Are We Really Thinking?

In Postman's last line he talks about how people today have stopped thinking. He said that because people are laughing and not thinking they don’t know why they are actually laughing. Postman says that the problem is not that people are laughing and not thinking about it, but that people do not know why they stopped thinking and knowing what they are laughing at. This shows that our society has focused more on entertainment and less on actually thinking about what is entertaining them. As long as a show is captivating the attention of people they do not care that they have stopped thinking and mindlessly watch something and not know why they have stopped thinking.

Interesting Communication

Not being able to talk and instead having to draw was annoying. “Conversations” took a lot longer to draw out what I wanted to say than just being able to say what I was thinking.  Also not being able to talk made some things confusing when trying to figure what the other people’s drawings meant, so it affected the points that myself and others were trying to get across.

Technology Trouble

In both the video and the book Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman talks about how people are changing in society. For instance it is becoming normal to talk to inanimate objects, such as an answering machine. He said in the future we would be talking to doorknobs and toasters, and that would be considered totally normal. In Postman’s book he says “moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.” He is talking about how society is focused on technology and is talking to it and it has become natural and a part of our daily lives.

Postman also talks about how people are “shifting from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics” (page 13). People these days are changing from the enjoyment of reading to just watching television. Even though people relied on readings in the past people today want more technology to do things for themselves, making us lazy. This is because people are used to the technology and are always ready for the newest thing on the market.

Should We Censor Our Words?

1.        The words “Civility in public discourse is important” introduce Chavez's article. When she says this she is stating one point of view that people should be civil and watch the particular words that one uses.

2.       Chavez decided to use the word "bellicose" because it means aggressively hostile, or ready to fight. She talks about how the political campaigns have always been a battle to get the office they want. Then she used phrases such as “a candidate took his best shot” to lead into how there is a difference between something one says and what it actually means with tone.

3.       In this article Chavez is trying to tell people that the words are not the problem it is how they are used, and we should not dilute our language just to be completely politically correct. One of Chavez’s points is that in the story “Huckleberry Finn" the “N word” is used and people are debating taking it out and replacing it with the word slave. Chavez says that it “deprives students from learning important lessons about both racism and the social mores of earlier eras.” She is saying that it would take away an important lesson that the book gives by diluting the language used and making it more politically correct.

4.      I agree with Chavez because diluting our language would make things like debates weak and not allow for people to truly convey their point.

Conserve, Reuse, Recycle

The sentence that reveals Semrau’s point was when he said “Quite simply, use what you have until it can no longer function. Then it is time to recycle.” This shows his point because he talked about being green and recycling. He even talked about reusing his own body for science.

The technique of withholding of information from Semrau helps the intention of his essay. Semrau’s intention is to show that we can recycle anything and should if it will help others. His writing strategy of withholding information keeps the reader interested. It makes the reader want to know why the things that happened periodically through his life were important to the story and wanting to know why we should recycle everything. The more the reader kept reading the more information the reader could get and be able to understand the article and why we should recycle. However if Semrau would have made his article long instead of relatively short his writing strategy would make a reader lose interest in the point of the article. Since it was short it could keep a reader’s attention to find that his point was that we should recycle everything until it is not useable to anyone.