Kurt Vonnegut has always had a great awareness of the destructive social impact of
science and technology. Contraptions that Vonnegut calls "social transplants" replace real
relatives and friends with synthetic ones. Recordings, radio and television are just a few of these
devices. They make it possible to bring synthetic relatives and friends right into your home and
replace those friends and relatives who are not perfect, nor even consistent, with a better class of
people. Vonnegut's least favorite technology is the computer, because it is a nervous system
outside of our own, and it has deprived humans of the experience of becoming. "All they have to
do now is wait for the next program from Microsoft" (Pickering 24). Films, books and plays
show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk. Singers and musicians
show us humans making sounds far lovelier than humans really make (Skaw 568). All of these
technological developments have decreased the......
Join Now or Login to view the rest of this paper.
Approximate Word Count: 1677
Approximate Pages: 7 (260 words per double-spaced page) |