The End of Solitude Reflection

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The end of Solitude Essay A former Enlgish Professor at Yale University, William Deresiewicz, has penned an essay called “The End of Solitude.” This essay represents Deresiewicz’s point of view on the debate about literacy that scholars still continue to wage concerning the benefits and limits of technology. In “The End of Solitude”, Deresiewicz’s major claim is that, “technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone” (92). Deresiewicz complains that we are incapable of being alone and that the electronic age is killing an individual’s appreciation of solitude. Deresiewicz’s essay is a persuasive bit, but I am not influenced by it. In Deresiewicz’s essay, he shares that he asked his class a question about the place that solitude has in their lives, and almost all of them answered that they have no time for it. Teenagers and young adults have not matured yet, but individuals teenage habits all begin to gradually dwindle as a person enters adulthood because the person is beginning to take on more responsibility. In essence, I believe that solitude leads a person into loneliness, and that the advantages of technology and social media heavily outweigh the advantages of living a fairly solitary life, and I will prove this. Deresiewicz begins his essay comparing three eras. The Romanticism, Modernism, and Postmodernism eras, and it is very clear that the postmodern era isn’t his favorite. Deresiewicz states that, “if the property that grounded the self, in romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility” (92). We can take from this that Deresiewicz doesn’t like the idea of being visible to strangers. However, Deresiewicz goes on and continues that, “a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month” (92). This does show visibility, but

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