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

Thomas de Zengotita suggests that, “reality is more fragmented than ever.” Throught his essay he makes many valid points regarding our world today. Thomas’ main argument states, “the effect of being bombarded by such a rage of realities - from the edited reality of wedding videos to the uniquely staged reality of “Survivor” - is that we become numb to the subtle differences between these varying degrees of reality.”

While reading Zengotita’s essay, I jotted down many comments. Mosty, I agreed with what he was trying to say. Thomas stated, “ The Holidays came and went, and - if you were not personally stricken by the terror of September- chances are you got over it. You moved on.” Now think about it, how is this possible? How are we able to move on from something so awful? It is because we are numb. We are numb to our surroundings. Then again on the other hand, we are still fighting a war because of September 11th. In a way, this shows that as a nation, we have not moved on. But individually, most of is have.

How about all of the new developments: cloning, artificial intelligence, robots. In a few decades people are not even going to be needed. Our jobs will be taken over by computers and robots. You won’t need to study or learn because you’ll be able to take some kind of pill that installs the information into your head. Or what about child birth? Soon you will be able to choose what color hair and eyes your baby has. Things like this show how numb we are to the changes around us. We are living in a fast lane. Take the time to stop and think about the world around us.

The media fills our heads with more and more junk everyday. We believe what we are influenced to believe, instead of reality. If something bad happens, what do we do? We try and simply forget about it, rather than see the actual problem. If something seems incurable, we would rather look away.

As they say, we need to take the time to “stop and smell the roses.” As a society, we need to take a look around us. Look at what this world is coming to. We are exposed to these rapid changes on a daily basis. So how do we just keep going? Why does is seem like we are not affected? Jessica 11:16, 3 April 2007 (EDT)