Notion : Idea of Progress TS

IDEA OF PROGRESS

So, for this oral exercise, I would like to speak about the topic concerning the Ideas of Progress. Progress means the different innovations or technologies created in order to change the world… In my opinion it’s important to let a big place to innovation and progress because it’s our future. But, how progress and innovation change the world? We had to study 4 documents in order to respond to this question. These 4 documents would be on one unit each. The first is about the American dream, the second about the difference between Dystopia and reality; the third would have subject on music and it utilization in order to protest against something, and the last one about philanthropy. So the first would be the article about the comparative upward mobility, the second document about an extract from the movie Gattaca, the third, the Vietnam War and the summit of protests songs, and the last one, the gospel of wealth by Carnegie.

Well, the whole world has many visions of the American Dream, for some people it’s the actual possibility the work hard and become wealthy in the United States, for others, it’s an old and gone expression that signified that social mobility is only in America so we had to move there in order to find it. The article “Comparative upward mobility” deals about the social mobility of people, indeed now it’s very easy to move so students are moving in order to learn and speak many languages. It’s for that actually, many countries knows a positive social mobility, people have more knowledge, do better jobs or have a better life. Few years ago, many people called the US “the land of opportunity” but today, this expression is misplaced because the social mobility in USA is stagnant, in fact the “American Dream” is and gone expression but for me more and more people can educated herself by trip or studies, the social mobility is a real opportunity.

The extract from the movie Gattaca, by Andrew Niccol (1997) is about controlling the DNA of a baby from a pregnant women, Gattaca is a great movie about the innovation and the scientific progress, even it is scaring, it show how the science can evolve and help mankind, this dystopia in that’s movie showed the bad side of the progress, it means the DNA control and the monitoring of people by her DNA, but in reality, medical innovation is really important, I’ve been operate recently and I think innovation can save many lives if it is under good hands. Andrew Niccol had a big vision of progress, but the technologies must be controlled by human and not inverse, because it can be dangerous for people.

There are many different ways to influence the populations and change the world, and the music is in that list. Indeed, when the Vietnam War begun, the draft was set up, so all the young people had to be deploy in Vietnam to fight the communism, that was an ideological war and the US loss 60 000 men in VN between 1964 and 1973. The draft, or conscription was very criticize by American people and many singers wrote protest songs against the war, the Hippie movement is also developed during this period (San Francisco by Scott McKenzie). Hello Vietnam by Johnny Wright in 1965 (not seen in class) is a powerful song who explains very clearly the state of mind of deployed soldiers. Protest songs are in my opinion a good way to influence the world. And they have

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