Book Club Blog – Claire Nastari

This text is different fro any text that I have read. It seems to want its readers to think about what it would be like to have a continuous stream of information running through their minds. While I was reading this book I came to the realization that the technology world is coming closer and closer to this idea of having a constant stream of information running through our minds. Technology has come a long way from even when I was little. When I was about five years old I still remember my dad telling me I had to get off the phone because someone was sending him a fax for work and the phone line was connected to the fax line. I also remember the internet taking at least ten or fifteen minutes to start up. Then there was gameboys and blackberry phones that everyone wanted. Texting was the thing to do throughout middle school and I didn’t even have a phone that was capable of doing so. Then came the earliest version of the iphone. People mostly used it for its games and applications, but not so much for the internet because it was so slow. Then the droids and newer iphones came out that allowed people to search the internet much faster. Now we have our phones and tablets and even google glasses that can get us information with a touch of a finger or a verbal command. We are moving toward this constant stream of information. The only thing separating us from the world of “Feed” is that we don’t yet have chips that we can attach to our nervous system in our bodies. Scary to think about.

I think this book would be a great tool in a high school or even middle school classroom these days. I wouldn’t have said middle school ten years ago, but now I think it would be appropriate. Tween and teenagers need to wrap their head around the idea that technology is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. It is causing us to read less, to put less effort into certain things and is just making us lazy in general. If you asked a bunch of middle school students to write a paper on a personal war story from WWII what do you think most of them would do? Ask their friends or family if they know anyone who is still living from WWII and maybe interview them? Or google “personal WWII stories”? I can bet you they would choose the second option, no doubt. It is not because they are uncreative or stupid, but because they have been using the internet their whole life to obtain information. They have not done it any other way. I think this book would be a great tool to teach middle school and high school students that they should make an effort to not go through their lives relying on technology.