Reed Chapter 8-10

The final chapters of Reed’s Digitized Lives were very interesting and thought provoking. Chapter eight discusses the debate of whether technology is making kids today less intelligent than before. But more importantly Reed talks about technology being integrated into modern classrooms and the possible effects that this can have. He states, “you need to know not how many tablet computers or digital projectors your son’s or daughter’s classroom has (though that is good to know), but rather what are teachers doing with the technologies they have. Are they using them creatively or dully, are they using them to escape their role as teachers or deepen that role?”

I know that my personal experience with computers was pretty limited in school before college. At least I feel like it is less so than what children have in school today. In elementary school the only time that I was exposed to computers was when we went to the lab once a week to take typing classes. This class was mostly an interactive typing game that was focused on you learning the keys and increasing your typing speed. In middle school I had a class that was dedicated to learning Microsoft programs and also learning how to form different papers such as resumes or different applications. This was very useful in learning how to use, not only Word, but also excel, and power point. By the time I was in high school computers were pretty integrated into my classes because I specifically chose technology oriented classes. I was taught to use and become proficient in illustrator, Photoshop, flash, and other Adobe programs. This was extremely helpful to me to learn at a young age. I also think it helped me later in life when choosing what college degree I wanted to peruse.

Another point that Reed brings up is who exactly is on the internet and who as access to it. “The world wide web isn’t.” The gap between those who do have internet and those who do not is called the digital divide. Reed makes the claim that the wealth gap (which can be said is the same as the digital divide) is not a socially sustainable trend. This can only lead to greater and greater strife. This leads to distress and social exclusion. This is the same concept that we have heard from a previous book panel. How this gap is only causing a greater and greater divide.

New Media and Politics Expert Group

Today in class the expert group on new media and politics presented. This group was very well informed and presented the information explaining news media and politics, its past history, and what possibilities there are for news media and politics in the future. I really enjoyed the texting polls that we did in class, rather than getting into groups! One thing that I found very interesting from their presentation was that they claimed 60% of people are politically active online. This means that they post, like, or comment on political things on any social media site. They also stated that 43% of users want to know more about an issue because of something that they saw online. This could mean that someone posted an opinion on a current political issue and just shy of half the people who see that would go pursue more facts on that issue.

Another interesting thing that has come up in modern politics is that the internet and social media has changed the way that political donations are collected. It used to be were a candidate gets huge donations from a small number of people. Now it is where a huge number of people can donate small amounts to a candidate of their choosing. This is what happened with the Obama campaign. He raised huge sums of donations just by having a large number of people donate amounts around $5. An interesting statistic that he group showed us was that today about 50% of donations are raised online or through email. Another 10% is raised through apps and text messages.

The group also talked about the history of the media and politics. Basically this showed us that FDR was the “radio” president. John F. Kennedy was the “Television” president, and Obama was the emerging “internet” president.

One thing that I found the most interesting from their presentation was when they showed a chart of all the current presidential candidates and what social media sites they are signed up for and use regularly. They brought up the questions of uses Snapchat in a political manner. Would you follow a candidate who is on Snapchat? It’s an interesting question since Snapchat is such a new medium and that means this is the first campaign where this is even an option for a candidate to use. One thing about Snapchat is that it is such a raw form of social media. By this I mean that once you post something it is on your story for about 24 hours and I don’t believe you can take it down. As we have seen in the past some candidates would tweet something out that they are later advised to take down. On other social sites such as Instagram, twitter, and Facebook you can heavily edit and even delete something that you have previously posted. Snapchat changes that a little bit. You can only really edit a chat with what text/stickers you want to add to it and then you cannot really edit it much further. I’m not so certain if that is fully appropriate for a political candidate running for the presidency, and in the long run it may actually do more harm than good for the individual candidate. I suppose only time will tell how new media is effecting politic. And we will see this especially in the upcoming year.

