In the opening of "Silent Spring," Rachel Carson paints a vivid picture of the damage from uncontrolled use of pesticides. She depicts a scene that is akin to a horror movie. Animals diseased, plants dying and an unnatural stillness that comes from a great tragedy. The worst part of this was that there was no monster or evil that caused the silence. What had caused this silence was something that humans had done for their own sake. People had begun to spray their crops with a purpose to kill insects. Unintentionally they killed much more than pests and even poisoned themselves.
In the court system of the Untied States, the difference between manslaughter and murder is simple intent. We as a people have determined that it is not the results that we should be punished for, but what we intend to do, the results that we wished to happen. As a result, when great calamities such as the effects of DDT occur, there is no punishment for the crime. Humanity never intends to destroy, yet it almost invariably does. Therefore, it is no great surprise when we shape our environment and change our destines under the ethos of science that disastrous results occur. It appears as though when it comes to technology we never have foresight, ask the impossible, become dependent on it, and even violate our own rights. In the case of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, we kill ourselves with it.
The most difficult question to answer when considering the catastrophes of technology is what we should do to correct our mistakes. To find out what we should do, we should answer who is responsible. We can always blame the creators of the new technologies for not thinking ahead before implementing their new ideas. The classic example is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the young doctor dreaming about his fantastic new powers attained by his own intellect. He has come up with a new way to create life, he tells himself. Here, he glorifies his work:
“Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation up on lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.”(Shelley, 232)
This shows how the young doctor only thought of the benefits of what he could do. Never did it occur to him what could happen, what did happen. That his creations would be unsightly, that they would have their own minds against him, or that his creation would not be accepted by the general populace. One can allegorize Frankenstein’s monster with every technology that has been introduced, a thing which held great promise but caused disastrous results.
If we know that our lack of foresight causes such great destruction, how is it that history can repeat itself so frequently with technology? Looking at how our advances have caused consequences, from the introduction of DDT to the resistance bacteria are building to antibiotics, why is it that humans continue to invent and introduce new technology without considering every angle?
We can find the answer by looking at the quote. There he envisions a virtual empire of his creations that would have love and devotion to him. He sees life after death; he sees his creations as being perfect. What happened is that he saw only perfection with his technology and failed to realize the downfalls or consider them. The young doctor is an example of the human condition to be lured into fantasies without considering the consequences, as shown in J. Michael Bishop’s essay, Enemies of Promise.
This essay reveals that human beings have always been lured by promises and think that you can get something for nothing, get everything by doing nothing. This logical fallacy has been applied to science from the start. Not only do scientists fail to assess the impacts of their work, but to meet the hungry demands of consumers, they promise the impossible. Businesses capitalize on the dreams of the scientists and the hopes of the populace as a way for the technology to cure all ills. Nowhere is this more apparent in Todd Oppenheimer’s essay, The Computer Delusion. With the introduction of computers came the promise of solving the problems of mass education. We constantly seek improvement in this area, looking for ways to individualize education, for specialists to be able to teach to more people, to cause teachers far away to be able to educate countless numbers of students. However, this too followed the cycle of promise and shortcomings. Students did not learn faster or performed higher with the introduction of computers. In fact, they showed the same results from when we tried to say that television learning would revolutionize education. Once again we promise the impossible and are disappointed with the results.
This causes for a technology that has a possibility to improve our quality of life to be overused and cause destruction. It causes the populace to reject the benefits technology can employ because rather than accept cautious introduction of a technology, we must have the impossible dream or nothing at all. Thus, we see shortcomings of new technologies being implemented and the consequences of the old ones affecting us all.
Not every technology has had an ill result that grossly overrides the benefits. These technologies we hold onto and employ it in our everyday lives. The perfect example of this are automobiles. Especially in American society, where we value the individual, we drive our cars everyday. We have become dependent on these vehicles and it allows us to live someplace far away from where we work, mobilize goods and services, and allow us to travel to places far away. However, it is this dependency that causes problems. As described in James Q. Wilson’s Cars and Their Enemies, pollution from cars is literally killing people and drowning us in toxic fumes. Even using cars has become a pain with traffic congestion, constant upkeep and the cost of gas. Now, it is too late. The solutions to cars that Wilson offers in his essay do not solve this dependency and will not satisfy the American need to have individualized transportation.
Individualism is a value that most of us hold dear, and technology infringes on that. In Pamela Samuelson’s Digital Rights War, she explores the impact of information technology. Before the internet or printers or any of the new technologies considering the dissemination of literature, there were clear cut rules about what infringed copyrights. Individual work would be credited to the proper author, and they would receive their proper pay. However, the line is not so clearly defined and problems are arising. It is not only patented literature, but music as well. As discussed in Digital Rights War, you can print off your favorite passages of plays to share with your friends, but what about the whole thing? When does sharing become stealing? These questions arose because of technology, and point more towards not the technology being at fault, but how people use them.
That is how we must ultimately answer the question of how we correct our mistakes. It is not the technology that is at fault. The new inventions are simply tools with a purpose in mind. It is our thought on how we treat this technology that causes the problems. It starts with the inventors who fail to see or warn consumers about possible shortcomings of their ideas, and continues with consumer demanding the impossible, and ends with overuse and dependence on a technology.
