Technological Insecurities

Hello again people of the world!!!. Or maybe just people from my class, either way it's definitely nice to have you back. This is another assignment for my Electronic Communications class at the NDSU campus. This weeks assignment deals with our readings from he last two weeks. They are "Cyborg Manifesto" by Donna Haraway, which is an essay dealing with the massive amounts of new information and technology entering our world and how the everyday woman will deal with it. Haraway is a feminist at heart, but her story is still very interesting to the outgoing male. The other story is entitled "As we may think", and was written by a man named Vannaver Bush in the year 1945. It is an extremely interesting essay about the fact that the world needs to come up with a better way of storing its information. The story was written shortly after the end of WWII, and Bush expresses the idea that since we are finally done trying to kill one another, maybe we can use our scientific minds to create a better storage system for all the information out there. His idea revolved around a machine known as the "Memex", which is startlingly close to resembling our modern day computer.
Well, now that the back story is all there, the assignment before me is which of these essays did you not understand and why? The truth of the matter is that they are both fairly easy to understand. Granted, the vocabulary used in each story is extremely wide, but even the most difficult words can be figured out when they are put into sentences. The story of Vannaver Bush's was definitely the easier of the two to understand, simply because he used a lot of repetition to get his points across. You can tell by reading "As We May Think" that Bush is a very scientific minded man. The fact that he uses many themes that people may have not known then only adds to his theory that people were just simply not ready for the "Memex" yet. Haraway's story, although more difficult to read, is still understandable to the imaginative. Her ideas focus on adapting to use the new hardware being created or fail to function in life. Her ideas are not completely lost by the imagination, especially in the present day and age when a 4 year old can use a computer better than their mother. The problem with this story is that it does the same kind of thing a Bush's, it begins talking in circles. Much like a documentary, these stories give you a problem, then a point of view, and then smash that point of view in to your head with a brick. They are still interesting, they just get a little old after awhile.
Another student in my class, whose hyperlink is http://xoverwriter.blogspot.com, has commented on Bush's story and Bush's line stating that the language of the time was not ready for these advancements. He believes that Bush was insisting that we needed to change the way we talk to each other before we can fully understand the technologies that will be represented. I do think this is a very good analysis of Bush's words, but I truly believe that Bush just mean that people weren't ready to understand what he was thinking of. That the "Memex" would simply not work in his present time, because people weren't ready to understand it is all. I do still like his idea and recommend checking it out so that you are not only getting one biased opinion today.
Anyways, that's it from the horror fanatic. Waiting to see some more good films come out but it just never seems to happen. Weird...