Book Panel 11/5

In class there were two book panel presentations. One was reviewing SuperBetter by McGonigal and the second one was Alone Together by Turkle. Alone together talks about how we as a society tend to now expect more from technology and less from other people. The example used is Facebook, which is technically human contact but it is easier to engage and easier to avoid if you want to. This is similar to the social media expert group where we learned that people are feeling down on themselves because we see a highlight reel that makes everyone’s life look so much better than it is in real life. This is something that we know yet we still feel down when our lives don't match up to others on social media. This goes to show how disconnected we may be in our own lives and we use social media as a way to make lives seem so much better than they actually are. In the first part of Turkle’s book the group discusses how our relationship with computers and machines looks like today. This goes into how a robot can be a companion in addition to a machine that is programmed to complete a task. In the second part they talk about how people are emotionally attached to machines and social media in general. How we have need to express ourselves online. This all just shows us how our personal and business lives are greatly affected by social media and technology overall.

The second group presented the book SuperBetter by McGonigal. This book sounded like it was extremely interesting to read. The group began their presentation by talking about ways to keep your mind active and attentive. This can connect to what the author talks about in the ways all games change how we respond to stress, challenge, and pain. By adopting a gameful mindset we can cultivate new ways to recover ourselves and learn to me more resilient in everyday life. I know that this kind of sounds like a relief because we as a society have been told that video games make us violet or impatient or just an overall less productive person. McGonigal says the exact opposite. The group talks about the steps that she created to make yourself into a more resilient person. This will result in you generally feeling better and being a better person. It is really interesting how video games and even just games in general, can have such a huge impact.  

Social Media Expert Group

The expert group that presented in class taught us about social media. Social media is a concepts that we seem to know a lot about now because we are the product of a generation that practically lives online. However there were somethings that were mentioned that I didn’t know. For one they mentioned how the first social media site was actually launched in 1997. This was only later followed by Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This actually surprised me because I genuinely thought that Myspace was one of the first public social media sites available.

One thing that this group discussed was how social media has become so successful in the past ten years. There are multiple factors that attribute to the success of a social site but the main factor seems to be human self-obsession. Social sites feed upon you uploading information about yourself. This includes all forms of you everyday information to major milestones in your life. In a normal day you could post a status about your mood, then upload a picture of what you had for lunch that day, and finally post Snapchat pictures of your night out. This is all very “you” centric. What we have noticed as a whole is that people seem to now need some kind of validation from their social media lives. I know of an Australia model who was an “Instagram star” and she recently just one night just deleted all her social media overnight. She went on to explain how she felt horrible about how she was kind of living her life completely online. She would spend hours out of her day to post well enough to get a “post-able” picture. She also explained how she was once paid $400 dollars just to post a picture of herself in a certain dress. But this lead her to be overly conscious of her body images and she was doing unhealthy things to keep looking a certain way. It seems that kids more and more validate their self-worth based on how many likes they got on a comment or picture. If there were more likes, it was a great day. If there were less likes it was a horrible day.

However this is not to say the social media is all bad. This form of social communication gives us all a sense of community. We are all connected to each other now. We just need to make sure to not let a number of likes determine our happiness. 

Reed Ch. 3-7

In chapters 3 through 7 in Digitized Lives, Reeds touches on five pretty interesting topics. The first is how identity is perceived online. It’s interesting to see how you are perceived online. It is understood that people can mediate what is posted on a status or what pictures they post. That is a part of what makes an online identity. Another aspect that was talked about in class was what happens when you type your own name into any search engine, and the results that come up. Do we as individual have power over how our name gets responded to in that manner? For instance when I type my name “Jennifer McIlvaine” into Google, the first link that comes up is “cooking with Chef Jennifer McIlvaine in Umbria.”  Now it’s really cool to know that there is an Italian chef with my name, but that’s not my virtual identity. Just some interesting thoughts about how you are interpreted online. 

The next thing that this book brings to attention is how new technologies are possible creating or solving problems related to our desire for greater equality. The points that we came up with in class were that there is a noticeable gap in the wealthy and the poor. This creates a technological gap between the gadgets that some people have the ability to own. That was an interesting point but I had initially thought about how the internet has brought racial injustice to the limelight. As we have seen in the recent years it is easier for people to illustrate any racial discrimination just by bringing out your phone and recording them. This creates a way to open a dialog about what is really happening. So both the points about the wealth gap that is immersing and the social injustices that is being illuminated are both important points that technology is bring about.

