Kylie's Response on "Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution"

In our culture today we lean on believing what is shown to us through pictures, adds, and graphics. In the essay “Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution” by Cynthia L. Selfe she discusses the impact technology has on us along with the fears and the essentials of it. Selfe’s first narrative was “The Global Village and the Electronic Colony”. In this popular social narrative she explains how the computer network that spans the globe will serve to erase meaningless geopolitical borders, eliminate racial and ethnic differences, re-establish a historical familial relationship which binds together the peoples of the world regardless of race, ethnicity, or location. We are supplied with information about these topics through news, radio, and internet, but the issue is that it is edited so that the cruel and depressing stuff that is actually happening to others like us is hidden. We know its there, yet we are not obligated to hear or go through the painful obstacles others go through without a choice. The internet have created a separation between Americans and people of other races and locations by creating a defined knowledge. This knowledge is limited. Americans know what is going on, but without having to physically or mentally go through it they have lost remorse and sympathy for those in different situations. We only allow ourselves to know what we are comfortable knowing. Selfe says, “In fact, we find ourselves, as a culture, ill equipped to cope with the changes that the ‘global village’ story necessitates, unable, even, to imagine, collectivity, ways of relating to the world outside our previous historical and cultural experiences.” In this essay she give examples of two pictures. In the first figure it is an ethnic man with the world above him and the text says, “For the world to have a future we must work together as one tribe.” In the second figure it has several pictures of a man and of his tribe the texts for this figure is, “Welcome to the planet. Virgin’s one tribe. Virgin’s one world atlas. Welcome to One Tribe and One World.” With our technology today we rarely can even tell when we are just getting the re-told and revised facts shown to us. She goes on to explain in this essay, “This re-telling and re-vising of the Global Village story- we can now call it the Electronic Colonial narrative- happens very naturally within the discursive venues available to our culture- on television, in our classrooms, in books, and articles, and in corporate settings- often without anyone noticing because the elements of revised Electronic Colonial narrative are so much more familiar and acceptable to us than were those of the original Global Village story.

After reading this essay, I agree with Selfe’s understanding of technology and how it have impacted us without even realizing it. An example of this could be, my friend and I went on the internet and we came across an add for donating to the cause of Africa and Global Hunger. Instead of donating or even giving the add the time of day, they move on to check their Facebook to distract them from the hard truth. Last week I was in a class at my high school and we are picking debate topics and mine is abortion. I was on the internet looking up statistics and information and a page popped up, it was a picture of a baby who had been aborted and it broke my heart. This is a first-hand picture of what is happening in real life, and after seeing that picture it impacted me so much. We are given many opportunities to hear or see the cold facts on which is happening, but it is in our hands to click the button or not change the channel. The revised and blinded version of facts are supplied in many places and in the essay Selfe describes how we use that to claim we can understand and experience what people in other places are going through. Yet, we do not know what they are going through, it is not happening to us, we keep it “arm’s length away” from us so that we do not have to suffer.