After going through the chapters assigned for reading this week I was pretty frustrated. I found myself reading about things the ‘we’ are doing, yet I couldn’t remember doing these things. Sure, some of the extremely general claims about how technology has affected the way we live and learn are things I can remember doing. However the majority of assumptions that I read through seemed mostly sensationalist.
As a reader I felt like I was being shoved into this category, the same way he described as “not giving people what they want [but rather] getting them to take what the choice-giver has to sell” (53). I felt as if the author had points he wanted to make, and he was going to use the reader to make those points. Maybe I completely missed something and this reaction is what he was going for. I found it interesting that he talks about “facts devoid of context are almost impossible to apply sensibly” when most of the ‘facts’ that the author presented were based on something that ‘we’ are doing, none of which I could really place myself in.
In the end I fell that I probably missed the entire point of the reading simply because of the wordage used by the author. If he had not included the reader in basically all of the assumptions made throughout, I feel it would have left a lot more open for interpretation by the reader. Again, maybe this was his attempt at forcing the reader to become a ‘programmer’ rather than a program, but it frustrated the hell out of me.