For this assignment, I have gathered magazine articles, advertisments, as well as a comic strip and a poem from my graduation memory book. When brought together, these finds make arguments about the double edged sword of western society and technological advancements. That is, these finds put pressure on the promise of technology and western beliefs by sheding light on what is often lost when such "advancements" are made.
"So, which way is up?"
This page from "Adbusters" offers two opinion pieces that, when placed together, comment on the side effects of American's mechanized society. The top piece, written by Jim McClellan, reads the corporate grind and consumer "binging" through the lens of a "wipeout" in surfing. Surfers, unlike the corporate drone, understands, respects, and plans for the wipeout. They understand that they are riding nature, and they surrender their control to her might. McClellan suggests that we are in the middle of a wipeout, but we have chosen to keep our eyes closed and not try to figure out how to find the surface. We have decided not to break through the "head-in-the-sand consumer hedonism" in favor of survival underwater. Perhaps the reason we are trying to live underwater relates to the stripping away of natural "refuge" that mechanism and consumerism demand.
When McClellan's piece is placed above Knuston's, the reader is able to link Knuston's insistance that people in city's need a natural refuge to McClellan's criticism of corporate consumerism. That is, perhaps, because we have destroyed our wild refuge to satisfy our consumer urges, by trying to live underwater, we have killed our ability to sustain our spirits.
Like people who would try to breath underwater instead of doing the difficult work of finding the surface, we are killing ourselves.