Essay on Spare Time
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When I was a kid, I would get a new toy and play with it until it broke. We know we are growing up because it takes longer and longer for us to break our toys, but we can manage it if we keep at it. Anyway, for Christmas one year I was given a football game that consisted of a football field with a vibrator beneath it. You would set the players out on the field and turn on the vibrator, and everyone would seem to run around for a minute, usually in the wrong direction. It was soon evident to this youngster that this mechanism only pretended to be like a real football game, and this created in me that most vital of American attitudes, dissatisfaction. The more our toys can do, the more dissatisfied we are that they cannot do more. When we are children our toys are meant to fill time, to give us something to do. As we grow older, our toys have a different purpose--they are meant to save us time and give us more leisure to buy more toys and get more leisure. However, this noble effort is not working as well as it once did, and I have noted that the toys we have today take away more time than they save. Your spare time is valuable, whether you know it or not. First, you are not likely to have too much of it, so you do not want to waste what you have. Second, there are a large number of entities appealing for you to spend you spare time with them--everything from television and radio to the 7-11, the local pool hall, video games, and much more, and obvio
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sition and transmission of information is thus the most important element of the Internet. Those experts say this because they know that your average superhighway is clogged with vehicles most of the time and only pretends it will get you to your destination faster. The Internet lives up to this same image.
It is clear that the Internet will change society. Society has already been changed by the more rapid spread of technology seen in the last two decades with the advent of the personal computer and with the success of the videocassette and cable television. Many see a future which will combine these technologies in the information superhighway. We are therefore treated over and over again to delightful images of access to every library in the cosmos. We are encouraged to envision remote Third World villagers getting medical diagnoses which can be instantly analyzed by worldclass doctors. This will all come to pass when the new networks of coaxial cable and fiber optics are installed over the next ten to twenty years. This image of nirvana goes by the name "500 Channels of Television"--yes, we get TV, too--and supposedly we also get unlimited choices as to what we watch, what information we download, and who we chat with
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Aunt Sally, Anyway Christmas, Al Gore, Television--yes TV, Third World, , fax machine, War Peace, fax machines, computer fax machine, communicative technologies, field vibrator, cable television, watch television, 500 choices, piece software, whatever sent, football game,
Approximate Word count = 2350
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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