Reading Response #3

The central focus of my in-class essay revolved around being distracted by technology and what it has offered us—we’re drowning in it all. Being given this impairment to our lives, we’ve begun to forget about man as a whole and how we universally need natural connection with each other more than the intelligence and knowledge through this hi-tech age (despite the large importance put onto them). Humans have become reliant on technology and bitter because of it.
A quote in Sven Birkert’s essay, “The Owl Has Flown” related to my main idea and helped clarify what I was trying to go at. Birket himself writes, “But swamped by data, and in thrall to the technologies that manipulate it [wisdom], we no longer think in these larger and necessarily more imprecise terms. In our lateral age, living in the bureaucracies of information, we don’t venture a claim to that kind of understanding.” (pg 32). In other words, Birkert believes that since becoming used to living with technology daily, we’ve become less in-touch with ourselves and our potential to think on our own. He’s insisting that we don’t care to stop and reflect upon our lives anymore because we’re too enamored by technology. His quote helps with the main idea I was revolving my essay around because I mostly mentioned that we need to be connected to each other, and I didn’t mention what we should do individually, also.
This quote changes my thinking about technology in a sense that we not only have to see the human population as one whole, but also look at ourselves as individuals. Wisdom is something that is essential to fixing the problems we face… and how we will begin to tweak at them initially will only be possible through human connection.