Author Question: How would you paraphrase this poem? What are the speakers objectionsto social media? What will be ... (Read 73 times)

Tirant22 · **on:** Jul 20, 2018

How would you paraphrase this poem? What are the speakers objectionsto social media?

What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

What do the dead seem to want from the living?

What will be an ideal response?

maaaaaaaaaa · **Reply #1 on:** Jul 20, 2018

Answer to Question 1

The poem is an ironic invitation to participate in a mass ritual of arrested development, universal trivialization, and erasure of the bounds of judgment, taste, and privacy. Alexie sees the electronic revolution as replacing true personal contact and genuine emotional and spiritual experience with virtual interactions that breed isolation and loneliness, emotional emptiness and spiritual sterility. Anyone of a certain age who has ever attended a high-school reunion can testify to how easily decades of maturation and personal development are swept aside in an instant reversion to ones adolescent self. Anyone who has spent time on social media can bear witness to the facile bonhomie and fatuous nostalgia that prevail there, with endlessly shared litanies containing lines like Remember when rap was what your parents gave you in the mouth if you talked back to them? Many young people have already learned, to their severe cost, that Internet postings are public and permanent, and that college admissions officers and prospective employers are not favorably impressed by personal accounts of epic promiscuity and drunkenness. When, in its infancy, the Internet was touted as the greatest educational tool in human history, no one foresaw that its principal functions would include the facilitation of commerce and personal abuse and the delivery of pornography and videos of cats playing the piano.

Answer to Question 2

Like emotional vampires, they seem to want to keep alive whatever bonds of affection may have existed between them and their loved ones. As the last two lines suggest, this hunger of theirs is so intense and all-consuming that, unless you practice the rites described in the octave, they will sniff out any lingering feelings that you have for them and lure you to them as the sirens lured Ulysses.