Blog Post #12; Caitlin Barth

WAY back when

                 The first reading that discusses a condition that I will never be able to pronounce (apotemnophilia) dismayed me enough to rank as #1 for “most memorable.” In “A New Way To Be Mad” Carl Elliot describes the phenomenon of a semantic contagion through the identification and description of a condition where people feel the need to become an amputee in order to become their “true selves.” I think this very first reading could be applied to most of our work in this course.

                  Through all things within science and technology, we are constantly falling into a semantic contagion of some sort. I find our eagerness to identify as something very intriguing. Of course, as humans, we all want to belong and have an identity and shape that identity to be something magnificent, however, is it completely necessary to chop off your own limb to shape it? In my opinion, that is nowhere near worth it, but still, there are people who crave it. As Robin always said, we won’t be able to solve all the world’s problems within an hour and fifteen minutes or even in a brief blog post. However, what I do know is that humans have always, and will always, categorize the world to the point of it making us go mad.

                 There is no doubt that categorization makes our lives easier. For instance, a fork being categorized as a piece of cutlery, therefore one can find it in the cutlery drawer. Without categorization, we would be lost in a library. But classification of the world hasn’t always provided us with ease. This innate practice has also facilitated stereotypes and racism, deforestation and a warming climate. We aren’t able to visualize the interwoven nature of societies and the natural world, but rather broken up into pieces, each with its own color coated label. Maybe I’m just going off topic and ranting, but I do think that the themes that stem from Carl Elliot’s piece perfectly depict the way in which we are mad in every aspect, but at different degrees. These differing degrees of being mad is the knowledge gap between our collective inability to facilitate any type of paradigm shift in our complex societies. I hope I am making some sense here, but I’m going to stop typing before I go on another tangent. Moreover, I will never forget the condition of wanting to chop off a limb or being attracted to those without limbs.