Is All our Technological Progress Hurting Our Posterity?

"The Dumbest Generation?" and "Where Are We Headed" in the PBS’s Digital Nation

Summary:
Each of these video segments deals with the adverse effects that digital media is having on our and the newest generation. What is argued initially is that educators are seeing a “dumbing down” of students in college, high school, and even down to the elementary level. This loss is seen in the way that student write – “in paragraphs rather than essays” – and in the way that they read – sparknotes, short books, how much they read, etc. They cite data that shows test scores in reading and writing may be going down as a result, and suggest that technology and media is to blame for all of this. The other side of the argument is also offered here, though. Many of the people speaking say that students are learning different by the standards of previous generations. They also admit that there may be some loss that comes with this, but there is also societal gain, and that this loss has come with every new technology. The best example I thought was their reference to the Homeric poems, which in print are thousands of pages long, yet used to be cited from memory. They say that this ability to memorize single things in this volume was lost with the inception of print, but they also point out that this loss comes at the feet of great gains (print). One additional thing that they show is how society is adapting to technology in education, especially video games. They show an elementary/middle school that is based on simple games to encourage learning and exploration. There is also multiple Army recruiting buildings called “The Army Experience” walled with Xboxes playing shooter games aimed at teens that play video games.
Inquiry:
I have mixed reactions to both sides of the argument presented here, and think that a middle ground is more of the right path for society. We’ve all grown up with books, and very few will doubt that kids who read more do better academically. Children are reading less and less as technology becomes more prominent, they are tempted with games more and more, and I believe the claims that the video makes about kids learning differently. I think that these learning differences can be a bad thing, but only when taken to the extreme. I recognize that the advances in society outweigh any small learning loss that comes as an effect, but I still think that as a society we should encourage kids to read physical books, play outside, and just be unplugged. I find more and more that my digital life can be more of a burden than a benefit (sometimes), and I fear that children who grow up totally wired may never catch themselves and see what there is outside of digital media.
I think that our generation (and even more so with the people just a few years older) has a unique position in that we were mostly raised on books and more classical forms of education, and are just recently (last ~10 years) seeing technology being a major part of our life. We all grew up knowing what cell phones were, but they were simple then, never touch-screen smart phones with internet access. This is all that children might ever see even five years from now. We have seen both sides of the situation, something that our children will never see. But is it a bad thing?
Questions:
1) If you were the parent of a young child now, what kinds of digital media would you encourage? Specifically, what new media do you think are most beneficial to children’s education today?
2) One could argue that video games, etc. are good for children “in moderation”. Can this argument be made with books? Is there a point where reading too much can be just as bad as playing too many games? What makes the difference between these thresholds?
3) How did technology influence the young generation before ours (lets say pre-cell phones), how has it influenced us, and how will it influence the next generation (i.e. someone who is being born now)? What will be the defining educational differences between these three groups?



P.S: did anyone else notice Henry Jenkins’ part, and/or the Wooden Mirror? They seemed like fun Easter eggs as I watched.

Electronic Monumentality

Summary disclosure: this is a long post
This article is an excerpt from the introduction from Ulmer’s book about electronic Monumentality. Ulmer conjectures and hypothesizes about the precursors and implications on creating monuments electronically that address, reach and impact individuals and societies. Ulmer suggests starting an internet consultancy (EmerAgency) to educate society about electronic monumentality and MEmorial to act as the implementation method.

Electracy is the literacy of new media and the internet and it makes individual and collective commemoration possible and facilitates the creation of new politics, ethics and education to recognize and address the dromosphere (the pollution of human thought and language (http://heuretics.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/internet-accident/) Ulmer claims that his application of MEmorial could potentially be to electracy as analytical writing is to literacy; a way to think critically and analyze dilemmas, the realm of electracy, in attempt to reach a solution or a puzzle piece to the solution.

He goes on to talk about the implications of apparati on individuals and socities;
- Orality; solved dilemmas by chance and religion. Aided individuals in identification of oneself as a spirit.
- Literacy; brought on the Enlightenment and the move toward science and knowledge. Literacy has helped aid in the identification of selfhood, however “has not done well ameliorating societal ignorance” (xxv)
- Electracy; Because it is a new apparatus (starting with photography in the 19th century) the ramifications are yet to be seen, however one of the main applications as of now appears to be entertainment. Ulmer later asserts that one of the goals of electracy is to “do for the community as a whole what literacy did for individuals.” – or rather give a framework for solving societal dilemmas.

