All I needed to know about English 102 I learned from Marvel Comics

"What hope can there be for mankind," I thought, "when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?" (245).


It's become quite the cliche these days to quote from Spiderman when he says, "With great power comes great responsibility," but what does such a statement really mean in our current political climate? In our last class, we touched upon the scene from Batman: Dark Knight where Christian Bale uses (perhaps one could argue abuses) his super-hero status to spy on his fellow Gotham-ites. He does this with all the best intentions--to save the city of Gotham, of course, and his girlfriend!--but at what cost? In the end, encouraged by Morgan Freeman, Christain Bale unplugs the super-spy machine and destroys it, but are our own government officials, the people in whom we place our public trust, always so gracious? Given such enormous power, could such a machine become a sort of "plaything" for government officials, using such technology not because it's right, but because it's there.



If we think such scenarios are merely the stuff of comic books and over-the-top episodes of 24, we should probably think again. Recently, Thomas Tamm, a whistle blower from NSA, has stepped forward to reveal the extensive abuses of power by the Bush Administration through wire-tapping and eavesdropping on US citizens. Now, this blog isn't going to be a rant on the Bush administration (that's for another blog!), but this brings up serious questions of the effects of technology on our society in terms of our rights as US citizens and our rights to privacy. The Bush administration would argue that warrant-less wiretapping kept us "safe," and that the "ends justify the means," but at what cost do we purchase this safety? As Gore Vidal once said, "In politics there are no ends, only means," and I tend to agree. From a global perspective, we are perhaps no more "safe" today than we were eight years ago, and yet the former administration defended their policies until the very end.

Kim Vicente discusses "the human factor" in technology, citing examples of our need to sleep, our need for user-friendly, intuitive software, but I think what he tends to leave out is the uglier aspects of our humanity--our greed, our jealousies, our insecurities, our fears, and our megalomania. In the "right" hands, I suppose, technologies could be used responsibly, but what happens if placed in the "wrong" hands? I think engineers tend to create technologies with optimism, but to what extent should we anticipate the nefarious purposes for which technologies could be used? Vonnegut says that we are all inevitably "children" when it comes to dangerous technologies. If we can't hinder the proliferation of new technologies, how then do we learn the responsibilities that come with such power?