Blog 2

Our reading this week help us to formulate a broader view on technology. Much of the advantages that technology has developed, many of us see as things we need. Chapter 2 brings about the concept of convenience. In modern day terms convenience refers to something being suitable to us, it bringing about comfort or ease. The way these words and their meanings are evolving has much to do with our development of technology and its’ progression.

Chapter 2 discusses how we have used technology to overcome bodily limits. We see physical limitations as something that we must overcome. To overcome the limitation of space the chapter uses as examples the different types of transportation we have invented to overcome it. Though our bodies couldn’t possibly be in three different parts of the world in one day on our own two feet we have overcome this bodily inconvenience with technology, the airplane. It also describes how technology now wants to “collapse space and time so that the communicator/traveler can be everywhere at once without exertion.” You can now be on a Skype call with your family, while being in another country on a business trip and also watch a video of the example the book gives, a watering hole in Africa through the website AfriCam. It seems that whatever bodily limitation we believe ourselves to have, we try to overcome it with technology.

Technology has now changed we to what people consider wants vs. needs. Needs are generally described as need for shelter, food, water, clothing, sleep, physical contact and procreation. Now with our advancement in technology, many companies would not be able to function without internet and Wi-Fi in their businesses. They would probably describe these things as a need.

One of my favorite things chapter 2 discusses is that the ultimate limit of the body is its own lifetime. I like the statement Slack uses in stating, “all living bodies, at least as we write, will die.” “If death is the ultimate limit of the body, the ultimate technology will one one that overcomes death. But, perhaps, this is like the four-minute mile, and once that limit is overcome, a new limit horizon will stretch out before the inhabitants of the future.” This part of the chapter really made me think. What if death is only a limitation of the mind? If it’s just a threshold we are getting closer and closer to overcoming. We’re already learning ways on how to extend lives, things that at one time seemed impossible. It’s very exciting to think that we may just be thought processes away from overcoming the limitation of death.

The chapter also argues that the expectations on what technology is supposed to do for us has become very demanding. But, I believe that our demand on it, technology, is what has stretched it so much in such a rapid pace of growth. Years ago we were much slower at technological development. Now it seems as if we are constantly on the leading edge of something that will impact our culture.