Ready Player One Analysis

Midterm Reflection The development of the digital age has created social and literary change. While the wide-spread use of social media has brought people together with its world-wide connections and vast availability of information, it has also fostered a sense of disjointedness. The effects of this transformation has been studied in English 137, in which the most memorable lessons learned have been about book structure, e-books and e-readers, themes of assigned readings, and the state of reality versus the virtual world.
There is no simple way to define an e-book. What we know as a book is a very modern version with a table of contents, page numbers, and running headers. Books commonly were only seen as paper that was cut, folded, and bound
They all seem to caution about a false reality and manipulation, along with fear and danger, as a result of our obsession with technology. In Wool, man destroys the world as we know it. People live in a fear that is taught to them as a means of control. They are not taught about their history, and they are taught not to think. In Ready Player One, the future is shown to be a world where anything is possible in the virtual realm of Oasis. In the real world, competition for money leads to no boundaries and death. This takes the anonymity and lack of reality away. Ready Player One shows how virtual reality is used as an escape from the burdens of life. It also brings up the question, and varying opinions, as to whether not having real life connections is good or
AI/IT is powerful and the center of control in each of the stories. In Ready Player One, Wool, and Neuromancer, it serves as an antagonist to uprisings. Computers have unlimited knowledge to the point of humans becoming inferior, a fearful thought. Another major theme is our attachment to technology. As stated in class, when one receives a notification, he/she has the need to check it immediately. Technology is something people have become dependent on, and like the authors, some fear this dependence will grow too much in the future. Technology becomes so much a part of our lives that hacking often results in the quest to gain more information and control. In Speak, the author shows the progression, and outcome, of dependence of technology, from splitting up marriages to attachment problems in young girls when their babybots (AI) are taken away. Some of the characters become dependent on AI for compassion, when in fact in this book and in all of these books, AI does not have compassion. AI is programmed algorithms of memories of the past. We are compassionate to a