Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Body Paragraph

Another strategy that Carr uses is a metaphor. He compares the famous movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey” to present day. Carr quotes the movie when the character Dave takes apart HAL, the computer that runs the spaceship and has killed his crew mates. Carr quotes, “ ‘Dave,stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?’ So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. ‘Dave, my mind is going,’ HAL says forlornly. ‘I can feel it. I can feel it.’ I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory”(Carr p 58). Carr uses the disassembling of the computer’s memory as a metaphor to the disintegration of his and everyone elses’ memories due to technology. Carr chooses words such as “tinkering”, “circuitry”, and “reprogramming”. This word choice suggests that Carr feels like a robot. HAL, contrary to humans, was chained to a wall and could not stop his own disassembly. However, us humans have more control than that, or do we. This metaphor shows that Carr feels as though we are helpless to this change, just as HAL was. We have become addicted to the internet and the technology that we have such easy access to often at the end of our fingertips. 

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