Paradigm Shifts

In The Circle, the setting, without being clearly stated, is a bit further in the future than we are today. This is due to the technologies available and also little indications that the world has moved on like how when the Senator trying to break up The Circle mentioned the breaking of AT&T as a monopoly. Anyways, a paradigm shift has definitely occurred and it hasn’t stopped throughout the novel.

In the novel, I feel like the residual values and beliefs are what we might consider dominant in our world today yet a bit old fashioned. I think Mae is stuck residual and dominant in the novel. She (earlier in the book) acts more like the normal person, being lazy on weekends and kayaking every couple weeks without much thought. When brought to her attention that just doing these activities without everyone knowing, then she adjusts and understands the Circle’s need for transparency. Mae’s parents and Mercer definitely are people who hold residual values to a high standard. Mae’s Parents felt distrust in Mae and the Circle after basically having their house bugged with Cameras and Sensors. Any Circler would not mind this happening to them because they believe in 100 percent transparency. However, Mae’s parents still value their sense of privacy. Mercer complains to Mae that she is way too caught up in her technology and social media. He tells her if she wants to talk to him she should do it the old fashioned way, the way they were doing it at the time of this talk. Face to face. I feel like Mercer’s values may be considered residual today in our time. We have gone too far in my opinion with social media and how it affects our communication. For the past week, I have been without a phone because mine broke. During the first couple days, it felt like I was going through withdrawal, it was hard to deal with. Afterwards however, it ended up being fantastic, I had so much more free time and was much more productive and actually had to go knock on people’s doors to talk to them and use my laptop and put in more effort to talk to people like my parents.  Try not touching your phone for 5 days.

I like to think that the campus of The Circle is its own separate world (or utopia). However, the effects of the Circle are much more universal. Statistically, it has become a monopoly. Whatever the Circlers believe, are the dominant values. Passion, participation, transparency. Those are the dominant values shown throughout the book. If you have a passion, participate, and share with others. The sharing with others part to the circlers like your duty, to the others. If you don’t share, it’s like an insult, like you’re holding back from them and that is considered offensive. With most of the world using the Circle and their social media features, that means most of the world has accepted the PPT values. Mae, being a dynamic character has become more and more like Annie and even crazier in my opinion throughout the book. To spend hours on different screens increasing your PartiRank just to do your duty and to please others is crazy to me, but Dominant in the Circle. Dan also holds these values very high, often meeting with Mae to discuss her involvement, or to congratulate her on doing her duty and staying “active” (which means obsessing) on her social media and being a part of community.

In the Circle, there has been a few emerging values. I feel like all of them have to do with transparency however. The Congresswoman who pledged to wear the Camera around her neck like Stewart wants other politicians to follow in her footsteps. She claims if she has nothing to hide, then she should not care who sees what she does. This is backed up by Congress’s 11 percent approval rating. In a way, I think this is considered over-transparency. A total abandonment of privacy. Which is not yet what the circle has come to, but is something that might be coming. It’s all about knowing. Mae felt like a new person after social media binging on her accounts because after she was finished, she felt like she knew everything that was going on, even her bodily function. And she felt at peace. I hate to say it, but if privacy did vanish and everything was transparent, then the world would know peace. Knowledge is everything.