One of the barriers, Ulmer states, for electracy to achieving its societal goal is that our era bases our knowledge/belief on literary testimony, meaning that a story/fact doesn’t have a great impact unless received testimonially and this is likely because of a numbing from exposure to much trauma. There are “concerns about “compassion fatigue” – the failure of citizens to be affected by or at least moved to action in response to the daily rehersal of worldwide misery”. This fatigue from trauma exposure makes electracy’s goal of societal identification and solution difficult.

He continues to layout how MEmorial would be an electracy application for individuals and societies to process, monumentalize, and solve dilemmas and trauma.

The audience is definitely academic peers that are familiar with various works and concepts that Ulmer’s arguments are built upon as it is replete with specific terms with little or no defining and quotes from several previous works. The language is quite sophisticated and the background understanding of this language assumed. Ulmer claims of his MEmorial format as a society problem solving tool and has much on stake. In a sense he is comparing himself to Socrates as he stated that Socrates had an oral application of a literacy mindset and Ulmer is claiming that electracy (in the form of MEmorial) is the way to solve not just individual but societal dilemmas. In projecting these arguments I think Ulmer has a lot at stake.

Personal Comments
In my opinion Ulmer greatly over-generalizes concepts that are not necessarily true. For Example, he claims that literacy has helped the individual identify themselves and process and solve dilemmas through knowledge and education. But how widely is this sense of “literacy” applied and is it always a fail-safe problem-solving self-identifying mode? How widely are any of the apparatus applied?

Also the creation and application of EmerAgency and MEmorial seems so abstract and inapplicable that I do not see how it could achieve the goal that it aims to achieve. Going back to the application of the apparatus, if only a few individuals pursue the application and utilization of apparatus

Inquiry
Below are some questions that I was left with;
1. Ulmer states that society can be ignorant (illustrated by Uncle Sam below) and electracy has the potential to solve this societal ignorance and “compassion fatigue”, however how true is this? In my opinion new media is more often than not abused and taken for granted and allows for individuals to become self-centric and with a sense of deserving (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk)
2. But how widely is this sense of “literacy” applied and is it always a fail-safe problem-solving self-identifying mode?
3. Aside from societal ignorance and compassion fatigue, what are other challenges that electracy will face in it’s attempts to achieve it’s goal of educating individuals and societies with the goal of creating new politics, ethics and education (thus making the world a better place)?

Rise of the Rhizome

“Introduction: Rhizome” from A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discusses the relationships between objects, specifically focusing on the repeated appearances of linear progression to describe how things come about from something else. Deleuze and Guattari firstly challenge the conventional ideas about a book and what can be gained from reading it. A quote from the passage challengingly states, “Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been.”(407) This quote claims that the ideas or “organs” upon which the “body” of the book is composed are not truly original, or ideological in nature, but instead take from others in an endless cycle of citations to create literature as we think of it. To oppose this binary way of thinking that one cannot exist without the other and one leads from the other, Guattari and Deleuze propose the idea of the Rhizome. The rhizome is described as “an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture offshoots.” The rhizome is further described as not a means of reproduction, but when it becomes other things that it is more of a continuance of itself, and never does it stop being what it inherently is. Very little can be discerned from the authors besides the fact that they are radical thinkers, who challenge the extremely dominant Western idea of linear progression, i.e. left to right, 1,2,3,4,5, you read books from top to bottom, front to back. It is possible that these men are foreign or raised in a different culture if you make a giant stereotypical leap from their names but besides that, little is revealed about them. Deleuze and Guattari don’t have much at stake when they are arguing their beliefs but with drastically different ideas like theirs, it is important to be concise and say what you want to say correctly, the first time, in order to be taken seriously.

I will be the first to admit that this reading, one of the shortest readings that we have had all semester, was incredibly difficult for me to understand the first time through. I had to reread and even re-reread several passages to understand (I hope) what was being said. My first response to this reading was the Deleuze and Guattari were being controversial and tearing down widely held ideas just for the sake of it. I love to read and the after the first page of ripping my beloved books apart, I was a bit annoyed with the reading. However upon finishing the passage I found that I had to agree, at least partially, with what Deleuze and Guattari were proposing and that creating things to follow a rhizomatous structure could quite possibly be a great knew way to approach things. Already I believe things like links to other sites and parts of webpages function as rhizomes because they just transport you to different parts of the whole, without any mandated linear fashion (for some sites). I do not believe that the idea of a rhizome is so different from the linear thinking Deleuze and Guattari make a strong effort to discredit. Essentially all of the offshoots, roots, and leaves start from one place, the central bulb and grow outward and away. They do not become separate entities and are just a different form of the same central thing but neither do these offshoots and stems come from nothingness. They begin somewhere. I also wanted to touch on the criticism of dichotomy that Deleuze and Guattari make, mainly that even while they attempted to point out the flaws of dichotomy, they could not help but use dichotomies. But on the other hand that fact may just prove their point, that we are only able to describe things in terms of others, as opposites of others in some cases, and that this should not be the case.

