Recreate Yourself Gopnik, Yoshino, Turkle

1264 Words6 Pages
“Recreate Yourself at No Cost through Mainstream Society” A utopia is a society where everyone shares highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities. In such a society, everyone is rewarded for covering their individual identities in order to assimilate into the mainstream. Between the late 1700’s and early 1900’s, Americans tried to create a utopian society. When a person migrated to America, he or she was expected to act American and leave his or her culture behind. The ideal was that the immigrants were entering a huge “pot” where people with different backgrounds would melt into a new race of men. The faster the assimilation, the faster they were able to reap the rewards of the mainstream. In the essay “Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights,” the author, Kenji Yoshino, writes about the reasons people have to cover their true identity to be accepted into mainstream society. Similarly, individuals in Turkle’s “Alone Together” essay use networked technology to cover themselves as a way to assimilate into the mainstream. Adam Gopnik’s essay, “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli,” further examines mainstream assimilation but from the view point of a busy three-year old little girl. Gopnik details the busy life of his young daughter, Olivia, who creates an imaginary friend, Mr. Ravioli, who she uses to show how people in New York City hide themselves behind the rewards of busyness to assimilate into the mainstream. In today’s society, people are different in so many ways that a utopian society could never exist. The only perfect society that we can possibly have is a paracosm, and it can only exist in a child’s imagination and only for a short time. Even if a person feels forced to cover his or her true identity, helping to create a utopian society by assimilating into the mainstream will result in definite rewards. The term “mainstream” has many meanings
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