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Analysis Of Society Is Dead: We Have Retreated Into The IworldThe essay chosen for analysis is Society is Dead: We Have Retreated into the IWorld by Andrew Sullivan. The piece first appeared on TimesOnline on the 20th of February, 2005. In a nutshell, in his essay, Sullivan claims that modern people have become more closed than ever before because they tend to retreat into themselves and listen to music on their digital devices rather than communicate with each other.In his essay, Andrew Sullivan addresses the issue of digitalization of the world and presents it as a serious problem of the modern society.
In accordance with the author, people choose to be wired rather than interact with each other and the world. In fact, they have their own world of music, which they do not want to share with other people. Sullivan states it is so because people do not want to leave their comfort zones and because nobody is able to challenge their opinions and point of view as no one simply has an idea what those opinions are like. Throughout the essay, Sullivan backs up his claim by painting pictures and discussing causes and consequences of such change in people’s behavior.
More specifically, he provides examples of situations almost everyone has experienced or seen at least once in life. The author of the essay attracts the audience’s attention to seemingly trivial things; from his perspective, however, this appears to be a real problem as people chose not to take notice of other people and things that happen in the world.In the essay, Sullivan rises quite an important question. He presents technical development and digitalization of the society as significant problems people should be aware of.
The examples he uses are vivid and really illustrative as they help grasp the author’s main claim. The fact that the author of the piece under consideration presents the cause-and-effect relationship between why people chose to be wired and what will happen next makes the essay really convincing. However, I prefer to look at the issue from the different perspective. In particular, I believe that people choose to barrier from others and the world because they are tired of constant interactions they sometimes do not even want to have.
As it has been mentioned above, the main strength of the essay under analysis is that the author uses quite simple and at the same time clear and illustrative examples from life to back up his main claim. This helps Sullivan to establish a connection between himself and the reader because he represents himself as a common person. In addition to this, he uses a range of metaphors; for example, he refers to gadgets as to “little white box[es]” people tend to worship (Sullivan). Such word choice makes the essay more interesting to read.
Personally for me, there are no weaknesses in the essay. There is only one thing I do not like very much about the piece, and it is the pessimistic tone of the writer, due to which the problem may seem earth-shattering and more serious than it really is. Work CitedSullivan, Andrew. "Society is Dead: We Have Retreated into the IWorld." Sunday Times. 20 Feb 2005: n. page. Web. 23 Jan. 2015. .
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