tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8692381608294018617.post6015203808967840761..comments2023-11-05T07:27:43.837-05:00Comments on Narrative and Technology: Revision 1- Androids as MetaphorsAdamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16302919444091859459noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8692381608294018617.post-26996878812356055262013-10-04T21:28:27.680-04:002013-10-04T21:28:27.680-04:00"I intend to show the correlation between the..."I intend to show the correlation between the world created by Philip K Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and that of his life in the 1950’s and 60s’ as well as its correlation to today’s society and technology and how it is more relevant than ever." - this argument is interesting, doable, and very, very large. I could do a hundred pages on it without breaking a sweat. My point is that you want to be more focused - it would be better to connect a particular aspect of his life to a particular aspect of the novel, while involving meaning - that is, why do we *care* that these two things can be connected?<br /><br />Your use of research in the long second paragraph is good, and your details are nice. The whole thing is a little long and clumsy, though: shorter paragraphs on more focused topics would help here. The content is solid, but the presentation could be improved.<br /><br />Re: drugs (if you're interested enough, go read his great novel *A Scanner Darkly*, which is about addiction to a drug called Death). You scratch some surface connections without asking what they mean. For instance - does the fact that the influence of the empathy box is like a drug-induced state count as a critique of the empathy box, or as a critique of an anti-drug society that doesn't recognize the *value* of drug use? Or is it something else? <br /><br />Again - you want to worry less about maximizing the number of connections you're making, and more on exploring what they mean, why they matter, what you can do with them. <br /><br />The long paragraph about technological changes starts out very badly - it seems like just a list of technological transformations. The material about people becoming more robotic at least has a purpose, but it's such a big claim, with so little evidence (do you really believe this? what evidence have you got? etc.), that it seems like a gesture toward an argument, not a functioning argument.<br /><br />The paragraph about political and social changes is much the same - a long list of changes experienced not just by Philip K. Dick but by everybody else living through this time. Many of these are significant to the novel in some way, I'll admit - but the devil is in the details. Quality, not quantity, of connections is what we want to see.<br /><br />The paragraph connecting us back to today has the same kind of problems. You have a very, very long list of observations, none of which are detailed. Noting that we have drugs today like they did in the 1960s isn't terribly interesting; helping to figure out ways in which our attitudes have evolved, or our usage patterns have changed, might be more relevant (if it were me, I'd do something with the abuse of prescription drugs here).<br /><br />Overall: Less is more. You would have been much better off focusing on one topic (ambitious example: the influence of Philip K. Dick's lost sister on his psychology and art), rather than dozens of topics. Many of the things you bring up are worth further exploration, but what you need to do is take *one* topic and make a detailed, significant argument about it - not maximize the number of different things you're saying. You show much more knowledge than insight here.Adamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16302919444091859459noreply@blogger.com