Journal 2: After reading Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Politics and the American Language”, select a quote from the essay that you think is significant (one or two sentences) and write a journal entry analyzing what you think it means and how it relates to her overall purpose.

The overall purpose of Rebecca Solnit’s essay ” Politics and the American Language” is to convey the power of words and what effect can occur in society due to the distortion of these words. She states in the second paragraph, “When the subject is grim. I think of the act of naming as diagnosis.” The use of a simile here is a perfect correlation between naming and diagnosis. When a doctor tells a patient that they have stage three cancer. The act of telling the truth, “calling things by their true names” can be unpleasant but it allowed the patient and doctor to discuss what can be done now and what will be accomplished in the future considering the situation. This goes hand in hand with the news and the political scene right now  where distortion of words are misleading the viewers into believing something that is perceived as good but in reality is terrible. If the news and media conveyed their words bluntly, truthfully the world would have been a better place. For example, the Palestine conflict that has been going on for years. The media sided with the zionest jews of israel and used words like “great”,”spiritual people” to get the audience perceiving that, what they are doing to Palestinians is a good thing. If people knew the actual truth, “true names”, then they would have done something for the Palestinians and things would have ended up differently.

Journal 3: In Carr’s essay, he writes that “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” What do you think this quote means? Write a paragraph response in which you support or challenge Carr’s conclusion about the affect of technology on the way we think, read, write, and live.

This quote by Carr means that as the world is evolving around computers now, instead of us using our own intelligence we will rely on technology to acquire knowledge for us without having to do the work, and this can be detrimental to society in the long run. I agree with Carr that technology is taking over every aspect of society at a rapid pace and acknowledges that technology is a great thing to have in society but it also comes with a price, and that is our intellect. Carr brings up how people back then would have a deep connection to the books and articles they read. Deep reading was a valuable skill that was important to society but as the years went on that started to diminish as the Internet took over. Skimming was a new thing as it was perceived as the most efficient way to read an article. Carr mentions a perfect comparison on how we used to think vs now “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip  along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.” This puts in perspective on how our thinking as evolved, instead of diving deep into the meaning of what an article is conveying we like to ride along the surface like a jet ski. As Carr goes on to talk about the printing press and how reading printed pages is not same as reading an article online. Reading printed pages allows for concentration and critical thinking that can not be done with reading an article online that is bombarded by ads and used as a means of distraction. Finally, the way we live is evolved around technology from texting, emailng, surfing the web but if we end up solely relying on technology for everything we lose at the end as Carr mentions “it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”

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