Great Works I: Remixing Memory

1. I will be focusing my post on the first few pages of chapter number ten. Page 230 where Odysseus asked his host Aeolus who he’d been with for a month for a chance to be on his way back. After they had talked about sailing home Aeolus didn’t deny him anything and provided him with a sack of wind.

2. Is is Odysseus’ fault? Are the gods against him and his ways?  Can you relate to this event?

3. Odysseus is given a chance to get back to his own land and decides to take a rest after the long nine days of journey. He was given this sack of winds with responsibility but he took on all the work on his own hands. He had been working on the vessel’s sheet himself without any help and didn’t trust one mate on the ship. In my opinion that was a good idea on his side but didn’t think of the consequences. Maybe if Odysseus had some help he wouldn’t of needed some rest and would’ve  easily gotten home safely or maybe he thought otherwise. It could have been Odysseus’ fault cause he hadn’t told the crew as to exactly what was inside the sack which is why the nosy mates had opened the sack in the first place. On page 232 King Aeolus says “Back again, Odysseus–why? Some blustering god attacked you?” This line may show that the gods are against Odysseus in some way. The god of the winds may have helped him but another god could have easily had different intentions. This event could easily be related to many people. The god of winds had given Odysseus the power to go back home with good intention but maybe other gods had a different intention. This story could be used in real life to show that good intentions don’t always end up in good situations!

In the first article “Phaedrus”, Socrates talks about how writing is bad because he states that when the author writes something, he has a specific idea or concept in mind when he is writing. When the author dies, his writings are left to be read by others but unfortunately, that is where the problem with writing arises. Since the writer is gone, no one can accurately know what his original idea was and therefore the writing can be mistaken by and abused by those who don’t understand what the article is talking about.

While I agree with Socrates that writing can cause problems because of the way readers can misinterpret what writers have written, I don’t believe that simply passing knowledge through oral means is a perfect solution to this problem. Writing is a very efficient way to record the history and events of the past and a way for people to bring their ideas to others in an easy to understand way even if they may not understand it. Passing of information purely through oral communication can cause problems because no person’s memory is perfect and as a result, information can be lost or broken apart over time. The best way of passing information should be the usage of both oral and written information.

With Nicholas Carr, his idea that the internet is affecting our intelligence is acceptable according to how he points it out. As a result of people having to scan websites for information rather than doing research in a library like in the past, people have become accustomed to not reading entire books or articles but rather skim through it looking for essential keywords for what their looking for. Its very noticeable when many people around you are constantly looking at their phones and computers intently but rarely seem to be able to hold attention when reading any sort of book or newspaper. In order to fix this problem, it is important that people should use their free time instead of going on the internet to read a book in order to regain the ability to read long texts and articles.