home

Kathleen February 9, 2012 Period 4 Where Do We Go From Here? “No government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny; that will keep us safe under every form of government.” In __Little Brother__ by Cory Doctorow and __1984__ by George Orwell, the authors write about a government that has abused its power and the pursuit of the characters in order to try and fix the problem that the government has created, causing the readers to start wondering whether or not their own government has began to do similar things. They show that society is slowly being overcome with the government and technology and it would take a lot of work to finally take the country back. By reading these books it becomes clear that social networking and technology is keeping most everyone interconnected at all times, taking away our social skills, and ultimately leaving our society unable to connect in person. media type="youtube" key="-USVduFNrts" height="315" width="560" ‍ To begin ‍ , technology is keeping people connected. This is first shown in Little Brother when Marcus uses the internet and his xbox to keep all of the people that were unhappy with homeland security’s new plans secretly together. “There’s no way they organized this without email and wikis and mailing lists. And there’s no way people this smart would have done that on the public Internet. This had all taken place on the Xnet, I’d bet my boots on it.” (Doctorow 190). In this quote Marcus is talking about how the “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 25” concert had to have been set up on the Xnet, because the whole thing was organized as protest of what the DHS was doing, and anyone that planned on keeping it secret would have to have done it on the secret Internet. In itself, this shows that technology keeps groups together, especially people who all have the same cause, but it will also keep just about anyone with a computer up to date on the latest and greatest things going on around them. The connection between people that technology brings to us is also demonstrated in 1984 by use of the Telescreens. Unlike in Little Brother__,__ where technology kept everyone up to date and in touch with their peers, in 1984, the technology is used instead for the government to keep up to date one what everyone is doing; more like a one way connection. "'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W! Yes, //you!// Bend lower, please! //That's// better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.'" (Orwell 36). This point shows that the people on the telescreen can see and hear each person that is currently standing in front of their telescreen, making it easy for the government and "Big Brother" to keep up to date one and connected with each individual. In modern day life, social networking manages to keep everyone connected with eachother. Although being connected may sound good, it is not always necessarily. To be connected to all of your peers all the time is being “in the loop,” and as great as that may be, it gives anyone willing to spend their time looking extremely easy access to anyone’s personal life. “Check in points used in conjunction with Google earth can allow a stalker to locate a user’s position in a matter of seconds.” (Drisko). This is just one of the many aspects of Facebook that Carrie Drisko points out in her online article “Celebrities on Facebook, It’s A Stalkers Paradise.” In this article she also brings up how anyone with enough time on their hands can easily access information about who someone is related too, their friends, their location, what they look like, and so much more, now, without even moving out of their ‍ computer chair. ‍ []

Next, these two books got me thinking about how people’s social skills are slowly ebbing away. In __Little Brother__ by Cory Doctorow this is clear by the way that everyone communicates on the internet or "xnet" rather than in ‍ <span style="font-family: 'Bell MT','serif'; font-size: 12px;">person. ">it's me, from tonight / Then she paste-bombed a block of crypto. I'd already entered her public key into my keychain, so I told the IM client to try decrypting the code with the key. >it's me from tonight / It was her!" (Doctorow 171). This passage from the book demonstrates how the people in __Little Brother__'s social skills are slowly disappearing because instead of calling Marcus to talk or set up a time to talk in person, both now and later, Marcus and Ange talk over the internet. Although this is mainly because of their attempt to stay out of the governments watchful eyes and keep their conversations private, this still could end up being used more and more as time progresses because it becomes so easy for them to get in contact with each other. The possibility of people starting to lack social skills is also demonstrated in 1984. "He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting: //i love you.//" (Orwell 108). This here shows how the overuse of technology can start to get rid of peoples social skills because instead of these two getting to know each other and developing a close relationship and then confessing their love to the other, they hardly even understand what love truly is, and are forced to say "I love you" to the other on a slip of paper. This is caused by the overuse of technology because they cannot talk about how they feel and don't understand true feelings because of the government always keeping an eye on them through technology and encouraging people to stop feeling anything at all. The last point that leads me to think that our social skills are gradually disappearing is social networking and the internet. "At a large university in New York, the dropout rate among freshmen newcomers rose dramatically as their investment in computers and Internet access increased. The reason? Administrators learned that 43% of the dropouts were staying up all night on the Internet."[| http://www.sierrasource.com/cep612/internet.html] This is just one of the many other scary facts that were shared in this article about how technology could possibly be more of a poison to today's community than an antidote. The sad part is that this article was written in 1999. The Pew research center said that 79% of American adults said they used the internet, and it’s still rising at a rapid pace. The more that people use the internet, the more likely they are to spend all night playing on some random social networking site instead of being out getting their education or connecting with their peers, and society is not only //letting// this happen, but //encouraging// it! At the rate we're moving, our country is going to be incapable of speech in 30 years.

