The Treadmill Summary

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Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “The Treadmill”, reveals a startling connection between the suburbanized world's technological advances and the deterioration of worldly experiences. Solnit claims that technology, despite having many benefits to society, may have many hidden negative effects. Solnit draws attention to various forms of technology, such as farm equipment, although her most persuasive argument is based upon the treadmill, and the simulated walking it provokes. Solnit believes this concept to be “perverse, because [she] can understand simulating farm labor, since the activities of rural life are not often available – but simulating walking suggests that space itself has disappeared” (Solnit 52). Solnit goes further to indicate how suburbanized people, rather than going out and engaging with the real world, are inadvertently choosing to become isolated from their environment through the usage of convenient machinery. The essay is an enlightening outlook on the disconnection from nature and life experiences in relation to the increased technological dependency, alluding specifically to the modern treadmill. During the Industrial Revolution, there were many advances in technology. Solnit signifies how manual labour was previously required in order to survive, but the “industrial revolution institutionalized and fragmented labor” (51), and effectively made life a comfortable affair in which a lot of work could now be done cognitively or by machines. Previously, to survive during our Pioneer Years, people had to physically complete tasks by doing all of the work manually; Pumping water, sowing seeds by hand, and tending to animals were common ways of life. But with the spawning of new inventions, more efficient work was now possible, resulting in greater amounts of free time. To this day, new technologies are doing the same thing, as they further reduce the need
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