【Flyer杀G作文组】1月22日作业Issue120 by wdvrdx111

wdvrdx111UID: 2870800

TOPIC: ISSUE120 - "So much is new and complex today that looking back for an understanding of the past provides little guidance for living in the present."


In modern society, as the galloping development of technology, most of us share the standpoint, as the statement claims, that we could be reasonable and convincing to announce we have stepped into a definitely new epoch, that is to say, the understandings of past would do little help. However, have we stood at a comprehensive view to ponder deeply over the objective world and our subjective inside? Like the coherent properties existing during the history of human being, the importance of the understandings of the past should be highlighted.

Since the commencement of the First Industrial Revolution took place three hundred years ago, the scope and sum of knowledge people have acquired, and the concomitantly miscellaneous technologies people have mastered have grown geometrically, and obviously we would further the promising trend in the foreseeable future. Thus during the process of expanding and refreshing our mind, to some extent, the majority of our society has polarized the issues and phenomena of the complexity and novelty of the environment today, meantime pay less attention to what once were significant. The groups of students prefer to input the beautiful fonts rather than parrot tedious handwriting practices; most workers rarely take the wrench and hammer but books about the instructions of the advanced automatic system; the young scholars tend to spare less time delving into piles of files, merely click to get the relevant information from online database instead. How can we articulate these phenomena? Besides the explications representing other sides and facets, the essential answer is the current society.

Simply put, the fulfillments for our mental demands and physical needs, which mostly were brought about by the growing development conflated with the social effects, should not be overemphasized in such way. Admittedly, these tremendous advents underlie important correlations with the understandings of the past.

There are two important sides worth our heeds: on one hand, no matter what the avant-garde inventions belong to the fields of science, art, education, or what we consider as the innovation which topples the precedent conceptions thoroughly, these substances or notions, apparently assimilate the advantages from the past on the basis of the understandings toward it. Take a look at IMAX, as for most audience, they would accept its identification as a "larger movie screen" for granted, though it is partly a succession of the panorama, which once was prevailing in the Western and displaced by the advent of fledging movie, that successfully absorbs the vantages of the unique form of painting, and with the assistance from the side of technology to appease to people's optical sentiment. Moreover, take another example, looking at the conception of Hypertext, most of us have realized its importance that without the existence of hypertext that the core nature of Internet-interaction would be vaporous. Perhaps most of us never bridge it with the incipient form of the notion-the familiar bibliography printed at the beginning of every textbooks and the end of a treatise. In short, when we take hindsight to such understandings of our past, not only we obtain better comprehension about the current society, but also can broaden our horizon for the future development.

On the other hand, the understandings of the past could lend the unalterable and indispensible spirits upon our daily lives and modern society. Consider the buildings on the Ellis Island, nowadays it might lack the initial function as an immigration port, hardly any new settlers could go through the iron gate, or vow to be a citizen of the United States under the flag, but its status as a museum always reminds us of the history depicting the ancestors of America, stimulates the nations to inherit the initiative to explore their own careers at present and write new chapters in the history of this prosperous continent. More importantly, those are the spirits that most of us have forgone or downplayed for the complexity and novelty of modern society.

In sum, it is at stake that the public turns the tide of ignorance towards such importance, and the understandings of history should be emphasized to help us cultivate comprehensive conceptions about our society, and render our future promising as it stands.