Week 1 - Weekly Discussion 1 PDF

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Weekly Discussion 1...

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Week One Discussions Contains unread posts Choose three sentences from the essay by Leo Marx that struck you as important for our understanding of technology, and describe what they mean in relation to Marx’s argument and to your own understanding of technology in general and writing in particular. Initial posts are due by Thursday at 11:30PM ET and at least two responses to fellow classmates are expected by the end of the week on Sunday by 11:30PM ET.

Hi All, The three significant sentences from the essay by Leo Marx are listed below: “The history of technology is one of those subjects that most people know more about than they realize”. I believe it was a great start by Leo Marx with this first sentence as it was an attention-grabbing statement. By this sentence, author Marx meant that our lives are being changed by technology more than we realize and it has been around for longer than we can imagine. As a reader, I would like to read the entire essay without getting bored and would love to learn how technology got involved with our lives and what changes were made by it. "Our own ancestors from this line if woodland apes began shaping stone tools and relying much more consistently on meat around 2m years ago. They tame fire perhaps 1.5m years ago. They developed human language perhaps 150000 years ago. They invented agriculture 10,000 years ago. Also made gun powder around 1000 years ago and motor vehicles a century ago”. The above sentence by Marx was trying to make us understand how technology is a common scientific method that is around from generations to generations. It has been believed that all great inventions are invented by mistake or desire to do something. Author Marx tried to explain how technology helped all encouraged and curious humans to develop themselves from the stone age to today’s world. “The hazardous character of technology – the word, the concept – is a consequence of the history just outlined.” With the above sentence, author Marx kind of warned us that technology has dark side as well. Just like all other things, it has both good and bad outcomes. As an example, social media networks are great to connect with each other now a day. We meet many people through social media networks. Some people we encounter in real life and some don’t. It makes us to be less social in real life. We can chat with other for hours but when it comes to talk to someone suiting next to us, we can’t. We don’t see who’s sitting right next to us in a bus/train because we both are busy with our phone updating status in Facebook or twitter. There are many consequences such

as cyber-bullying, stalking, impersonation, identity theft and others that we have to face. Kids, teen and teenagers don’t go out to play in an open field to have mental growth naturally because they are behind a computer/TV screen playing online games. The consequences for that are fantasy and dangerous behavior can be seen in early age of a person. We can write a whole essay about it. In conclusion, we need to take the advantages of technology for us and ignore the dark side of it. Reference: MARX, L. (2010). Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept. Technology and Culture, 51(3), 561-577. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.umuc.edu/stable/40927986 Thank you....