During today’s class on Thursday, January 29, I decided to keep a tally of how many times the word technology (or technological, etc.) was said during our discussion of Jentery Sayers’ “Technology.” My method was simple: keep a tally on a sheet of paper. My grand total of utterances of the word technology came out to be 229 times, including words like “high-tech” and “technological.” I found that participating in a discussion while trying to keep track of one word being consistently used in the discussion is very challenging. Also, I experienced semantic satiation, the phenomenon in which the repetition of a word leads to the sense that it no longer has a meaning. I also wondered why common English language doesn’t use more words for “technology.”

After hearing Dr. Thomas’ 3 week motivational speech, I decided to keep track of how many people added their opinions or comments to the class discussion, and whether they just jumped in or raised their hands. I tallied 9 instances of people raising their hands or making some similar gesture before commenting, and 28 instances of people blurting out (for lack of a better phrase) their comments or opinions. It also stuck out to me that the people who participate the most often are also the ones who blurt out their comments first, not that this is a problem.

 

technology-funny-cartoon-6

I thought this photo was cute and relevant to today’s class discussion.

Source: http://www.raafatrola.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/technology-funny-cartoon-6.jpg