Mitchell's essay speaks more of the idyllic than the facts and thus it is hard to swallow what he is saying. He speaks of E-topia and feels that this ideal world can be achieved or rather has been achieved due to the revolution in internet technology. This is far from the truth. Agreed that internet technology has revolutionized the way we work, but it is still not time that we can put our work life at stake on it. The lack of security on the internet is a growing concern for a lot of firms and companies. Combined with system crashes and power losses, the internet can be one of the biggest threats to privacy and data. Another thing that Mitchell takes for granted is the availability of internet technology to everyone around the world. At preset, there are people living in this world who do not get even one square meal per day. Then how are they supposed to have access to a computer, let alone the internet.

It has been said that beauty can only be appreciated if it is not everlasting. Thus, when Mitchell says that the rich people would prefer to live in scenic locations and manage their work form there using internet technologies, these people are bound to be tired of all the scenic beauty at some time or the other. It is perhaps human nature to be at fault. Thus the idea of an E-topia seems more theoretical than practical. Workplaces and homes would be merged into a single establishment says Mitchell, but he forgets that for work to be done, people are required and a job like manufacturing cars requires the combined effort of all the workers and machines together. It is not practically viable to just contract out jobs to individuals working from their homes. People have to meet and work together. Thus I feel that his idea of the ideal live/work place is a bit too far – fetched.

Overall, his essay provides us with guidelines with which to improve our lives using technology, but E-topia is something we can never achieve in reality. However, that doesn’t mean we stop trying. We should always strive for perfection.
  ¶ 9:49 PM

  Tara McPherson's essay about the comparison between the internet and television is something obvious. She feels that the internet is revolutionizing today’s world and it would slowly edge out television. One of the reasons why this seems obvious is that we (the students who are writing these blogs) were born in the mid 1980's and internet is probably about half our age. Thus my point is that we have "grown" together with the internet and thus its capabilities and usefulness seem obvious to us. Another reason why this may seem obvious is the fact that today, most of the world has been "computerized". Thus it is hard to imagine a world without computers and since computers have so many uses (specifically, the internet), this thing seemed inevitable.

The author has a sense of "being in the moment" while she is surfing because she can actively participate. In fact, the choice is hers, whether to surf through a web site or not. Thus she feels that the internet offers tremendous choice, though options may be limited. She feels that the web is "a mediator between man and machine". That it is a "technology of experience". Although she praises the internet and web, she mentions that she is not biased and does not want to imply that one is superior to the other. Rather, she is more specifically interested in exploring the "technologies" of the web. She also feels that television and the web reference each other in some way and thus wishes to explore the capabilities of the web further and how it can complement television.
  ¶ 1:19 AM

  Roland Barthe's Camera Lucidia was difficult to evaluate because of the words he used and also because he went deep into a subject, sometimes contradicting himself. He feels that photography is an incomplete picture of someone and that it is a vague term. A photograph represents nothing but the object which is being photographed and thus, the photograph has no identity of its own. Another point he makes about them is that photographs do not offer a "whole" memory of someone. It is successful only as far as capturing the outer expression and features of a person goes. It cannot go into the mind of the person or reveal his thoughts. Thus he says that by looking at a photograph, one cannot say that he/she knows the object (or rather person) being photographed. Even if the photograph manages to capture some emotion on the face of the person being photographed, most of the time, the expression is fabricated because the subject becomes aware and conscious that he is being photographed. Thus he feels that they are a bad way to remember people.

Another notable feature of his writing deals with time and death. He feels that whatever has been there before him is history. Thus, his mother's death would be history to him. When he looks at her pictures, he remembers only parts of her (like her perfume, her clothes etc), but the photographs never give him a true and complete picture of his mother. He remembers her death and remembers how in her last days he had nursed and cared for her. Since he was approaching the same age as his mother when she passed away, he feels that the whole world is empty and hollow and that there is nothing left for him to do but await his own demise. Thus he gets melancholic and nostalgic, speaking about one of the last photographs taken of his mother before her death and tells the readers how tired and worn out she looked.
  ¶ 10:42 PM