I thought his description of the railroad, the telegraph, and the radio is very impressive.  It obviously made an impression on him as a child that he could still recall years later as a poet.  Luckily for my paper, he talks about these inventions and the impact they had on his childhood in depth.  While I wasn't expecting to find so much from him personally on the subject, I am very happy that I did find something.  Hopefully it will be helpful when I actually start the writing process. Just thought I would share this breif part of his speech because it seems very fitting.  

The more I am researching Orwell, the further I am getting away from algorithms. There may be some grammatical sequencing in public discourse, either written or oral, but I find Orwell is more interested in the tricks of propaganda. The 2+2=5 represents the 'dumbing down' of language of the city Oceania to make the citizens more blinded to the actual truths. Having read one of his essays that I find quite fascinating, I would be hard-pressed to believe Orwell would have a different view on the usage of the English language in today's technological society. That is where my essay is at for now, in a nutshell. It's nothing much, but maybe enough to get me on the right track.

This excerpt was taken from Chapter 8 entitled "Dagara Cosmology and Ritual." As stated in class before, I noticed a lot of connections between with this text that would help compliment my understanding on reading Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood. I was deeply surprised and fascinated on how some of content in Somé's work can also allude to previous discussions we have had on the body and nature being a medium for information. To think of our bones as a receptor of information makes incredible sense. I remember my grandmother telling me, when I was much younger, of a bike accident she had when she was a young kid, and what triggered her memory of the incident was a shock of pain in her leg. She mentioned how older people feel all of the major injuries they have had when they were younger. That even when we get old to the point that our minds go, our bodies will gladly remind us of some pasts through the aches and pains we may be feeling that have otherwise been engraved. What message I got was that our minds may forget things, but our bodies (more specifically our bones) won't. It's kind of like the bones are a moving slate that holds memory of the past through the impressions it collects and stores, much like how rocks provide a recorded timeline on the shifts of Earth. If that is the case, then maybe our skin and muscle may very well be the Freudian "Mystical Writing Pad" and the bones the slate that contain the underlying impressions.

     I have been browsing for resources to enhance my research, so far I have narrowed it down to a couple of sites. George-Orwell.org, while not a very comprehensive site, provides essays that may help one to get into the mind, or perspective, of George Orwell. Upon browsing, I stumbled across inventor Konrad Zuse, who invented the very first program-controlled computing machines, as documented on the Konrad Zuse Internet Archive (it states here that he invented the Z3, the first successful program-controlled computer in 1941, which may have what helped gear Orwell into the concept of the telescreen—a mixture of a television, telephone, and computer). I also came upon a website on Narendra Karmarkar. Since this would be a meaty topic, I know I will have to limit my scope, so I want to focus on a couple of sections documented in 1984 where Orwell took a glimpse into the future, find what innovations manifested from 1949-1984 that may have corresponded with these episodes, and see how we can still see the implications to this day. My hunt for resources is not yet over. I hope that the endeavor would be a successful, as ideas for more resources come to mind over the course of the next week or so.

It's as if Fate (or the great System or Machine of corporation capitalism through media) that determined we would be discussing Railroads, Telegraphs, and Newspapers on the 120th birthday of Raymond Loewy, "The Father of Industrial Design," about which we still use today: from gas station logos that direct us toward the havens where we fill up or vehicles in order to get to class on time, to Coca-Cola vending machines that have saved us from insanity on the restless nights spent on homework, thus making completing assignments with enough energy a possibility). Or, it could just be an incredible coincide... Of course, I would have never found that out if it hadn't been for the marvelous invention of Google.

The first paragraph should always serve as a throttle that kick-starts the gears of the mechanism of a great story. Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” does just that by effectively providing social commentary on social media at a time when the internet was a rare Dystopiatic fantasy, at the brink of a tragedy, and in the heart of the story. It focuses not on the news that Mrs. Mallard husband has mortally departed, but how she has “received” the startling news. There is a lot of word-of-mouth amidst the social community, conversations with “messages” composed “broken sentences” and containing “veiled hints” at the true source of the otherwise adulterated fact. Her source was from a friend of Mrs. Mallard’s husband who received “intelligence” of the matter where else but at a “newspaper office” (current times Twitter and Facebook, or even Yahoo!News or Associated Press), and did not have the news come to hear in a formal matter and privately (as from law enforcement), but that his death had been publicized. Taken aback, Mrs. Mallard could only find a moment of solace when looking out into the world from within her caged confinement through a “window”; it was outside where she noticed “life” apparent, outside of her cage, where she noticed nothing else but the faint notes of “sparrows twittering.” The deep enrichment in the subtleties is why I have always loved Chopin’s works.

--or at least that's how it all seems to me.

These two lines stuck out the most in my reading of the last sections of the story. Especially the word 'black darkness'. Is not darkness dark enough? But pitch black, where the most minute is detail is neglected (or deprived) from the sensory of the eyes. Psychologically, however, the blackness could represent the dark abyss of the mysterious realm subconscious. Likewise the slate onto which thoughts and ideas are constructed begins as a void of nothingness. "Gaps and blanks and absent answers" can be seen as preconceptions on which the telegrapher banked her convictions; they had once been justified and validated by her. The preconceptions and ideas are the paint that we brush (or spill) upon the easel, and ignorance is the paint thinner that takes away the factual constructs of the image (ideas). The black darkness can also be conceived as the ink within a telegraph that imprints messages (factual or opinionated) upon the ribbon. In modern times, blackness can be the binary domain, and the red flare be the coding of the binary domain. "She wanted no detail, no fact... shame" is the philosophy of many who dabble with the contents in a binary domain: a webpage editor/designer selects what he/she deems most fit for the audience, while members of a social network try so hard to prove themselves (indicate their strengths more frequently than their weaknesses). There is nothing wrong with pride, as it is a human condition, but facing, acknowledging, and admitting shame is quite a feat that is worth all action.