Once we see who is responsible for which part, then it is easier to determine what we should do to correct our mistakes. However, how we implement that technology will always be a debate. There are many varying opinions about what is best for society and how we should govern ourselves. The things that must be recognized that technology is a tool to be used, and the technology itself or further development of it cannot be responsible. Cars themselves do not drive and pollute our atmosphere. It is people who drive everyday emitting pollutants, and people who decide whether or not they want to take measures to safely use technology. The destruction of mankind has always been by his own hand, and the calamities he has caused are not done with the tools he made but how he used them. From creating monsters to using harmful toxins mankind has always had a goal to make himself greater by using tools. It is up to humanity then, how we use the tools, and counterproductive to stop using or to stop creating tools. This is the solution to the problem of technology, and recognizing that the morals we use to justify the introduction of new technology need to be constantly examined.
Delegating responsibility, recognizing the morality of technology itself are the only ways we can correct and prevent anything like the story painted in Silent Spring happening again.
A-
Thompson
You present in this paper an original argument that uses a fairly sophisticated analysis of examples and observations to persuade readers to its point of view. I think the overall organization, concept, and execution of your argument is excellent. But your editing skills remain somewhat underdeveloped in comparison to your argumentation skills. There are numerous places where distracting surface compete with your argument for the reader’s attention—this only serves to detract from the overall quality of your work. Errors include everything from missing words to sentence fragments. You don’t seem to repeat any certain type of error—most appear to be the result of careless editing of typos. I’ll list some, as I always do, but there are too many and they are too varied to make it possible to list them all. Many remain that I will not mention, but I do expect you to fix before submitting your final version. However, one important error I will mention here-you have no Works Cited page attached to this document. Technically, this means that you have not cited your sources, which is the most severe of all academic sins. Submitting a paper(s) in your portfolio without proper and full MLA-style citation will result in a severe grade penalty.
The Excellent Paper
This paper adds to and/or exceeds the Good Paper in one or more of the following ways:
Yes The paper gives the controlling thesis or main idea an original twist, showing real insight into some of the subtleties and complexities of the issues involved.
Yes The paper develops original and unique material.
Yes The paper offers a distinctive and compelling voice, one which helps readers follow the structure of the paper.
No Secure in its command of a mature syntax, the excellent paper may successfully risk playful and artful effects with language.
No The paper has been scrupulously edited and is free of mechanical and/or grammatical errors of any type.
The Good Paper
This paper adds to and/or exceeds the Satisfactory Paper in one or more of the following ways:
Yes The paper is purposeful, successfully articulating a controlling thesis or main idea, or set of ideas.
Yes The paper smoothly guides the reader through a series of stated points or examples.
Yes The paper offers appropriate examples and/or details that support its purpose. The examples are drawn from experience, observation, and specific engagement with a text.
Yes The paper compels and maintains the reader's attention, and the voice may be compelling.
No The writer is obviously in control of standard, edited American English. There are very few, if any, distracting mechanical and/or grammatical errors.
Yes The paper establishes a context for itself that is clearly evident to readers outside of the immediate classroom setting.
The Satisfactory Paper
Yes This paper offers a fairly clear controlling thesis or main idea, and its context is obvious to most readers.
Yes The paper clearly attempts to guide the reader through a series of stated points or examples, so that the reader does not have to make undue effort to understand the paper.
Yes The main idea of the paper is supported by relatively distinct details and/or examples.
Yes The paper offers an explicit argument that goes beyond mere "plot" summary. It argues by analyzing, quoting from, thinking through, and discussing texts, developing a coherent argument through the use of evidence, claims, and examples that illustrate its position.
Yes The paper engages with the ideas and the text so as to reveal a critical thinking process.
Yes There is an effort in the paper to develop both a variety of examples and adequate transitions between the examples.
1/2 The sentence and paragraph structure is competent and functional, and the paper has few distracting surface errors.
Here are only some of the errors I noted as I read your essay:
No Works Cited page
Paragraph 6: (1) your opening sentence basically forces the reader to go back and look at the Frankenstein quote again. Can you refer to the quote—perhaps repeat a key phrase or sentence—without doing this? (2) The last sentence in the paragraph has problems: “The young doctor is an example of the human condition to be lured into fantasies without considering the consequences …” This should read something like: “The young doctor is an example of how easily humans are lured into fantasies without considering the consequences …”.
Paragraph 7: (1) Replace “This essay” with “Bishop” in the first sentence. (2) the last clause of the first sentence is problematic, in that you do not maintain parallel structure: “This essay reveals that human beings have always been lured by promises and think that you can get something for nothing, get everything by doing nothing.” This should read something like: “Bishop reveals that human beings have always been lured by promises of a ‘free lunch’—by thinking that you can get something for nothing, get everything by doing nothing.” (3) there are missing words in sentence 5.
Paragraph 8: The wording of the first sentence is highly redundant—you use “causes”/”cause” in two different senses. This makes it both repetitive and confusing.
Yes The paper reflects some complexity of thought and style.
Yes The paper has a voice which may be, at times, compelling.
Yes The paper provides adequate context; i.e., it is understandable to general readers outside of the immediate classroom context.
