Travis Upper

In the article “in Plato’s Cave” by Susan Sontag she goes throughout the article and letting her viewers see the bunch of metaphors that she uses in her article. One of them is “the old fashioned camera was clumsier and harder to reload than a brown Bess musket. The modern camera is trying to be a ray gun.” What that means is that Susan is trying to show a similarity between the two completely different objects. I feel that the comparison is a good one because I have seen documentaries on the revolutionary war and how the brown Bess was the main weapon of choice for the average infantry man. It also when into great detail that they would have lines after another to shoot because it took so long to reload the musket. Susan does also bring out a good point that the modern cameras are trying to be like ray guns. Now days with a digital camera you can take pictures quickly and reload even quicker because you have a memory card. I feel she has a great idea beginning to bloom here. If she can get people to see the difference in the 18th century than the 21st century than she may get support about the photography.

In this article by Susan Sontag she says “the old fashioned camera was clumsier and harder to reload than a brown Bess musket. The modern camera is trying to be a ray gun,” it makes me feel that she is not putting in any evidence to convince me that the camera is like a gun. I feel she is not taking into consideration that most people probably don’t know how fast a brown Bess reloads or a camera in that era of time. The gun is very different than the gun now days and I feel she does not even mention the fact that the camera is very slow at reloading and is very clumsy.

The countering strategy I used was that she did not use enough evidence to support her claim. To make her article better and more intriguing she should add the evidence of how long it actually takes for an old fashioned camera to work and how long it takes to reload a brown Bess. If she did that I would be impressed and would agree with her that the camera takes a very long time to reload.