The History of the Future
One of the main arguments made in they Carey/Quirk article “the History of the Future” is that privileged class of people have the time, energy, and knowledge to imagine the future. I somewhat agree with this argument, but at the same time I disagree. I think that everybody has the ability to imagine the future, regardless of what class they are in. I think that more privileged classes of people have the ability to make a reality out of the things that they imagine. Obviously the advantage that more privileged classes have is their access to more technologically advanced systems such as computers as well as more time to use those systems. This brings about the debate over whether a small group of people should be in control of basically deciding the nation’s future. If the richest people in the world are in charge of envisioning the future and making those visions become reality, then things that are invented are going to be geared toward people of higher classes, leaving behind lower class people. I think as of right now there is a divide between “haves” and “have nots” especially concerning technology. I know people my age who do not own computers and they have a cell phone from 2001, and I also know people who have a laptop, a desktop, an ipod, and an iphone. It’s kind of ironic that there’s a debate over websites that allow a small group of users to decide which videos will be featured on their homepage, yet it’s not a problem that a small group of people are deciding what technology people will be able to use to access that website in the future.