Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

First of all, the take out your pencils activity is very useful when reading an essay like this. It makes it hard to go through the reading without comprehending what ou are reading. By having conversation with myself and the writer as I read i was able to grasp the ideas that Zengotita was putting out there for a longer period of time.

Overall, the feeling that I got from Zengotita was that he felt American culture acts as a false protection of ourselves. We all feel safe and at home because we are "wooed" by advertising, television, internet, cloning, artificial intelligence, and so on and so forth as he makes numerous references to what is "numbing our minds." I think that the comparison of culure to an anestetic is a very rich simile because in fact that is what most of our technology is doing these days; they are covering our mind with a cloud that makes it impossible to penetrate without possible stimulation.

Although I think he did a good job at getting his point through, I feel that Zengotita was a bit repetitive on his rants about the "information revolution" that he described. After the section titled flood when Zengotita made the comment about Times Square sending message modules right for the gonads, taste buds, vanities, and fears I felt that he was doing just what he was criticising. He was "flooding" his essay. Overall, I think that this was a good essay in that it had good support for its points and its points were in fact valid and right on. On the other hand, towards the end of the essay I felt his points were becoming redundant and I felt like they were being drilled into my head for the past ten pages of writing. mjbrady 13:57 April 3rd 2007