Reading 4

Ecologizing Mobile Media, By Howard Rheingold

"All technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage." Why is it that the corresponding disadvantage always seems bigger than the advantage?

When people lived in tents they had a hard time. And the strong ones usually won. Ok, so weapons even things out, but then came cannons, and poison, and nukes. There's a part where techonolgy has made the world a worse place to live in. Yeah it sucks being out in the woods when you run into a cougar at 2 am and he stares at you menacingly from the hill ready to jump on you (gotta love the Olympic peninsula) and you wish you had a portable cannon, but then, walking through the woods in the moonlite without having to worry about all the nuclear war programs on the earth is worth the cougar. I have a chance with the cougar, I hope.

Or with medicine, yup its great to have a vaccine against mumps. But, with that I now have to worry about them creating some disease that wipes out all people of one race. Great. Is the vaccine worth it?

What about with computers? Yeah, the knowldege, convinience, connections are great. But what really is the cost? I'm not sure we know yet.

As for Flattner....

The flat thing makes no sense to me. Doesnt he realize it takes almost as long to fly to DC as it does to London from Seattle? Why? Cause the roundness of the earth makes connecting everythign a lot faster. Why flat?? I like the level idea way better. Thats what the Indian guy told him, earth is leveling. To me that analogy makes way more sense. We are not going back in time to a flat world...

Besides the title, and his horrible use of metaphors, the concept was ok. I agree with him that our education system sucks. I can't understand the huge sense of entitlement. Why do we think that without hard work we will continue to prosper? I don't get it. Only about 7 of the almost 200 people in my class went on to universities. The rest were amazed that life was hard for them. We are so not prepared.

Reading 3

"Discuss the effects of applying computing power to communication. What might Bush forecast today, if he were looking to 2050?"

Everyone: "As We May Think," by Vannevar Bush from The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.

Bush correctly points out that inventions are limited by many other factors than if they are good inventions. They need to be feasable to create at that time, need to have the money and the facilities to produce them, and they need to be inderstood by those who have the money to create them. So this is why we have so many terrible inventions made...

Inventions and technology have always increased our ability to communicate over distances and communicate in other ways then directly. As computing power increases communication aided by technology will also increase. They now have this cool thing where on your cell phone you can see the status of the people in your address book. Kinda like IM/Addressbook/Phone. Things like that are great. But they do take away the time we actually spend in person with people.

I think all techonology that helps keep people connected is a good thing. I just worry that the negative impact it leaves is bigger than the positive. Even though people can all easily find a community online and have someone to talk to, I think it would be better for them to learn how to communicate and have an actual community. If technology increases in communication, I am afraid it will make communication so short and easy, we will loose a lot in the proccess.

What Bush might forcast, I have no idea. I would have to have some idea of what might happen. He seemed to take technology that existed and improve it, and say thats what we will have in the future. I think though that technology will change so drastically that we don't have the concepts or the words to describe what will happen.

Reading 2

Informing ourselves to death. An interesting thought. I thought it was so cool when Socrates and thinkers of his day could learn about everything. They were studying math, science, history, philosophy, astronomy, and creating so much for these fields. Now to even get a basic understanding in all fields is pretty much impossible.

I think the author misses one point. Many many many people in the world have the exact same type of belief system that existed in the middle ages. And what difference does it make if 10,000 angels can dance on a pin head because God made it that way, and the chair was made out of a herring because God made it possible?

I think that the author of the document is correct in pointing out that information does nothing for us, unless we reflect on it. It won't take away starvation in Kenya, but if everyone in Kenya started reading philosophy (which I think is the cure to everything) they would get wisdom. With wisdom, comes peace and understanding. They would then stop accepting our debilitating handouts, fix their economy we keep breaking, stop fighting each other, and eat. Wisdom is what hasn't increased since the middle ages. Knowledge has. We need to figure out how to turn that knowledge into wisdom.

What he fails to point out is technology gives us the chance to find wisdom. Before we got agriculture and community, we were too busy fighting for out lives to have time to reflect. Now we have all we need to become better people. The problem? It's not just information technology brings. It's also distraction, addicting distraction, that keeps us from processing the information into anything useful. Its not the computers, but the games!!

It was a great article. I wish everyone who works with computers would have a chance to read it.

Reading 1

Media Technology and Society -Brian Winston

So while I was reading, besides, that it was hard to see what the article was actually trying to tell me... society affects technology. Who doesn't know that? I'm not sure the circle diagrams told me much. I think if he explains the diagrams more in the book, I'll get a lot more out of it.

Noam Chomsky is a great political and human rights activist. I enjoy reading his works, on politics. But as a linguist? He said he never taught a child a language (so he didn't know how people actually aquire their first language, even though he has three children) and he never learned a forign language himself. How can he be a linguist? Don't you need to practice something before you can figure out the theory? Anyway, hes theories on linguistics always seem a bit odd to me.

"As a society we are schizophrenic about machines." How is being wary of new technology, knowing its inevitible, and trying to fit it into our current social patterns schirzophrenic? That seems like a perfectly logical reaction. How would he want us to react?

LLC's are new, weren't they made in 1977? Not in the last century?

Why is he quoting Louis Carroll?? Couldn't he just say, not full suppression, or use another word altogether? Clio's graments, Popper? What is he trying to do, show he's culturally educated? Ok, so maybe I shouldn't be writing my blog after reading, http://realitysteve.com/2006/10/bachelor-recap-10206.html and having a huge headache and cold =)