Q1 Journal 3

Since I simply could not put my book down, I continued even more of The Circle by Dave Eggers.  In about a half hour, I read twenty-six more pages.  This section starts after a successful date with Francis, and the two sit together in front of an auditorium listening to another presentation.  The presenter shows off his new dating invention, and to Mae’s horror, Francis volunteers to test it.  With this system, Francis and the presenter demonstrate that it can find anything about a potential date, Mae in this case, ranging from allergies to food preferences.  Mae understandably runs off and refuses to talk to Francis, which is what I would do in this situation.  This is Mae’s first raw experience of the utter invasiveness of the Circle’s technology.  Shockingly, however, she was not annoyed by the violation of privacy but rather by the fact that Francis did not simply ask her about these preferences and that the profile was incomplete.

Later that afternoon, she drives back to her parents’ home because her father had had a seizure the night before.  This later turns out to be a false alarm, but Eggers takes this opportunity to introduce us to Mae’s ex-boyfriend from college, Mercer, who had helped transport Mae’s father to the hospital.  He is a social foil to Mae in that he does not care one bit for social media or any of that technology.  They get into an argument in which Mercer calls basically all of the Circle’s social media and new inventions childish and dorky.  He rants on page 131, “You can ask me!  Actually ask me.  You know how weird that is, that you, my friend and ex-girlfriend, gets her information about me from some random person who’s never met me?  And then I have to sit across from you and it’s like we’re looking at each other through this strange fog.”  This beautifully explains how people in Mae’s time, which is very similar to ours, has become so overly obsessed with social media that they value the gossiping with random people more than consulting an actual person.  He then mocks the like and dislike system, known as smiles and frowns in the story, by saying that it is something that only middle school children would be expected to do.  It makes me wonder how badly we have distorted our communication with each other through the gossip that runs around our social networks and our thirst for affirmation from our peers.  Mae, on the other hand, can only think of benefits of social networking.  By the end of this conversation, Mae and Mercer find each other repulsive because of their differing ideas.  Now that I have met Mercer, I have begun to see him as a voice of reason whom we will likely see later on to provide even more insights into how the novel’s world and our society have made fools of themselves through technology.  This greatly develops a man vs. society conflict throughout the novel between humanity and the technological world of fancy gadgets and electronic communication.

The next day, when Mae goes kayaking for the second time in the novel, she finds that the rental company had digitized their system.  I immediately groaned because I predicted at that moment that the new technology would end up ruining this safe haven at some point.  When Mae returns to work the next Monday, she finds out that everyone is disappointed that she could not attend parties that happened over the weekend.  Again, the Circle sucks Mae back into the frenzied world of social obsession, and she loses herself again in her work.  By this time, she has virtually forgotten about her argument with Mercer just as life moves on relentlessly.  In this section, I became very interested in Mae’s conversation with Mercer because I now see the conflicting ideas of society that emerge in this book.  After this, I could not wait to read even more.