Reading Responses Week 1

Should we be suspicious of the Anthropocene idea?

This article really emphasizes how everything is man-made, and that a true natural world doesn’t exist anymore. Amartya Sen’s observation that natural catastrophes aren’t in fact natural, but the product of political and economic systems. In theory it seems like a good thing that humans have control over the environment and have the ability to change things for the better by making changes to our political system. However, in reality it's not that simple and the changes for the better have not been happening. One phrase that really stood out to me in this article is, "a slow crisis feels normal. It feels, in fact, natural.". This phrase sums up the relationship between people and the changing environment. We have gotten used to the fact that human activity is damaging the earth, and just kind of accept the idea as a fact that we cannot individually change. The term 'global warming' has been thrown around so much for such a long time that it does seem normal. Some of these ideas tie into a current event that I was reading, Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming Has Already begun (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/science/flooding-of-coast-caused-by-global-warming-has-already-begun.html?_r=0). Even the title implies that so many people don’t pay attention to these issues unless they are affecting them in the current moment. Many people are used to the idea of global warming as something that’s happening slowly, that they often don’t realize the effects are happening right now.

The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure

Brian Larkin's article gave me a little more information on how infrastructures work. At one point he explains how everything in one infrastructure is dependent on each other. Bigger and powerful items in an infrastructure are made up of smaller items working together which are made up of smaller items and so on. A part that interested me was, “They  become infrastructures when either one technological system comes to dominate over the others” (pg. 330). The dominance and dependence of infrastructures reminds me somewhat of a food chain.

Before reading this article, I never thought about how networked infrastructures must survive in other environments with differing conditions as well. This makes me wonder if there are any infrastructure systems that could only work in one specific place, or were designed customly for a specific place. I also found it interesting how some infrastructures, like the one described in South Africa, produced a “new sort of citizen.” This relates back to the previous article about the Anthropocene idea about how people shape the infrastructure; infrastructure shapes people as well. We effect the environment just like the environment affects us.