The Dangers of the Versificator

Part I
For this assignment I am going to use a combination of peer-to-peer file sharing, social networking sites, and internet radio stations as my current communication technologies that could be potentially dangerous to human culture. The three of these technologies make creative communication forms convenient and for the most part free to access. My particular focus will be on music. I will start by saying I take full advantage of all of these technologies. Through file sharing progams such as Kazaa, social networking sites such as MySpace Music, and internet radio sites, you can basically access any song by and band ever written within a few minutes. While this is great for me and my generation, I can see this being a turn off to artists in future generations that want to write music. People will always write music and create new and innovative styles of music, but the incentives to mass produce and share your creativity with the world will be lacking.

Part II
The technology I can relate todaýs technologies to would be the versificator as used in 1984. The versificator first comes up in chapter 4 of 1984 when Winstońs job at the Record́s department is being described. Winstońs job is to ̈̈supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, novels....̈̈ He goes on to say however, that there are other departments that deal with ̈̈proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment....which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kleidoscope known as a versificator.̈ With the versificator there is no required human input to create these forms of entertainment and a brainless machine such as this obviously lacks the creative ability that a human would have.

Part III
Like I stated in Part I, artists that are not getting paid for their work are going to lack motivation to create innovative music and the media form itself could fade itself out. It seems that a major goal of technology is to keep creating machines that can do the same work that a human could do with no human input. If we let it, there could become a point where humans have no desire to be creative and create artistic works of their own. In striving for convenience, we could come to a situation where we risk losing our culture and human instincts.