Higher education in America is certainly not cheap. Anyone currently attending college can attest to that fact. The government assistance which helped create today’s leaders is drying up while costs continue to rise. Many students apply for scholarships to help defray the costs, and competition for these limited funds is fierce. I’ve entered a few contests, but have yet to win anything. The winners usually are students at top-tier universities, while those of us at the community college level, particularly non-traditional students, don’t seem to fare too well (A notable exception to this trend is the Datatel Scholarship Program, which features a scholarship specifically for returning students like me, and the winners are RARELY from Div I Universities).
In the case of essay contests, certain sponsors courteously post the winning entries while others do not. I believe the winning entry should always be posted online. Simply posting a notice that says "Congratulations to X for an outstanding essay" does not give a great deal of insight as to how the losing essay writers may improve their writing, nor does it prove that the judging was completely objective. Those who submit their work into the public arena do so with an expectation that their work will be scrutinized, and although they don't expect individual critiques, the opportunity to compare one's work to those of others can be a great educational tool. Isn't the goal of awarding a college scholarship to encourage education? I believe it is, or at least it should be a goal.
So, in the interest of education, I will show the other side of the story. I will post a series of losing essays which I have entered into various scholarship contests, as well as all essays which I enter into future contests. Here’s the first of many to come…
How has the technology of the past 20 years affected the relationship between the individual and society?
“Reach Out and Touch Someone” was the well-known marketing slogan of a major telephone company twenty years ago. The advertisements usually featured wistful scenes of people separated by a long distance distractedly going about their day, when the telephone rings, and it’s a special someone calling to “just say ‘hi’.” The recipient is deeply touched by the caller’s act of caring. The commercial ends, leaving viewers thinking about for whom they could do the same, and checking the time to see if the lower evening rates were in effect yet.
The telephone company’s message successfully connected the practical uses of long-distance communications with the humanistic need for contact, even if the contact is not tactile. The years since have seen an explosion in the quality, accessibility, and affordability of various modes of communication. Technology has allowed individuals to “plug and play” in the larger human consciousness. People on opposite ends of the Earth can converse with each other, share ideas, and learn things as never before. This greater awareness of the outside world, however, has not translated into a growth of the individual mind. Technology’s tremendous growth has served to shape individual minds into components of a larger collective mind, a “hive.”
“The Hive” was T.J. Bass’s name for the human society of a distant future. In his 1974 book “The Godwhale”, the contradictions of advanced technology’s power and its weaknesses are brilliantly illustrated. The story’s protagonist, Larry Dever, is a young man who becomes paraplegic after his spine is crushed during an accident. Medical technology could not restore the use of his lower body despite its high level of sophistication. Hoping for a cure, he chooses to have the paralyzed lower half of his body surgically removed and stored, use a robotic body called a Mannequin to replace his legs, and go into Suspension until medicine could develop the technology to make his body whole again. Larry Dever symbolizes a society that had developed their technology to a high level, and put increasing faith in technology to make itself whole, a society much like our own.
Larry awakens in the distant future to find humankind completely dependent upon technology, and unable to turn back. The Earth’s population has grown to 3.5 trillion, and lives inside of a domed city that covers all of the continents. The inhabitants have lost their humanity and live symbiotically with technology, unable to reproduce or provide adequate food without technological assistance. Through technology, they have mastered the human genetic code, and mass-produce offspring in giant laboratories. The technology that allowed them to build cyborg whales to harvest the seas until they died now allows them to produce food through molecular manipulation of chemicals and the protein of dead humans. Each person in society is built for a specific purpose and is part of a class, much like bees in a hive are specialized into workers and drones. This limited role of self in relation to society becomes more apparent in our 21st Century lives as technology continues to advance, and we become increasingly reliant upon technology to solve our problems and make things easier.
Technology in the last twenty years has indeed made individuals dependent upon society. Whether an individual chooses this dependence is immaterial, as society cannot exist at the level it does now without it. Computers are not the clichéd “wave of the future.” They have become a cybernetic organ within the larger human body, an expansion module of the human nervous system. Memories, images, and dreams can live completely independent from the minds that created them. Thoughts, goals, even complete life histories are translated into 1s and 0s, stored in silicon, cloned, mutated, and teleported at the speed of light anywhere in the world, all at the stroke of a key or the click of a mouse. Individuals realize that society is the keeper of their lives. The records that prove who they are, or that they even existed at all are keyed into data files for safekeeping. Every vital record, the net currency of every individual’s worth, is stored in memory banks across the globe. And, like other banks, they charge interest. The interest for individuals is a dependence on technology, and by extension, the society that provides it. Like Larry Dever, individuals have sought to make themselves “whole” by relying on technology, and they are seeing this aim succeed, though not as they hoped. They have become whole as a society instead.
Status: LOST
Winners’ Schools: Boston College, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University
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