Blog 4 : Borgmann

In chapter four, Borgmann discussed many different things that we take for granted in today’s world. He starts by saying that if we lost all of our recording mechanisms, our society would be ‘primitive and incomplete.’ I agree with him completely. It makes me think about all the different information one can store on a computer. For example, with the Excel application, not only can you store a bunch of different numbers, but you can highlight a given row and it will give you an answer to a number of different mathematical expressions in a matter of seconds. I’m sure there are a large number of people in this world who rely on that computer program alone to get them through their forty hour work week. The thought of scratching ‘tallies’ into bone in order to keep track of things seems ludicrous to us, but it was a reality to them. It also causes me to think about my job over the summer. I worked in a large warehouse, and every week we had to go through and take inventory. If it weren’t for technology, that process would probably take several weeks to complete. It is amazing to actually take the time to look back and see the hours that people of the past had to put forth in order to complete their daily activities. As for the class discussions, we were talking about spending a couple hours in the wilderness compared to in front of a computer. During the summer of my sophomore year of high school, I spent a week in Wyoming for a retreat. During this retreat we stayed on a ranch, where there was no television, no cell phones, and no contact with anyone but the people we were there with. It was an amazing experience and as soon as we left, everyone wanted to go back. Even though I couldn’t sit down and right out a list of things I learned, it still to this day feels like I learned and accomplished more during that one week than I ever could sitting in front of a computer. It’s hard to realize that life isn’t as stressful without technology until you actually spend some time away from it. Computers are great a lot of the time, but sometimes being away from them can be even better.