Letter for You [HW #15- Gavin]

Let's do this. No trash talking about the commenting system this round.

As always, your writing portrays great ideas in such an articulate way (e.g."I found myself with less distraction in the form of music, which normally lifts me away from my surrounding and deeper into myself by shutting off the outside and the other people around me"). Although our class has the same general ideas about digitalization, it's just so much more intriguing to read your blogs. It's a lot more engaging.

With that being said, it seems to me that your main focus is digitalization being a source of distractions and alienation. And it's not something that we're not aware of, but like you said, we don't act on it. As a result, "society is doomed for a collapse, that's inevitable." I agree that this contributes greatly to our collapse. We're just so blinded by having fun, using our DRDs and focusing on the next step to take to stay fresh, that we don't see anything on the bigger picture. We don't see our lifestyles are messed up, or how we really have no control of anything, not even the people that we choose to be. One big idea that sums this up would be "you need to be distracted in order to survive." If we're not distracted, we'd be left with the reality of life, which I don't think many of us can handle.

The results of your self-experiment would agree with your argument. By starving yourself of digitalization, you had more time to think when you were on the bus and became more aware of the people around you, rather than shutting them off. You were able to make something (skateboard) meaningful by having some sort of contribution to its production. And you "felt free." Even so, I'm assuming you didn't/wouldn't completely cut yourself away from the digital world. We always tell ourselves that DRDs distract us, and are bad for us, but even thought we known that on the days of our "digital ramadan" we are more perceptive and freer, we always, for some reason, go back to digitalization. Remember "Never Let Me Go"? That's probably another allegory too. We're devoting our lives to become tools for the "real" people- the ones that matter (let's save this for another day; this is about digitalization). So anyways, we're all kind of like the students from Hailsham. Even after they left the school, they continued to think about it and wished they were back there. And even more so, hardly anyone aside from Tommy and Kathy saw this system as messed up, because they were all caught up in enjoying their time, and fulfilling their roles. And even with Tommy and Kathy as the exceptions, nothing was done to change it. I guess here's the "D" or the "E" portion of the ABCDEF commenting- it could be used to develop your ideas, but it's also a question that was triggered through reading your blog, hmmm I'm not sure. How much of our desire to go back to digitalization/Hailsham derives from holding on to something familiar to us? And how much of it is out of fear for change?

Another question I would like to prompt in response to "People are no longer encouraged about doing things themselves" is: Is this out of laziness, or out of being efficient? I think it's both, but mostly laziness. Things (e.g. downloads) also just seem more fun and agonizing when you're just watching it go.

A-B-C-D-E-F...I think I did all of them. Anyways, it was my pleasure reading your post. Let's just make those "drafts" into real deals. I'll be interested in seeing how you expand on the ideas that you already wrote about. Oh, and you might want to read or re-read John's HW 14, particularly the last one or two paragraphs. It connects with the whole distraction idea. For now, chao outside Gutha Mucka.