#engl106

President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961) warns the American people of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, advocating for a more balanced and peaceful moral grounding for our society in an increasingly dangerous, immoral, and apathetic world. Eisenhower’s message is vitally important, but the speech was mostly ignored when it was given for a variety of reasons, such as boring tone, length, and contradicting the popular opinions and attitudes of the public. Although the speech did not receive much attention, it’s message remains deeply relevant today; however, if it was delivered today, it would probably be largely ignored by the American people just like it was 50 years ago, for almost exactly the same reasons. Considering the direction modern journalism has taken, the speech would probably be completely ignored or even ridiculed in the media. Since the 1980′s, the focus of journalism has shifted from informing the people about important events to entertaining the people with meaningless or irrelevant stories. People love good stories and conflict, and reporting on the details of congressional proceedings and the finer points of policy doesn’t quite hit the same nerve as reporting on the personal scandals of celebrities and politicians. You only need to spend about five minutes logged onto any social media platform to see that it is plastered with nothing but meaningless clickbait or extremely polarizing political articles about the most entertaining figure of the day, such as the latest doings of presidential candidates. More often than not, instead of reporting on these people’s ability to lead our nation from a political perspective, journalism now entertains the public with the latest scandal. All of this shows an alarming trend in the mindset of the American people. It shows a decline from genuine interest and care about the direction our country is taking into nothing more than an obsession with entertainment and less relevant details. If this entertainment news continues to prevail over real news, the future of journalism looks very bleak. I would encourage people to regain their thirst for knowledge so that their thirst for entertainment takes a back seat. Seeking out more reputable and less biased news sources is one way to start, but having genuine interest in not only the personal lives of our leaders, but also their skills and knowledge, as well as the details of the policies they control, is an excellent way to get this country’s political mindset back on track. 

              A review by Peter Bradshaw (http://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/nov/13/2012-film-review) comprehends that this movie is blown out of proportions with plenty of computer generated images incorporated into the movie along with the unbelievable scenarios that occur in the movie. But he concludes his review of the film with: “But it’s enjoyable.” According to this review, we can understand that this movie is based on the predictions of the Mayans that the world will end during the year 2012. What everyone should learn from such movies and predictions is that, people should continue to move forward and just continue with life, as worrying about something will not change it.

              According to Dan Mitchell’s IGN (http://www.ign.com/articles/1999/12/08/the-matrix) short review of the film, it is essentially “a world where the realization of truth is only the first step in freeing mankind from their cyber cocoons.” Thus this small clip from the movie highlights how mankind is struggling to live with the dominance of cyber power. He then argues that everything in a real person’s life may actually be a hallucination programmed into a super computer. Although it is possible to accept this analysis of life, it would seem more appropriate to accept that life revolves around the brain rather than some program or the five senses given to humans. So this small clip from the movie can be true or not true, depending on the way a person views life.

According to an opinion editorial by Gary Marcus (http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150706-terminator-genisys-an-ai-experts-view), artificial intelligence is clearly a threat for mankind according to many influential people in the world today such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. But what Gary Marcus goes on to question, is whether the actions of the terminator machines can actually be true in the near future. He effectively argues against this by stating: “machines don’t need to be smarter than us in all ways to be dangerous; they merely need to be powerful.” This is an unusual and different take on the threat of evolving artificial intelligence. But after watching this movie, and comprehending both sides of the argument, there will always be an element of doubt with humanity’s first creation.

XU:  I think that if civilization can never end unless all hope is lost. The human kind is strong; because unlike animals that only live to survive, we have hopes and dreams. As long as hope is still present, man will find a way to not only survive, but also to actually live. I think that if civilization were to end tomorrow, what I would miss the most is music. Even though civilization is lost in Station Elven, I believe that the Traveling Symphony created their own civilization by relying upon each other through music, acting, and living. To me, civilization is not lost as long as there is still communication and exchange of emotions amongst different individuals. Music is stronger than words or actions at times, and to me, if music was lost, then that would actually be the end of the world.

Dialectic Journals #16~19

found this on my dashboard, pretty interesting, so I thought I’d share.