Final Exam

Response to Motorcycles and Buddha (2/17)

The basis of Borgmann's major argument against Pirsig's thesis is as follows: that technology has become too obscure and disconnected to become a focal practice. I must disagree. While it is true that technology has become obscured from the commodity that it delivers, it does not prevent that technology from being used in a focal manner. Indeed, it enhances it.

Specialized knowlege, more specifically the acquiring of it, can itself be focal. As technology becomes more and more departed from focal practices it at the same time generates a necessity for more and more interaction and understanding with others. Not only does it take years of education, time spent in a classroom with other people, interacting and experiencing to create and fix this new technology, it also requires time spent with friends trying to understand how the new technology works and if it breaks whether or not it can be fixed or should be used in an alternate manner.

Humanity is united by its frustration with and attempts to understand technology. How many jokes are told and stories are shared about some piece of equipment breaking? I myself bond best with my father when we're discussing the algorithm for a new program or cussing out a fried hard drive. Learning, sharing, dicussing--focal.

Response to irony (2/17)

Books are difficult to research from. For one thing, not only do you have to spend time finding the book, you can spend hours reading through it before you realize that this particular work does not have the particular information that you need.

The same of course, can be said of research on the internet, but with databases and trusted sites you can often find not only what you need but also more than you hoped for. The access to information online is instantaneous and unparalleled. Because there is so much, of course, you can be led astray but with the internet (and unlike books) you can can search within documents to quickly determine what information it contains and whether or not that information is relevant.

The database at Thomas More may not have had direct access to the article needed, but the article was found and acquired immediately with only a phone call to a friend. Not an hour drive to Lexington, nor a two week delay for inter-library loan. Books just cannot competer with the speed.