Monday, September 27, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
1st Blog Essay
It is extremely difficult to imagine life without the internet. The internet has become a routine part of everyday life and manifested itself in our culture. It is the vessel businesses use to keep in touch with clients, children use for entertainment, and people working full-time jobs use to attain a college degree. It is virtually an endless source of information available at the click of a button. When considering this, I guess it is not surprising how fast such a new technology has imbedded itself so deep into our way of life. Sometimes it seems as though the internet has always been. Facebook alone has become so popular and relevant that it is hard to recollect the pre-Facebook age. This was especially evident to me when I was reading over the instructions for this assignment. I really had to rack my brain to remember some of my first encounters with the internet. The internet’s significance makes it seem incredibly older than it actually is. It seems as though man’s discovery of the internet was the equivalent to his discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel. With that in mind, I will try to the best of my abilities to recall ancient history for you.
I was in elementary school when I had my first encounter with the internet. As far as I can remember, my friend Daniel was the first person to have an internet accessible computer in his house. He was the only one out of all my friends. When he would have a sleep over after one of our coach pitch baseball games, we would all be gathered around the computer screen. It was a big deal because none of us other kids had been exposed to this before. I distinctly remember the sound the computer would make as the dial-up modem connected to the internet. We created our own neighborhoods with the Sims program and our own amusement parks with Rollercoaster Tycoon. We also searched the internet for cheat codes for Playstation and Super Nintendo video games. I am sure we were also doing other Ninja Turtle type things as well. I can recall Daniel’s mother yelling from downstairs that we need to get off the computer because we were tying up the phone line for too long. The distinction between dial-up and DSL internet connection is comparable to the earth’s Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras. Each bringing about new changes and advances in evolution that changed the way people live and interact within each time frame and context. As the early evolution of the internet continued to advance it carried over to my middle school years with a new craze. AIM was wildly popular by the time I was an early teenager. All of my friends were using it and we would have conversations among three and four people at a time. I can remember updating my away messages and my profile and looking at others to see what my friends were doing. The sound of a door opening would come over the speakers every time a new friend signed online and I would hurry to look and see who it was. I would spend hours on weeknights talking to my friends about school, football practice, and what we were going to do the next day. Now AIM seems dead and has been replaced by Facebook. This is further evidence of the fast paced nature of the internet. What is new today is old tomorrow. Change is inevitable. While they may not have ever envisioned these changes would occur so rapidly and evolve to be so complex, Bush and Hawthorne both understood the central idea.
Bush and Hawthorne address change in technology in their respective writings that we read and discussed in class. However, they both take completely different approaches. I believe that Bush focused more on what technological advancement meant for our world in an academic setting and Hawthorne emphasized its’ impact on social constructs and interactions. Bush discusses how technology has been used in the depletion of human life and well being. He believed we should turn our attention to ways that will help improve our quality of life. Bush thought technology should be used not as a weapon, but as a means of “Progressive freedom.” His memex device would aid in this by helping researches, scientists, and scholars share information. It would be much faster and more efficient. If someone had already researched a specific topic you could build further upon their research because you wouldn’t have to do everything they had just done. His idea is very impressive for his time and very predictive of the nature of the internet. However, I tend to be more of a skeptic. Bush focused on all the positive qualities and potential without really addressing the possible consequences.
Hawthorne seems as though he would be a car salesman’s toughest customer. He would look the car over with a keen eye for any scratches or scuffs. He would never settle for a price he thought to be too high. This is the way he approached the wood stove. He looked at it very carefully and weighed the pros and cons. He came to conclude that the price we as a people would have to pay for the stove was too high. It would compromise social meaning and interaction. We would lose one of the essential components of our humanity. Human communication through physical conversation would be choked out by this new invention. To a certain extent, this has happened with the inception and development of the internet. I mentioned earlier, a room full of elementary school aged boys sitting around a computer screen. We sat there until we were told we had to get off of the computer. Before Daniel got that computer, we always played basketball when we went to his house. We played for hours until it was time to wash up and eat dinner. The internet has done amazing things for society and it has also contributed to lazier less personal society. Everything is available with that one click of a button. I know sometimes I do not want to cook dinner. So instead of cooking, or even talking to another person at a drive-through window, I can get online, place an order on the Boone Takeout website, and have it brought to my house. Is this a convenience or just another step towards an ever progressing less personal society? Newspapers all around the country are dying fast because there is not much they have to offer that the internet does not. What will be next? Will we lose the need for libraries and printed books? A more compelling question is what would that mean for our society? Hawthorne made a prediction about the direction of our interaction with each other. I do not know if it will come true or not, but I do believe he definitely has enough evidence to make a good case.
