#personal learning journal

[khemmyrick-blog]

code_log.episode_four(no_users_allowed)

Finally reverse engineered the apps made in my last two courses to the point where I can start on the basic element of project five.  Gotta get my flask app reading and writing to/from that database to/from the post stream before I can worry about ‘users’ and premade HTML/CSS. I’m writing this here to remind myself that I completed this step, and put it in a twin folder for the BSNwF(Add Some Layout) workspace.  In case I get stuck and entertain the idea of restarting from scratch for the zillionth time.

[com580-blog-blog]

Cognitive Surplus

The idea behind Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky is that society is now using networks to produce for the common good. The main example discussed was people’s use of Wikipedia, a publicly-edited online encyclopedia where people can add, edited and (I think) take away articles pertaining to a certain person, place, or thing.

As discussed in the TED video, Wikipedia is kept alive by “nerds” who monitor and patrol it’s pages in their free time to uphold the credibility of Wikipedia, though they are not paid employees. This illustrates the thought that people in certain groups have motivation that derives from the intrinsic satisfaction they get from working within those groups for a common goal.

The Internet allows you to change the scale, as some of my classmates mentioned, because some people can think they can become activists online through blogs or social sites like Wikipedia. Mostly, I think, because it serves as an equal platform for everyone to get involved with a cause (again, group of people with similar interests spend their free time doing things like monitoring Wikipedia because of the intrinsic satisfaction that it brings).

The effects of the multitude of social participation can lead to what is referred to as a Cognitive Surplus. The means of creating a cognitive surplus seem to be very similar to the results: people who are spending time blogging, editing, and becoming activists online. The affects of which can:

*Create an extremely passive society. Instead of Marching on Washington or other potentially necessary extremes to solve a common goal, society is funneled down to that one person who clicks “support” on a facebook Cause and calls it quits.

*Creates a somewhat socially inapt society.

However if people are becoming more “involved” with a cause because of the Internet platform, are the effects of which really that bad?

Compared with the Gutenberg Parenthesis, as discussed in class, people in a society give up certain abilities when one form of technology emerges while gaining another. When Gutenberg invented the printing press people somewhat lost their memorization ability. However it allowed us to value the “written word” through a narrative form instead of orally and, assumingly, increased literacy.

With the emergence of social networking, editing, etc. people are becoming more passive but maybe they’re becoming more informed because the easy of which information on these sites are shared. As another student mentioned in class, there is no intrapersonal communication when watching TV or reading a book, unless it’s a book club, so when compared to editing Wikipedia articles, the latter has more social interaction.   

[com580-blog-blog]

So what happens to a brain on the Internet?

As discussed in class, your brain will remold itself into a new form that it is more compatible with Internet-mediated information, kind of like melted plastic. This assumption is based off of Plasticity, the idea that our brains are constantly changing.

Carr stated his point of view being that our minds aren’t necessarily changing, but evolving. Evolving in a way that allows us to adapt, thus losing excess traits along the way.

With the Internet, the spread of ideas are more current, allowing our brains to adopt and process information more quickly than before. The speed of which this information is transmitted (through social networking for example) can have a noticeable impact on society. It was mentioned in class if communication over the Internet can make us more democratic. Such as on Twitter, people see what others (like news outlets or companies) know or are doing and “retweet” it to their followers, making a democratic situation through voting. –Essentially because people are acting upon what they’ve read and not about what they have done themselves. 

This new execution of democracy can be considered an evolution. However some believe that it is too early to be identifying anything as an evolution or to say that people’s brains are evolving with new technology. It essentially takes thousands of years for evolution to evolve, so to say that over the past decade or so people’s brains have evolved-through plasticity-to a point that is dramatically different than before doesn’t seem possible.

That’s maybe why some believe that our brains are simply adapting, not evolving.  

When people connect, there is a purpose and properties that evolve (as mentioned on the TED video).  People have adapted to keeping relationships on the Internet that transitivity has emerged being the capital form of connecting. Transitivity being if Person A is connected to Person B, who is connected to Person C, then Person A is inevitably connected to Person C.

It was interesting to explore in the TED video that the connection of these people are greater than the sum of their parts, thus creating a super organism. A super organism being a community that cannot be reducible to a single individual, and must be studied by looking at the collective, because “different social locations affect the structure of you life”.

Example being, in the TED videos it was mentioned that if you are with over-weight people, you chance of becoming over weight are greatly increased than someone who are connected to people that live an active lifestyle. That even if a mutual friend is over-weight your chances are still higher. It’s only until you get to the position of a friend’s friend’s friend’s friend(at least four connections) that you are no longer affected by that aspect of transitivity.

The reason being, is because you are far enough away that you do not consider that person’s activity as “the norm”. The norm being, of course, what is the acceptable standard is. This brings full circle back to our plastic minds: what is the norm? And who causes the changes that causes our minds to change? Why do we change? Are we naturally motivated to move forward?  

In the TED videos it is said that we choose to go forward, to be connected, because “the benefits of living connected are better than the risks” and “social networks are fundamentally connected to goodness”. 

The structure, the way people are connected matters because it affects our entire lives. So whether it’s our brains that adapt because of Plasticity or because of our transitive position: our brain the Internet is changing because there’s a desirable means of connectivity that causes us to want to change.

[com580-blog-blog]

This is your brain on the Internet-The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

This week in Carr, we approached the Internet in a different way compared to Wu. Instead of Wu’s discussion of how we are influencing IT, we discussed on how IT is influencing US. 

(The Internet has been growing over the years, becoming more of a factor in our lives-like a person-that I will now refer to it in this post as IT).

