2nd draft for writing project 4

Rate of Change
Life is affected by technology in an infinite number of ways, but everyone has a different opinion about whether those effects are positive or negative. Sven Birkerts, a critic of electronic text, wrote the novel The Gutenberg Elegies to emphasize his negative viewpoint on technology.  He states, “The rate of change, social and technological, has surpassed exponentially the gradually escalating rates of previous periods.”  Everyone can agree with Birkerts’ assertion that technology is advancing because we have witnessed the advancement of phones, music players, television, and other electronics during our lifetime.  The Internet in itself is a huge milestone, and, less than 20 years after its introduction to the public, phones can be used to access the Internet to check email, download music, and play games.  It is obvious that society is constantly changing as a result of technology, but is it changing too quickly?
Technology is a powerful tool that helps society advance and become more sophisticated.  Without it, the world would be quieter and incredibly less connected.  Many people cannot even imagine what life would be like without television, phones, and computers.  These devices allow faster, more convenient communication between people who may not even live on the same continent.  Information can be transmitted from place to place at the click of a button, allowing everyone in the world access to knowledge that they would not otherwise have.  Technology is extremely influential and has helped the human race achieve many goals, from non-invasive surgery to accurate weather predictions.
While many people adore the Internet and utilize it everyday, there are still those, like Birkerts, who are strongly opposed to society’s increasing dependence on technology.  There is a piece of technology to achieve almost any goal, and as long as we have access to that technology, we would rather use it than do things the old-fashioned way.
Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl demonstrates how rapidly technology has advanced in the past decade.  The Internet allows people to link to countless sites with just the click of a button and, while Patchwork Girl does this to some extent, it is much more limited than society is accustomed to.  The StorySpace program allows the user to navigate to different text boxes without having to follow the traditional line-by-line format that most novels use.  Jackson purposefully uses the program in order to intrigue the reader and give him/her a different type of reading experience.  Instead, its non-linear format confuses the audience and leaves them with no true sense of what the story is about.  While it may have been an exciting program to use when it first came out, those who utilize it now deem it limiting because they are so familiar with the Internet.

“I see instead a steady displacement of old by new, a generational pressure that escalates, its momentum gathers as the members of the old dispensation age and die off.”

[I'm still working on the organization. I need to incorporate the last quote somewhere in the last unfinished paragraph. I still need a conclusion, also.]

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