Victorian Collective

After class on Thursday I kept thinking about collectives.  The Borg and the Drummers are definitely collectives.  Their minds are like one, inter-connected and almost without free thought.  One is many.  The more I thought about it the more I kept thinking the Victorians in The Diamond Age are a sort of collective.  The Victorians want everyone in their phyle to think alike and act a certain way.  They do not like people who speak up and cause dissent.  They want to go on living their comfortable lives and not have anyone make any waves.  This is why Finkle-McGraw and Hackworth came up with the primer.  If everyone is acting the same and doing the same things, then no one is unique or has unique experiences.  Both Hackworth and Finkle-McGraw want their girls to grow up having experiences that will change them into something great, non-conforming because they realize the Victorians do not give them this opportunity.  Miss Matheson says this when she is talking to the girls on page 321 when she talks about the differnet phyles and being clever.  She states, "Whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost...unless you are doing it with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward."  So, my thought is that she is telling them it is okay to be clever but you must be clever with people like you and together, collectively, your ideas will be carried by many.  One is many.  Then, later on page 353, Miss Matheson tells Nell, "You can try to act the same-we have tried to make you the same..."  Part of the curriculum of Miss Matheson's school is to prepare young ladies to take the Oath, to be a Victorian, to be the same as all other Victorians.  One is many.

Ractives

I was really interested on the discussion we had on Tuesday about Nell and the Primer.  What really interested me was the question about when Nell the girl is distinguished from Nell the Primer character (or somethign like that).  I kept thinking about Miranda and the ractives.  You could almost ask the same question about Miranda or any other ractive.  When she is inside her "egshell" she takes on different characters and personas.  Sure, she reads from a prompter for most of it but it is still what she puts into each character that makes them unique.  When does Mirnda the person separate from Miranda the character.  And to take things further, it seems that someone could so wrapped up in these ractives that they lose all sense of time.  Miranda even loses track of time during a session with Nell and realizes that she'd been going "eight hours without a break" (136).  She doesn't realize until after the session that she is parched and hasn't used the loo for hours.  She got so wrapped up in the character that she lost touch with her own body.  The question then becomes whether or not a person could get so wrapped up in a ractive world that they completely lose touch with reality and get lost in ractive and believe it to be the only world.  What would happen then?  In this alternate reality would it be possible for people to only live in ractives?  How much would people depend on these machines to interact with others and would ractives take the place of actual human contact?  The reference to Surrogates also came up in class and in a way it is similar to ractives.  People play different parts from the safety of these "eggshells" while their own body is safe from direct interaction.  The problem arises when people would only use these ractives to interact.  Is that the kind of world we will come to someday?

Initial thoughts on Diamond Age

Okay, so when I first started to read this book my first thought was, "WHAT!?!?!" It started out so strange to me.     It was like being thrown into a foreign country without knowing the languge and trying to figure what the heck was going on.  I had to reread the first couple of pages to  try to understand what was going on.  The I read the back cover and found out it said it takes place in the 21st century.  I was thinking, "No way," this is way too futuristic.  But I stuck it out and as I progressed through the first reading discovered many things about the book and now find it very intriguing.  I think the part where Hackworth is reviewing the biography of Finkle-McGraw (p 19) clarified a lot for me and that is when the book really started to get grounded.  I started to think of the book not in terms of a futuristic piece but as an alternate reality piece.  When Hackworth is describing Finkle-McGraw's youth it sounds very similar to what I know about America.  It's when he describes Finkle-McGraws accomplishments that things start to take a different direction.  So it's not that this is so far into the future, to me, this book is simply describing a reality where nano-technology has literally exploded onto the main scene and has expanded technology to the point where it seems futuristic.  I now find this alternate reality fascinating.  I am still trying to decipher and visualize many of the things described but feel that I have a better grasp of the book now and look forward to finding out what more surprises are in store for us readers.
As far as Bud is concerned, I just finished the part where the tiny bombs have exploded in his veins, I find it hard to believe that this is the end of his character.  I will read more and see if, by some miracle, he survives or if he comes back later in the book.  I just find it odd that Stephenson would introduce so vibrant and interesting a character and kill him off right away.  I am very curious as to what happens next.  We'll see, we'll see......