Imagine a rectangular room composed of walls that were flexible, but unbreakable; if trapped, a person could push and shove on the walls with all their strength and would do nothing but flex them in and out thus trapping the person in the room. Figuratively speaking, society has placed us all in a “room” similar to the scene described and the walls are becoming less and less flexible as time goes by. In his essay titled “Innovation Starvation,” Neal Stephenson discusses how society as a whole is trapped in this room and is becoming less capable of envisioning and accomplishing beneficial projects like previous generations were able to. In his essay, he is addressing all of us as a society and is attempting to help us understand how crucial
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In fact, we have become so cautious that we do not even approach the walls anymore due to the presentiment that someone trying to escape on the other side of the wall will punch it and hit us in the process. As a society we have learned to not “push on the walls” because it is a risk that others have convinced us we do not want to take. By “pushing on the walls,” we are invading others’ space, or ideas, and so we suppose that it is best to just stay away from the …show more content…
He describes everything in a tremendous amount of detail, from the accomplishments in the past, to the description of different inventions, to the effects of no ingenuity on our society. He constructs sentences such as the following to press people to remember those days of excitement when innovations were being created swiftly. He says, “Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions” (540). Immediately, readers picture that scene and think about their experience watching those space missions or of stories their relatives have told them about it; it makes them long for that feeling to come back. This rhetorical device was critical in Stephenson’s essay because he does an excellent job of describing the way our society was before, how it is now, and how it could be if we started to “think outside of the bubble”
In fact, we have become so cautious that we do not even approach the walls anymore due to the presentiment that someone trying to escape on the other side of the wall will punch it and hit us in the process. As a society we have learned to not “push on the walls” because it is a risk that others have convinced us we do not want to take. By “pushing on the walls,” we are invading others’ space, or ideas, and so we suppose that it is best to just stay away from the …show more content…
He describes everything in a tremendous amount of detail, from the accomplishments in the past, to the description of different inventions, to the effects of no ingenuity on our society. He constructs sentences such as the following to press people to remember those days of excitement when innovations were being created swiftly. He says, “Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions” (540). Immediately, readers picture that scene and think about their experience watching those space missions or of stories their relatives have told them about it; it makes them long for that feeling to come back. This rhetorical device was critical in Stephenson’s essay because he does an excellent job of describing the way our society was before, how it is now, and how it could be if we started to “think outside of the bubble”