=
<span style="font-family: 'Bell MT','serif'; font-size: 12px;">Finally, these two books bring up another important point: where do our social skills go from here? In __Little Brother__ the internet is used as a source of communication constantly, and the thought of a community without it is difficult for many people, like the main character Marcus, to wrap their head around. "And the best part -- as far as I was concerned -- was that paranoidXbox was //paranoid.// Every bit that went over the air was scrambled to within an inch of its life. You could wiretap it all you wanted, but you'd never figure out who was talking, what they were talking about or who they were talking to. Anonymous Web, email and IM. Just what I needed." (Doctorow 88). This quotation shows how wrapped up people can get in the technology and the Internet. After Marcus’ computer got tapped by the Homeland Security, instead of simply avoiding looking up anything that could put him under even more suspicion or just not using computers at all, he continues on to create a whole new internet in which he could not be tracked under. Although in the end it was very helpful, and is not a step that anyone would disagree with, this just goes to show how far people will go in order to keep their technology at hand. How technology is leading to a society lacking social skills is again illustrated in __1984__. <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Bell MT','serif'; font-size: 12px;">"Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity." (Orwell 256). This is an example of how society could eventually completely lack social skills in the book __1984__ simply by what it states. This quote says that eventually no human will have any feeling whatsoever because the books government decided to take over society with the use of technology, and in the end all of their hard work would pay off with a emotionless community that could do nothing but work. The last example to prove this point came from a blog. “ <span style="font-family: 'Bell MT','serif'; font-size: 12px;">Today I looked at the Top toys for Christmas 2011. Nearly all of them are electronic. None are educational. None encourage imagination, creativity or innovation. None inspire social interaction.”… “Children today are bombarded with smartphones, iPods, laptops and iPads.” []. And where does all of this wonderful technology get us? Nowhere. Literally. Most people would find it difficult to search the web while moving. How can someone keep up on their social skills with people when they are sitting in their room playing on their laptop? Easy answer: they can’t. Or even when people take to technology more portable than the laptop, like the iPod, most people don’t enjoy talking to someone that has music blasting so they can’t hear anything going on around them. With the way that everyone is using some form of technology for everything today, I’m amazed that we have continued on talking as long as we have. At the rate that the world is going, sooner rather than later not one will know how to talk at all. ====== <span style="font-family: 'Bell MT','serif'; font-size: 12px;">media type="youtube" key="Wy_wRKWP2pU" height="315" width="560"

<span style="font-family: 'Bell MT','serif'; font-size: 12px;">Overall, __Little Brother__ and __1984__ made it clear that technology can both help society and take away from it at the same time, and no one really knows to what extent it will expand before it stops. In order to stop technology before our social skills are completely destroyed, we need to learn just how far it can go before people can no longer have relationships in person, like many people have difficulty doing already. Where society should stop, or backtrack to, is to a place where the internet was just used for research and information rather than keeping up ones social life. Take the internet back to a place where the only reason that someone would want to get on their computer was so that they could check their facts or write an essay rather than sit and chat with all of their friends. Although many people would disagree, the best way to get people to interact in person is to make the other options difficult to come by and send technology back to where it started.

<span style="font-family: 'Bell MT','serif'; font-size: 12px;">Works Cited

=
<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Bell MT','serif';">London, Seeing. "Samuel Johnson Quotes." //<span style="font-family: 'Bell MT','serif';">Find the Famous Quotes You Need, ThinkExist.com Quotations. // ThinkExist. Web. 09 Feb. 2012. @http://thinkexist.com/quotation/no_government_power_can_be_abused_long-mankind/327111.html;. ======

Orwell, George. //1984: A Novel//. New York, NY: Published by Signet Classic, 1977. Print. Doctorow, Cory. //Little Brother//. New York: Tor, 2010. Print.