Some questions for thought are:
1. Do you think there is something wrong, or flawed about linear thinking?
2. If we were not to describe things by their relation to other things, how would we describe them? Is there a certain point we can get to and then we tread upon the line of defining things in terms of another?
3. Think of and explain a practical use of a rhizome-like structure in your life. What is it? How do you apply this idea?

Autism Online

Autistic culture online: virtual communication and cultural expression on the
Spectrum by Joyce Davidson is an article that addresses the how the Internet has opened the door to the mainstreaming of autistic culture and communication. Davidson’s primary claims are that the Internet allows for “language games” (as coined by Wittgenstein) and the spread of the Autism Spectrum, the self-proclaimed autistic culture. Davidson goes on to quote the biographies of several autistic people who have shared their views on how they view life as well as how there is a huge demand for the recognition of minority status among the population as neurologically different. Davidson claims that this is largely made possible because the Internet virtually eliminates the things that usually make “normal” communication so difficult for those with autism, ie focusing on facial expressions, body language and social aspects of conversation that don’t come naturally to autistics. Davidson is not really speaking to the autistic community in this article but is more trying to inform those possibly interested in the culture or more likely to inform those who use the Internet of what it has to offer beyond the normal realm of thinking. It is hard to know that much about Davidson, who seems to compile many thoughts and ideas composed by other people, no doubt making it an easy access to the information, but Davidson seems to lack many original ideas herself. Davidson avoids making any real controversial statements in this paper but does contribute those ideas that are divisive to others and makes comments on them. Overall it doesn’t seem that Davidson has much at stake by writing this article, only the knowledge that she is informing those who might have impressions of the autistic community without any basis.

I don’t know too much about the autistic culture or how it plays out online but I do have a cousin who is autistic and know his limitations as far as communication and how things can easily overwhelm him, so Davidson’s article seems to make sense as far as claiming that the Internet can allow those with autism can communicate better on a less personal level. I found the article extremely interesting as I had never before heard of the desire by autistics to be recognized as simply different and not disabled. Blog sites such as this or chat rooms are the perfect mediums for autistics to communicate to meet their social comfort needs as described by Davidson. The “normal” population of today, especially those around our age, are utilizing programs such as Skype, other webcams, or even ChatRoulette to communicate with others, however it appears that autistics would purposefully avoid means such as this for the very reasons we value it, for the personal “face to face” interaction.

My questions for contemplation are
1. Do you believe that adding “neurologically different” to the list of social variables would be a good idea or even valid?
2. If a cure were to be found for autism, or at least a super-effective therapy, do you believe that it should be an option to receive treatment or something that should be mandated? (as with some psychosis)
3. Do you consider autism as a disability or simply a difference? (this may require some research)

The Hacker Manifesto by The Mentor

Summary:
The Hacker Manifesto is a short, but very clear and meaningful statement of the place of the hacker culture in our society, and the frequent mislabeling of hackers. It tells us that a hacker is not necessarily someone that spends their nights breaking into your computer and stealing your identity. While this is something that some people that fall under the definition of a hacker do occasionally do, hackers are generally people that simply change things in a system in order to make them suit their needs or just to make them work better. They are the people that define their lives by the computer and what they can do with them. They are generally the people writing the software that we take for granted and use daily. They were the people that our schools rejected and misunderstood, but now they are some of the people that we most depend on.
The author, “The Mentor”, or Loyd Blankenship is presumably a hacker that is explaining very concisely who it is that become “hackers”. Being someone who has found this article in the past, I would think that his intended audience is the person who is interested in hacker culture, and is mildly knowledgeable with computers. His stake in making these statements is to address the psychology and general societal misunderstanding of hackers and their motives. He wrote this manifesto after being arrested, so I assume it was in protest of this.


