Journal #9

Introduction 1865-1914: Man vs. Machine (Computer)

            When reading the chapter a contemporary comparison that I thought about, was industrialization and the factory mentality compared to today's computer based society. The cartoon above represents Man vs. Computer, and I think of this as a competition between opposites, and this makes me think of back in the late 1800's to early 1900's how people saw themselves in opposition to the machine. The improvements in the early days of the 1900's were mostly in the Newspaper industry, which is a dying industry today. Everyday another Newspaper goes out of business as people get their news from New Media sources or download newspapers for free. A similarity between then and now is how people considered Poetry a dying art form, William Cullen Bryant said, "Poetry may get printed in newspapers, but no man makes money by it for the simple reason that nobody cares a fig for it" (24). Today poetry is still around, but its death may just be a slow one. People just don't care a bout poetry like they did in the early 1800's, print culture has changed. In fact one could argue that print culture is on its way to extinction depending on if you consider the internet to be "print culture" at all. If the internet and virtual sources are indeed print culture then it is actually growing. Nowadays anyone at all can get published simply by writing a blog, as I am doing now. 

           If anything we shouldn't view ourselves in opposition to the computer as people shouldn't have saw the machine as a bad thing, because it is helping to further man kind, can you imagine what life would be like today without the computer or the internet? Of course the transition times are always scary, when the country became more and more unemployed because factory's didn't need as many workers, or skilled workers anyway we experienced a time of unrest, crime rates rose, and people were suffering. Today we have similar unemployment, but the political unrest is actually on a declining trend, at least in the United States, maybe people are learning from history after all...