman's ideas of a media saturated culture, that the President of the United States went on a talk show to promote his new campaign of not increasing student loan rates.When I first saw it as a preview on Yahoo! (yes, that is where I get all my up to date news), I thought it was a joke. Why would the President be on Jimmy Fallon? Our generation is so consumed by our television shows and Facebook, that the President felt that he had to go on a talk show to get the news across. Is this really what our culture has come to? That our own President has to "slow jam" the news to us on talk shows? Personally, I find it a little pathetic. Is it so hard for us to keep updated in the news today that we expect it to come to us, instead of us going to it? We are so hard to keep interested, that the news has become even more entertaining to keep us watching. I think Postman would have had a nice laugh over this.
Read more about this at http://bpheitmeier.wordpress.com/  "Slow-Jamming Ourselves to Death?"

What can we learn from books?

We can advance our vocabulary by reading challenging books, which not only help us project our own ideas but also allow us to enter into a new reality different from our own. They lead us into our imagination, to search for something that is better, or even to show the restrictions that our reality gives us. When someone reads Harry Potter, they are allowed to look at a different perspective of life, but they also realize that they cannot live in a world of magic and the ability to fly or cast spells. Reading gives us truth and hope, and it opens our eyes to what we are and what we can become. Although wit is not our reality, we can learn things from books to apply to our reality. Harry Potter can teach lessons of friendship and of loyalty, or of determination and bravery. Reading inspires people to do things they would not normally do, one book that really inspired me in an odd way was Frankenstein. Although the story is about a monster that destroys everything his master loves, it showed me that you have to look past what people look like and what they wear, and to really get to know people and understand them before you make judgments about them. I was able to put myself in the shoes of the monster, which had such a kind and loving heart, but since he looked like a monster, he was treated like one. It is a completely fictional novel, but I was able to learn a valuable lesson from it. What more can reading do to make small changes that can have huge implications?

(Here is a video of Harry Potter World, a way that we can link our reality to the novel's reality) 

                I believe another reason reading is so important is because it develops our deep attention, which is important especially in college. The ability to focus for long periods of time has gradually become lost, and I believe a factor of that is due to how much time we spend on social media and television. If we could take the time to put down our phones, and choose to read a novel, our study skills would greatly enhance. I don’t know what the magic formula is for us to change our new found media culture, but if things keep going the way they are, what will happen to books? Will they disappear completely? Too much is at stake if we let that happen.

The Destruction of Words

“We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone.” (Orwell Part 1, Chapter5)

One of my favorite novels is 1984 by George Orwell. This book is significant because it shows the change the technology brings, and one part especially is the decline of vocabulary. In this future world, the people are forced to eliminate words they have previously used and adopt these new simpler words, and even created a new language, “Newspeak”. This leads to a huge connection between new media such as Twitter and Facebook, and how we speak in conversations. We have begun to adopt a new  language, people are starting to use “lol” as a word or phrase when speaking, and using shorter or simpler words. The reason for smaller and less depictive words in the novel was to limit the thoughts of the people, and to be able to manipulate them. When we destroy our vocabulary by using shorter or quicker phrases, we are limiting our ability to speak for ourselves. It prevents us from having our own voice; instead it becomes the same as everyone else’s. The only way that we can regain our ability to create complex sentences and thought is to read books that support it. In the world of 1984, the government used the new language as thought control, where no one could come up with anything significant because they were unable to produce a significant thought. The implication of this is how much we could lose by limiting our ability to project our own ideas. This lack of intelligence may lead to regress in our culture, to where we cannot keep up with progress and decline in new ideas and the advancement of our world. Isn’t it a scary thought that our future could change based on something so small, so little thought of as vocabulary? What would be left our language, so full of irony and wit, if we let it go to waste by forgetting it?

 “It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words… Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten” (Orwell Part 1, Chapter 5). The worst part to me is that we are not only accepting it, but also encouraging it. The novel was once thought of as prophetic, but I believe that we created a self-fulfilling prophesy. We have let ourselves watch TV or stay on Facebook instead of reading a novel. We have chosen to take the easy way out and make our language shorter and easier, instead of letting it challenge us. 

                                              12:30 to 15:25 on Video