Living in a Digital World

The cold glare of technology meets the eye with each passing glance – little apples are aglow every-which-way you turn. It’s a take over, soon there will be more of them than us. They invade our local watering holes, classrooms, our homes; our instinctual places of comfort have been overrun with metallic hardware and artificial intelligence. A iPad cannot show affection, it cannot make you a sandwich or play with you dog. So, why is it that we are treating our technology as if it is living? As if it is a member of the family? This over-injection of all things technology into our lives has blurred the boundary between what is flesh and what is simply metal. It has caused us to be unaware of how dependent we have become on computers and the internet. We need to weigh our options, and prioritize because when it comes down to it what’s more important? Abuelita or your MacBook?

THE LIMITS OF MY LANGUAGE MEAN THE LIMITS OF MY WORLD.

When we are raised with a certain dialect or with a different language that is not English, it is somewhat difficult for us to fluently speack proper English at school or wherever it is needed. For example, when giving a professional speech, going to an interview, or simply using forthe career path we have chosen. Because, when we go back to our family or close friends we will go back to speaking that dialect or different language; which in my case it's Spanish. We will constantly go back and forth with speaking proper English in our professional lives and a different dialect in our personal lives. I don't thin that we, besides the presindent of the United States, will adapt to only speaking proper English.

Honesty

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom, I guess this is true but I have a feeling that before chapter one of this book, you have a prologue which states do everything wrong because that is what we all do. A person can only be honest until they stop being honest and then they become liars. And it's funny, because once you have the label of being a liar, you can never take that label off. So how much is honesty really worth, when everyone lies, at least once in their lives, regardless of if it's a white lie? And anyways how can honesty be measured? If I'm honest one day and the next day I lied about reading my textbook, does that mean that I am a liar all of a sudden? I don't have a clear answer to any of these questions but one thing I do know is that if something doesn't feel right then you are probably not being honest.

~Beatrce M.

Words save lives

Words make up sentences. Sentences make up paragraphs. Paragraphs make up books. We read books to gain knowledge. When we have knowledge of something, anything, we pass it up to someone else, and many times to more than one person. When we are able to gain knowledge, our lives are saved. Because with knowledge we are able to progress and make something better out of our lives. It does not matter if our life is already good, we can still make it great. For example, the author of 'Superman and me' was able to save his life through books; he read many books until he had enough knowledge to set himself apart from all the people who looked down upon him. After he gained the knowledge to be a writer, those same people started to look up to him. The first words he learned to read saved his life.

"Popular art is a dream; it does not examine itself."

Meaning that popular art is made by an artist but once the artist is done he has no say in what his viewers will say about that piece of art. I remember Kanye West saying that if you started making music twenty years ago but it didn't get popular until ten years ago then your music was not great until ten years ago. Everyone examines your art except for yourself which makes sense because if you started examining your own art there would be no art. An artist knows what they want and that is their main focus until it is done. Examining just means exploiting, destroying, and maybe even jealousy.

The Cost of Money

"Anyone who has ever experienced poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor."

This paradoxical idea befuddles me. How can it be expensive to be poor? I think it can be expensive because i takes away so much: opportunities, food, shelter, education. Perhaps poverty is expensive because it takes away more than one can, wants, or is willing to give. Meanwhile, the wealthy live a life of frivolity, never really and truly worried about when their endless supply of money, luxury, and decadence will cease.

Poverty can also be expensive because when one has nothing to give, everything one desires or needs is that much more valuable and harder to attain--more expensive. As for me, I've never experienced poverty, yet, that is something my Cuban grandparents would be very happy to hear. My grandfather was a diplomat for the UN by the age of 25, and represented Cuba. A man who was friends with Pablo Neruda, lived near Winston Churchill, and voted on the creation of Israel, was reduced to cutting down sugar cane in order to have the luxury to leave his corrupted homeland. I think he would be glad to hear how far we've come. But then again, money is cheap.

Kelsey Garcia

David Foster Wallace Quote of Nuclear Power and TV

"Nuclear weapon and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the status."

-David Foster Wallace

Nuclear weapons and TV were introduced in the 20th century and that marked a huge turn of events that affected everyone and changed the future of the Earth, particularly for the worse. We always had weapons that were invented with the intent of killing one another, but the nuclear arm upped the status, just like David Foster Wallace mentioned, our tendency as humans to wage wars in face of any conflict. The power of nuclear weapons became evident when the U.S. used it to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a terrible display of human anger to which Japan still suffers the aftershock from.

TV works in the same fashion in a sense that it can make or break a person. With it, we can see celebrities showing the human tendency of power and desperation.

-Tenzin

EXPERIENCING POVERTY AT THE EXPENSE OF BEING POOR

You don't really know what you have until it is gone. James Baldwin expresses the importance of wealth when discussing the expense of being poor. Not owning any resources is a great disservice because of the inconvenience it causes to the person and the people around him.

An example of someone that knows how expensive it is to be poor would be a former successful business tycoon. This man would possess many items to represent his materialistic superiority. However, if something were to go awry and this tycoon fell, he would potentially lose all the things that he formerly prided himself over.

To be able to experience poverty, someone must have been very successful to be able to compare their current status to a prior success. For you to respect and appreciate what you have, at one point you must have been incapable of doing what you do now.

- Kumar