In chapter six in Carr, he approached if books have the same relevance when produced on the Internet. IT has much more capabilities for communication through visuals and audio than a measly book. Vooks, as shown in class, are examples of attempting to tell a narrative on the IT as opposed to a tradition book form. Vooks blend text, audio, visuals to tell a story: text on one side and a video of the content on the other.

While IT has extraordinary abilities, not everyone is impressed by all the mediated flows of communication that IT can do. After viewing the Vook promo video, most of my classmates agreed that all the different forms of media are distracting and actually take away from the narrative experience rather than adding to it. Carr addressed this as the issue of The Juggler’s Brian: where we have access to so much information that we think we (we being society today) can multitask whenever we really can’t-because it’s all so distracting.

For example: an iMedia student can think that he/she can multitask and do school work, research for capstone, and job hunt all at once. However when using the Internet, IT becomes very distracting with all the embedded links that users are taken down a rabbit hole and even more distracted than they were when they began with. Thus a person who thinks they can multitask is taken more aback because of the lack of straightforwardness the Internet provides. We can’t concentrate on the Internet just like we can’t concentrate on multiple tasks, because of when one tries to do too many things at once; the necessary amount of information can’t be given to them.

My classmates and I discussed that it isn’t a desirable option to consume narratives online (such as a Vook) because “People don’t want to search through links as opposed to reading a book” and “You lose the story, if books had a website approach”. So for us Millennials who are supposed to be so connected, we can still turn away from media that seems to overload us.  As Janna Anderson outlined in her handout: “It’s becoming more difficult to separate high-quality material from junk online […]”.

While most of us agreed that something like a Vook would be useful for reference. Like the workout videos, to read it and then see a visual of what the text is describing. But, at 12 or 13, to consume Harry Potter on a Vook (before the books become movies) it wouldn’t have been as great of an experience because you wouldn’t have imagined what the characters looked like, sounded like, or how to pronounce their names. 

Our minds may have a shorter attention span because of the in-your-face media that IT throws at us, but it’s like how Janna Anderson spoke about; our minds grow and change to adapt to new lifestyles. So whether it’s a lack of memorization ability because of the printing press and books or lack of concentration because of IT and all the things IT can do, people:

“[…] are lazy, are incapable of concentrating, or prefer mostly to be entertained, they will find new ways to be distracted, waste time, and goof off. The impact of online tools depends upon the ways in which users implement them”.

[com580-blog-blog]

Weekly Response

As we discussed Wu’s The Master Switch this past week, I began to see how Postman’s ideals in is “Five Things” speech were evident through out the history of media evolution. Mainly the idea of technology becoming ‘mythic’, meaning that an evolution of technology becomes so commonplace in our society/way of living, that we forget to question it or recognize the problem that it was supposed to solve.

The idea of technology becoming mythic is also explored in Sherry Turkle’s  Alone Together:Why We Expect more From Technology and Less From Each Other. Turkle is the Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, In the Author’s Note Turkle describes the “Turning Points” of technology as well as the technologies she studied that comprised the turning points. The first point that got me thinking was when she described the transition of technology from being a network of computers, and computers witheducational games, to more mobile personal devices.

”[…] by the late 1990s, children were presented with digital ‘creatures’ that made demands for attention and seemed to pay attention to them.”

This was a reference that I, after thinking of the toys I played with then, realized and made me feel kind of old. The author was describing Giga Pets/Tamagotchis, the key chain toy that you had to feed and take care of. From what I remember you had to watch the little black and white screen and when it would wake up you have to ask if it was hungry, lonely, etc. by pressing a series of buttons. There was also a Reset button on the back that would revive the Giga Pet if it died.

The reason why toys like Giga Pets, Furbies, and those robot dogs were “primitive” examples of the turning points in technology is because that’s when technology changed from being devices that did extra work for us to becoming outlets that functioned off our emotions. 

Giga Pets were ways to care for an animal without any risk (though I was disappointed when my koala bear died when my pencil led got stuck in the Reset button) and now with social networking (Facebook specifically) we can emotionally involve ourselves with others, through our computers, without any big risk of being hurt, embarrassed, or any other type of emotion that could occur in a traditional (face-to-face) interaction.

Chatroulette is also mentioned, an online site that has over 1.5 million users that connects you to all the other users and allows you to speak to them through a video interface. Conversations can be brought up and discarded at will (average timing quoted to being around two seconds). After any amount of time a user can click “Next” and another live-streaming video of a person will appear.

Technology that creates virtual pets and sites like Chatroulette seems to encourage people to treat devices with emotion and each other as objects. If this is the direction that technology is currently taking us, where we somewhat live through social networks where we can virtually interact with no risk and realistically interact with inanimate objects, media literacy spans across every demographic. It’s not a matter of who is technology savvy but to those who choose to be “connected”. 

Back to Wu though, we spent time exploring the ‘open’ and ‘closed’ aspects of The Cycle. I think it was Kim who brought up the electric car whenever we were discussing the effects of not going with the current ideals of technology (“F-ing with the magic”). The electric car gave people the option of purchasing cars that didn’t require any gas. It was supposed to be better for the consumer and for the planet. However, as told in the 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? GM saw the electric car as threat to oil and gas’ power in America and quietly took it off the market, another example of f-ing with the magic.

Now Chevrolet started putting the electric car back on the market at the end of 2010 and plans to develop more this year.  Maybe now because of the environmental issues, big companies are starting to see the useful, consumer effects of producing electric cars. With alternative system technologies, The Cycle seems to be reopening.