Inquiry:
My personal view of a hacker is not one of accusation or suspicion but something more along the line of reverence. I consider myself of fair intelligence, but the complexity of the systems that hackers understand, manipulate, and live for is sometimes mind-boggling to me. One of the most impressive things is that the best of them do it for fun, doing as a hobby things that are nowhere near the comprehension of the vast majority of the population. And even with all of the social stigma that comes with the term “hacker”, they are one of the unseen cornerstones of our digital society, often being the ones developing our computer software. In this respect I totally agree with The Hacker Manifesto when it says that hackers are misunderstood because they are above the social norms and limitations.
Questions:
1) What is your take on the term “hacker”? Do you personally assign it a negative connotation? Why or why not? When you think of a “hacker” what mental image comes to mind?
2) At the end of the Manifesto, it mentions using services without paying because it is run by “profiteering gluttons” (i.e. downloading software, music). Do you think that actions like this should be considered criminal? As Stallman also pushed for; should people be allowed to limit the distribution of intellectual property like software?
3) The Manifesto mentions that hackers are all alike. What is your take on this position? Do you see hacker culture as a sea of anonymous nerds all working independently towards a similar goal like The Mentor does, or a defocused group of digital delinquents?

The GNU Manifesto by Richard Stallman

Summary:

GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix”. At the time that Stallman wrote this, he was a programmer frustrated with the social limitations that the software like Unix (an early operating system)created by having licensing restrictions. Stallman believed that software should be free to be received, used, modified, and redistributed. This belief was based on the idea that users distributing it rather than paying for it really didn’t hurt anyone except the corporations that were unfairly profiting from it. What did hurt people thought was their limited access to useful software at the hands of these greedy corporations. These ideas led to Stallman creating his GNU operating system, which would function similarly to the popular Unix, but with open licensing, meaning that it could be distributed and used freely.

The actual manifesto’s purpose is to raise money, resources, and volunteers for his GNU project, so his audience is obviously programmers and companies interested in his cause. What Stallman has on the line is the future of his GNU project, so this Manifesto is extremely important. He first describes GNU, saying that it is a full Unix-compatible system to be distributed freely. Stallman states that his moral reasoning for writing the GNU system is that “…the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I just share it with other people who like it.” (546) The meat of Stallman’s arguments comes when he explains how all computer users will benefit from Unix. He states that freely distributing software is not just to save everyone the price of the software, but is to avoid “wasteful duplication of system programming effort”, which can “go instead into advancing the state of the art”. (547) This is then followed by a series of arguments against GNU and their rebuttals. Most of the argument has to do with the fact that the field might stagnate if programmers are no longer getting paid, and is countered by Stallman’s citing the nature of computer programmers and the fact that they will still be able to make money, just not as much.

Inquiry:

I believe that Stallman’s main idea behind the GNU, that restricting software use has a detrimental effect on society as a whole, is very sound. Professional software licenses can cost in the thousands easily, even more depending on its use, and this comes to be a huge cost on companies and consumers. This limiting of the use of professional software leads to it not being shared and used by people who may need it, and in this way puts an unnecessary burden on society. In my experience, when trying to get a license for Adobe Photoshop, something I need to support my Graphic Design hobby, I found that a new copy of the latest version can cost up to $999.99. I have spent hours learning to use Photoshop, and to find that I can never actually use it because a simple license cost so much personally limited me in a field that I was really interested in.

Our generation seems to have adapted to this legal but unethical limitation by circumventing these limitations with illegal and still unethical methods of software sharing. While a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended edition costs $999.99 here, one could download a copy for nothing elsewhere just as easily. The happy ending to my story is that student editions of Photoshop are below $100, and work perfectly with the limitation that you can’t use it to make a profit.

Questions:

1 ) What do you think of Stallman’s idea of a freely distributed Operating system? Would it cause the field of software design to advance, as he suggests, or do you think that programmers would shy away from a profession where their work was handed out and modified freely?

2) Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you were unable to do something computer-related because of software costs? If so describe your experiences?

3) Have you ever used open-source software, or freeware? Did you find it to be inferior or less reliable than equivalent licensed software? I recommend you try Ubuntu. It is a Linux-based operating system that you can download and use for free. You can even download it and run it in “Demo mode” without installing anything. Try it!

Let me google that for you...

This is the blog for March 11. I am getting it done early so I don’t have to deal with it later in the week. :)
The article “The Search Party” by Ken Auletta was published in the New Yorker in January of 2008. It examines the search engine Google and how it developed and the current controversies surrounding it. Auletta has a biography on the New Yorker webpage (biography). In this it discusses his stake from being previously involved in politics and he talks almost exclusively about communication. Clearly he is very well informed in the area, but I see serious biases as he works. It is hard to see some of his counterpoints and through his interviews; you see his points only through quotes from Google. Microsoft and other competitors have no quotes in the article. The claim that Auletta makes in this article is that Google’s expansion to D.C. and their lobbying operation was extremely important. The article starts with Google’s foundations of starting business and then talks about how it has been expanding faster and faster recently into many different avenues rather than just being a search engine. Google is quoted though as saying that they are “70% to the ‘core’ mission of providing a search engine and our advertising network.” This meaning that although they also deal with “Gmail” and their “apps” they are still focused on the premise of being the best search engine. The article discusses how Google strongly believes that the users are most important in many cases they quote some of the heads as saying we do what is best for our users. It also glances over the idea of Google collecting personal information and how they store it “safely” and to make the interactions more accurate with their searches.

