Summative Assignment – Adam Merbah – New Media 11
Why is it important that we become aware of the water?
We have become very accustomed to our surroundings and we seem to adapt to our environment very easily. We have been living blindly to the fact the media that we consume every day is slowly pulling us out of reality. It’s almost as if the media we consume, the technology we use and depend on, is making us less human. It brings us to a point where we need to take a step back and think about why we need to see the water. You may be thinking “What’s the water?”. The water, explained by David Foster Wallace in a commencement speech explains that the water is our perception of our surroundings. To put it simply, we currently cannot see the water. The media we are consuming and the information we bring in makes us think we know what’s going on in the world when the sad reality is that we don’t know what’s going on. The water has nothing to do with our knowledge, but more about our simple awareness of what is real.
As we’ve seen it through history and even nowadays, polarization in our society is an ongoing problem and is a prescription for disaster. Polarization in our society results in sharply contrasting beliefs and opinions, which creates disagreements and conflicts within a society/country. the article that stood out to me was one that talked about problems with political polarization in the united states. People In the united states tend to be very passionate about their political beliefs. The problem with this is that these people tend to only follow and watch out for what they are following. With this being a problem, liberals and conservatives are segregating themselves into their bubbles of ideologies and not considering other things. The political segregation of everyone is taking effect on the federal government. We need the federal government to be able to function as a society and to stop problems within it. If we continue like this, the federal government won’t be able to function. The political polarization and the segregating ideologies it creates is a direct example of our internet. Although we have all the world’s information at our fingertips, the internet’s algorithms create a lack of diversity, which limits us to what we see. And as we are all living blindly to the fact that we aren’t aware of the environment and others, the water becomes more and more invisible by the minute. The true perception of reality becomes limited to something false.
Liberals and conservatives need to take the time to think about one another. We all need to come to an understanding of each other and we have to put each other into perspective. With no middle ground to our understanding and beliefs, how are we going to see improvement? If we continue to be apathetic towards others that need empathy and help, we will start to see that there will be no one there for us when we need it the most. And weir’s “The Egg” Put things into perspective. The Egg shows that you are every person who has ever lived. The theory is about reincarnation and shows that time doesn’t exist, because you can get reincarnated into the past. The Egg’s main message of this theory is to treat people the way you want to be treated. The actions you take upon others may be actions towards yourself. It may not be on as deep of a level as it sounds, so let me explain. we need to understand that there isn’t much separating us, humans. We all live on the same planet. The more destruction we cause to one 
another and the more we stop taking care of our planet, we are only causing damage to ourselves. We must start to look at the bigger picture and to realize that we are in this together. We need to be aware of the water.
Work Cited :
https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
https://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/20/empathy-respect-critical-ease-political-polarization-sociologist-says/
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