Another point that Reed makes is about the presences of the Internet in our lives and how that affects our personal relationships. This is a significant component in our millennial lives because our social lives and relationships have been on the internet since middles school for most of us. One of the points that was brought up is that there is now this permanent record of all your conversations. If you say something to a friend, who later becomes someone you no longer trust, they have a concrete evidence of a possibly incriminating conversation with you. One of the good things about this technological medium in our relationships is when you are having a kind of heated conversation with a friend or a significant other you have a moment or two to think about how you want to respond. This is instead of face-to-face conversations that you have to think of a response immediately and you may accidentally say something that you don’t mean.

The reading from this week has shown me that there are a lot of positives and negatives to the moving technology, but it is never the fault of the tech. The internet is neutral. It becomes what you make of it. 

Ubiquitous Computing Expert Group

Going through the process of understanding ubiquitous computing and its integration into our society has been very eye opening for me. It’s really amazing understanding what is already on the technology market and what is right around the corner. Ubiquitous computing, which we found to also be referenced to as pervasive computing, is the growing trend towards embedding microprocessors in everyday objects so they can communicate  information. The words pervasive and ubiquitous mean “existing everywhere.” Pervasive computing devices are completely connected and constantly available. A technology trying to embed PCs into everyday objects to make conventional PCs invisible.

There are three main stages of computing that lead up to today’s standards of ubiquitous computing. The stages being the mainframe, and PC era, and then finally ubiquitous computing. The mainframe era was the time when there were multiple people using one machine. The example of this is when this peaked in the 90's, everyone had a PC in the home but it was one computer for the entire family. In the PC ear there was one machine per one person. Finally ubiquitous computing is when there are multiple machines per one person. This also shows us that the continuous connection is actually the opposite of virtual reality. Virtual reality immerses the person into the computer generated world, where computers are being embedded into the real world with ubiquitous computing.

The idea of having ubiquitous technology can be embedded into any aspect of your everyday life. We showed this in class by bring the groups together to think of different technologies in different areas. These being wearable, healthcare, home, automobile, and commercial technologies. For every category each group came up with multiple examples.  There are advantages and disadvantages or each category.

One of the categories with the most examples was for wearable technology. This would include things like Bluetooth jewelry, fit bit, smart watch, and the smart phone. The convergence of these technologies on one person would make that ubiquitous. The advantages for this wearable technology outweigh the disadvantages in my opinion. You have unlimited data that is at your literal fingertips 24/7. This data can tell you about your work, social life, family, and even your health. With the tracking technology of a fit bit people can see and keep record of their health. The only real disadvantages of this is to have to constantly keep you multiple devices charged. There could be a future around the corner, where all our wearable ubiquitous computing is in one single device. 

Book Group Presentations

Today in class two groups presented on their book reviews. The first group that presented reviewed a book called Future Perfect by Steven Johnson. This focus of this book is about peer to peer networking, how it works, and how it could be helping or harming our society. One thing that they talked about when it came to peer to peer networking was the ways in which it changed journalism. Journalism as a peer to peer network helped information management. What this means is that the news that you care about is probably what you are most likely to pay attention to. The example used in class was if your child scrapped her knee, you are more likely to care about that than a bombing in an overseas country. A better example of this, I believe would be that we as Americans care about new of our troops more so than the news of another countries troops. The group also mentioned how peer supported news makes the news cheap to come by. This can be seen by people uploading real-time YouTube videos, and live tweets and other social networks. A question that the group brings forth is “are the internet and the web pushing us into a positive direction.” The answer is that it all depends on your view of what is positive and what is negative. They talked about example of peer to peer networking which is torrent files, Wikipedia, or any social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Another aspect of a model of peer to peer networking that the group mentions was centralized networking, which is all intelligence that lays in the center of the networks, which made it easy to attack.

They concluded their review of this book by mentioning some examples of what peer innovation are. These include a Kickstarter which creates peer backing one another and crowd funding. Another peer innovation would be the prize back challenge and these sparked innovation whereas patents slowed down innovation.

Finally it can be concluded that peer to peer networking leads to more participation and thus more profit. This is because the internet and web is decentralized and has peer to peer architecture, and this allows anyone to voice ideas and opinions.

This group did a good job laying out all of the information provided in the book and gave a good understanding of the principles that need to be taken away from Johnson’s work.