This article is severely one-sided. I don’t really mind that they store my data because it is useful. I may have to search specifically for something one time, but after that, I am able to be more general the succeeding times. I love this feature. However, I don’t think that Google should be so cavalier about the storage. I think that standing up to the government and to not give them information was very wrong since they could have stopped people with illegal pornography. I am glad that they are careful with the information though since it does protect its users. Besides, then our government may spend time hunting down people who were just doing searches as jokes. The article starts discussing how Google is getting more involved with phones and this shows how it is dated. I think that re-examining this article would prove very interesting and if I had more time, I might do some research on it. I know that the Droid by Google is a very popular phone (our teacher loves hers :) ). I think that looking at Google as compared to Bing would be interesting now since Bing launched in the summer of last year. In Auletta’s biography it also lists his recent articles. Guess what? He wrote about Bing. (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/10/bing-of-the-hill.html) I think that it is great how technology and media are so fast to catch up with what we want to see and learn about. My opinions of Google are still the same after reading this article although I think that it is kind of odd to have the whole company really run by 3 people. Honestly, after I became a billionaire at the beginning of Google, I would have sold my spot to someone else and taken my money and retired. One more thing about Bing, I have problems that their ads show really cool features…that aren’t actually available. I wanted to use the when to buy plane tickets feature and it isn’t available (or I am just too stupid to figure out how to use it) for many cities. I like that Google is more to the point than the other engines as well.

By the way, the first thing I am doing when they invent time machines is going to buy serious stock in Google.

Question Time!

1. What do you use for a search engine and why? What makes this one that you use better than the others?
2. What is your opinion of Google keeping people’s search records and do you think they should be available to the government? Why or why not?
3. Do you see Google trying to stretch itself too thin by invading so many areas of technology (advertising, searching, phones, etc.)? Or will this be a good thing for them and they will become even more powerful? (they were in the top ten of richest corporations when this article was pubished)

Best application of The Cave's technology: Adult Entertainment

Technology is a phenomenon that has been advancing exponentially over the last 100 years. Bill Gates was quoted as saying, not even 20 years ago, that the private consumer would never need more than 1GB of hard drive space. I remember when my family got our first computer with Windows 95 and dial-up internet. Now, Windows 95 and much faster internet can be run on a cell phone. When I first got my own computer just 5 years ago, it came with a 100GB hard drive which was top of the line and I thought I could never fill it up. In the last generation, we’ve advanced from radio to silent black and white movies, to black and white with sound, to color tv, to stereo sound, to surround sound, to high definition, to HD 3-D, and now to immersive 3-D. At the rate these technologies advance, everyone will have an immersive 3-D setup in their homes within 20 years or less (I do not claim to have the know-how to make such a prediction, so I am playing it safe with that estimate). Even though I am aware of such technological advancements, it always surprises me when I see it firsthand. The Cave, at the University of Arizona, was built 5 years ago and cost about $400,000, and already the technology is available for the average consumer to own a 3-D capable television. My experience there really made me marvel at people’s technological prowess once again, but more than anything, it just made me want to see James Cameron’s Avatar again (that is SUCH a good movie!).
As far as my experience with the cave directly, I felt that the technology was stunted by the programming. I had hoped for an immersive environment (like a video game world), yet all we got were three dimensional models (which didn’t really look that good in 3-D). The flaws in the 3-D effects could be fixed by a few little changes (like a spherical projection plane, the edges between the surfaces ruined the 3-D effects). What really amazed me were the audio tracking applications that allowed the user to walk around in the digital environment. But, we all experienced it, so I don’t really need to go into detail. In the end, I enjoyed the experience because it opened my eyes, once again, to the wonderment of technological advancement and gave new dreams for my video gaming future.

I would like to know:

Did you find anything less/more intriguing than I did during your experience in The Cave (ie 3-D tech, motion tracking, etc.)?

Are you looking forward to this kind of technology being available to consumers? Why/why not?

What kind of program would you have liked to see available at The Cave (I alluded to the idea of a digital world to walk around in, or having something that moved on its own within the program)? I will give a prize to the most unique idea.