My Thoughts on "Technophobia"

I'm not too sure what I'm going to say about this particular reading... It seemed to reiterate the basic underlying themes of movies like Blade Runner and the Terminator films, and I don't have anything really "new" to add to what was said.

In all honesty, I don't consider myself to have a real "fear" of technology... My only problem with the concept of machines is how they seem to dehumanize people. When you're dealing with something like an assembly line and factory workers, you see that the people are completely interchangeable and, in reality, replaceable regardless of who they are, what they enjoy doing in their free time, what kind of family they have... So, in a way, you're saying that the machines are far more important than the people who work them.

When you talk about technology, or more specifically over the topics of technology that we've covered thus far, you continue to see the same basic themes: lack of individualism, freedom, choice... That machines turn "bad" and wreck havoc on the people and environment around them, and it's the people's fault for being too concerned with capitalism to restrain themselves from producing the technology that will eventually be their ruin. However, my opinion on such is that I have a much bigger fear of machines getting to the point that the worker no longer matters rather than machines becoming self-aware and killing people at random.

I really enjoy discussing these topics... It's a completely different approach to analyzing text than I've ever taken before, and I'm loving it so far. From the text, I found a line that "stuck out" to me, and I'll go ahead and include it though I've already discussed the meanings I gathered from it.

"Perhaps this accounts for the desire for for a more literal, natural world in conservative films. It is a reaction to the world they themselves help create through an ideal of efficient economic development."

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.