Journal 1

Before we chose this book all of us looked into the summaries and reviews of the book. The book is about a married couple, the man being an M.I.T. graduate, who decide to leave a life filled with technology, and move into a society that uses less electricity than the Amish. The main purpose of them moving into the different lifestyle is to see if technology really does make life easier or if it actually complicates life more. In this world we live in, technology is everywhere and part of almost everything we do. Most people couldn’t imagine living without it, and that is one reason we chose to read this book, and find out the difficulties they have to go through.
Some common biases of people who choose not to use technology are usually given negative labels. Some include hippie or environmentalists, and consider the people crazy or very odd. Whenever someone tries to do something that goes against the norm in this country, many stereotypes are thrown out there about the person. For a lot of us, it is hard to understand why some people would decide to ditch the life of technology, and start a lifestyle as simple as possible.
From this book, we want to learn about the difficulties that the couple face. Also, whether they feel that technology actually makes life easier, or if it makes life more difficult and advanced. This book seemed interesting to us because this is a lifestyle most of us wouldn’t ever consider living and it is a way for us to understand how much we actually do rely on technology. We feel it would be very interesting to cut back on the use of technology, and have a life that is possibly more rewarding for all the things we accomplish. This topic is significant to us because we are constantly using technology to try and make life “easier.”