I was in elementary school when I had my first encounter with the internet. As far as I can remember, my friend Daniel was the first person to have an internet accessible computer in his house. He was the only one out of all my friends. When he would have a sleep over after one of our coach pitch baseball games, we would all be gathered around the computer screen. It was a big deal because none of us other kids had been exposed to this before. I distinctly remember the sound the computer would make as the dial-up modem connected to the internet. We created our own neighborhoods with the Sims program and our own amusement parks with Rollercoaster Tycoon. We also searched the internet for cheat codes for Playstation and Super Nintendo video games. I am sure we were also doing other Ninja Turtle type things as well. I can recall Daniel’s mother yelling from downstairs that we need to get off the computer because we were tying up the phone line for too long. The distinction between dial-up and DSL internet connection is comparable to the earth’s Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras. Each bringing about new changes and advances in evolution that changed the way people live and interact within each time frame and context. As the early evolution of the internet continued to advance it carried over to my middle school years with a new craze. AIM was wildly popular by the time I was an early teenager. All of my friends were using it and we would have conversations among three and four people at a time. I can remember updating my away messages and my profile and looking at others to see what my friends were doing. The sound of a door opening would come over the speakers every time a new friend signed online and I would hurry to look and see who it was. I would spend hours on weeknights talking to my friends about school, football practice, and what we were going to do the next day. Now AIM seems dead and has been replaced by Facebook. This is further evidence of the fast paced nature of the internet. What is new today is old tomorrow. Change is inevitable. While they may not have ever envisioned these changes would occur so rapidly and evolve to be so complex, Bush and Hawthorne both understood the central idea.
Bush and Hawthorne address change in technology in their respective writings that we read and discussed in class. However, they both take completely different approaches. I believe that Bush focused more on what technological advancement meant for our world in an academic setting and Hawthorne emphasized its’ impact on social constructs and interactions. Bush discusses how technology has been used in the depletion of human life and well being. He believed we should turn our attention to ways that will help improve our quality of life. Bush thought technology should be used not as a weapon, but as a means of “Progressive freedom.” His memex device would aid in this by helping researches, scientists, and scholars share information. It would be much faster and more efficient. If someone had already researched a specific topic you could build further upon their research because you wouldn’t have to do everything they had just done. His idea is very impressive for his time and very predictive of the nature of the internet. However, I tend to be more of a skeptic. Bush focused on all the positive qualities and potential without really addressing the possible consequences.
Hawthorne seems as though he would be a car salesman’s toughest customer. He would look the car over with a keen eye for any scratches or scuffs. He would never settle for a price he thought to be too high. This is the way he approached the wood stove. He looked at it very carefully and weighed the pros and cons. He came to conclude that the price we as a people would have to pay for the stove was too high. It would compromise social meaning and interaction. We would lose one of the essential components of our humanity. Human communication through physical conversation would be choked out by this new invention. To a certain extent, this has happened with the inception and development of the internet. I mentioned earlier, a room full of elementary school aged boys sitting around a computer screen. We sat there until we were told we had to get off of the computer. Before Daniel got that computer, we always played basketball when we went to his house. We played for hours until it was time to wash up and eat dinner. The internet has done amazing things for society and it has also contributed to lazier less personal society. Everything is available with that one click of a button. I know sometimes I do not want to cook dinner. So instead of cooking, or even talking to another person at a drive-through window, I can get online, place an order on the Boone Takeout website, and have it brought to my house. Is this a convenience or just another step towards an ever progressing less personal society? Newspapers all around the country are dying fast because there is not much they have to offer that the internet does not. What will be next? Will we lose the need for libraries and printed books? A more compelling question is what would that mean for our society? Hawthorne made a prediction about the direction of our interaction with each other. I do not know if it will come true or not, but I do believe he definitely has enough evidence to make a good case.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Dangers of the Internet
http://www.netsmartz.org/news/dec02-02.htm
This link has an article about a girl who was murdered by a man she met on an online chat room. I found it ironic, given the material we have been discussing in class. Bush was way ahead of his time in thinking of a device that would be capable of networking and file sharing. I think it would be safe to say that in his inception of the idea he had only pure intentions. He believed that we should use our technological advances for the common good and improvement of our society. The internet has developed and is probally more complex than Bush could have ever imagined. However, this story goes to show that the internet is not always used with the betterment of society in mind. It is like anything else. It can be used to achieve great good and it can prove to be deadly. The motives of those using any technolgy determine the impact that technology has on our society.
This link has an article about a girl who was murdered by a man she met on an online chat room. I found it ironic, given the material we have been discussing in class. Bush was way ahead of his time in thinking of a device that would be capable of networking and file sharing. I think it would be safe to say that in his inception of the idea he had only pure intentions. He believed that we should use our technological advances for the common good and improvement of our society. The internet has developed and is probally more complex than Bush could have ever imagined. However, this story goes to show that the internet is not always used with the betterment of society in mind. It is like anything else. It can be used to achieve great good and it can prove to be deadly. The motives of those using any technolgy determine the impact that technology has on our society.
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