Here is the final product of my site:
You never can be to careful about what you say. Find out what I think about Dan Gillmor’s take on privacy and media here.
Increasingly, it is becoming more difficult to stand out from the crowd. One way to set yourself apart from others is to brand yourself in the digital world.
In this post, I discuss a few of the ways I am active in the Digital Media world.
Dan Gilmour makes the point in his book Mediactive that “information isn’t equal, not in quality or reliability.” He is referring to the fact that media today is becoming more unreliable and it is our duty as citizens to fix this problem. Throughout history people have simply been users of media, but we need to become active users and critics of media. If we continue to use media in a passive way, we are inhibiting not only media’s potential, but our own.
Through analyzing media, we become stronger critical thinkers. By simply accepting news articles, blog posts, Facebook updates, etc, as true, people are letting the media control their lives. Break throughs happen as a result of questioning and analyzing things of the past. Without questioning why something is happening, society will never grow or change. The media encourages us to accept their stories as factual, which is why most people do not question their reliability. Standing in line at the grocery store hearing people talk about tabloid articles and not question their legitimacy scares me.
As citizens, we cannot let the media control our daily thought processes. Gilmour stated it well when he said, “we can no longer afford to be passive consumers.” As a college student, I understand that people are busy and they may not have the time to double check the facts of everything they read. I don’t believe fact checking everything you read is necessary. People simply need to stop accepting everything they read as fact. The resources we have available today make it so easy to access information, but if we don’t begin to think critically about the information society is going to suffer severely.
Man-Computer Symbiosis details the path of interaction that will develop over time between humans and computers. The article proposes that “computers will one day perform intellectual operation much more effectively than man alone can perform them.” Today computers do in fact have this power, but we are now aware they are capable of so much more than has yet to be imagined. Computers were accurately described as “mechanically extended man.” This is probably more so true today than ever before. People never go anywhere without a computer attached to themselves.
The first sentence of The Computer as a Communication Device says its all: “In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through
a machine than face to face.” The article mentions that this is a startling thing for most people to expect for the future, but I highly doubt there is anyone today that would be startled to read this prediction. The author predicts the computer “can change the nature and value of communication even more profoundly than did the printing press and the picture tube, for, as we shall show, a well-programmed computer can provide direct access both to informational resources and to the processes for making use of the resources.”
Today people rarely limit technologies potential. In both articles, the authors envisioned a future that became a reality. This makes me excited for the future, but also nervous. Ideas people come up with today are often times impossible to grasp, but if the history of technology reveals anything, it is that anything is possible.
Engelbart’s continually accurate predictions of the future is what led to the success of computer technology. He never put a constraint on what technology could do and therefore was always able to foresee a future with infinite possibilities. The Loneliness of a Long Distance Thinker, discusses Engelbart’s ups and downs as he tried to convey to an unprepared world the possibilities of interactive technology. He knew that it took a while for people to adapt to new ways of thinking as he stated, “It is likely that each individual develops a certain repertory of process capabilities from which he selects and adapts those that will compose the processes that he executes. This repertory is like a toolkit. Just as the mechanic must know what his tools can do and how to use them, so the intellectual worker must know the capabilities of his tools and have suitable methods, strategies, and rules of thumb for making use of them.”
Engelbart’s vision was that technology would evolve so that people were able to share ideas and gain from each other as much as possible from technology. In As We May Think, Engelbart discusses how there is such a vast amount of information to discover. His desire is that people share their wealth of information with one another so we can help each other advance. He never became a rich and wealthy man, but that was never what he desired, as stated in the previous article. He wanted others to build on his ideas. He sees no need to hide information, but believes that it should be accessible to all in a medium that is easy to use so that we do not have to waste our time storing it in our minds.