Three Brilliant Insights: Consider recent readings (Turkle, Dawkins, Shirky, The Future of Learning in a Digital Age, Bauerlein), the documentary Digital Nation, and Dr. Mason’s talk — as well as your work on your research project — and, drawing upon these, offer three extraordinary points of illumination for the DH community. For each point you make, please include a quote (or summary) from the inspiration source and be sure to cite the source as well.
Please post your response as a reply on this page.
1. From Screen Time : “On one hand, they navigate the multimedia environment like pros…..On the other hand, they know remarkable little about the wider world….”
I feel its incredibly important especially for digital immigrants involved in DH to note that the idea of knowledge and learning is changing. Today’s society requires a different type of intelligence to succeed, needs and ways of thinking are completely different. Participatory learning may be the new direction of our learning style, it may not be. What DH needs to keep in mind is that the generations are not getting “dumber,” we just rely on different methods to obtain and transfer knowledge. Problem solving and learning take on a new approach.
2. Along with the first point, DH need to hold back judgment for now and just explore the effects. As Clay Shirky points out: “To the question “How is Internet is changing the way we think?”, the right answer is “Too soon to tell.” This isn’t because we can’t see some of the obvious effects already, but because the deep changes will be manifested only when new cultural norms shape what the technology makes possible.” It is precisely as Shirky states, the implications are not yet known. This is so incredibly important to keep in mind. “Knowledge” in the traditional sense could be viewed as decreasing, but what is knowledge anymore. The “new type of intellect” should be accepted and interpreted, not labeled. Today’s kids, the future of our society, function in a completely different way that needs to be harnessed, not changed.
3. In Dr. Mason’s presentation, she discussed the implications technology and the digital world has had on education, work, lifestyle, and relationships. She mentioned a higher rate of divorce, “work at home” instead of “stay at home,” home-schooling and online schooling, always working, longer lifespans……these changes are important to remember when comparing to the past. With such dramatic changes, I’m not sure how much can be compared. The implications of technology effect every aspect of our lives. Perhaps DH needs new standards to maintain the validity and applicability to life today.
Along with her presentation, the documentary Digital Nation, points out that we are always connected. What does this mean? Are our types of relationships changing? Perhaps. The social implications will be extremely important, I feel, in assessing the effect of the digital world. Classic psychology then needs to be challenged. DH needs to focus what it means to be a human being in today’s society.
1. From Sherry Turkle’s piece, “Computer simulations enable their users to think about complex phenomena as dynamic, evolving systems. But they also accustom us to manipulating systems whose core assumptions we may not understand and that may not be true.”
This quote made me think that even though digital features can help enhance our lives, we cannot live our lives in the digital world. We must take time to do works outside of the digital world and while we are working in the digital world, we cannot assume all the tools we are using are to our full understanding. We need to take time to explore these tools and experiment with them so we can use them to the fullest potential.
2. “Insults and obscenities, to which you would not dream of signing your real name, flow gleefully from the keyboard when you are masquerading online as ‘TinkyWinky’ or ‘FlubPoodle’ or ‘ArchWeasel’.” said by Richard Dawkins.
This should act as a cautionary quote to all digital humanists. While there may be rude and vulgar comments on a particular piece of work, if they do not allow any connection to it except a childish screen name then the comment isn’t worth your time to consider. On the other hand if a person has something constructive to say and gives more connection then simply a screen name, there may be some worth to exploring the comment and altering your work accordingly.
3. In “Digital Nation” the study done by Stanford which showed that multitaskers are not as good at multitasking as they thought. The study found that they did worse when multitasking. From this I gathered what has been know but people ignored and that is people should not multitask when working on something important. It is not hard to just put down other things and focus on one task, but people seem to have a lot of problems with this. Much of this is due the expantion of the digital devices, but to do something right those distractions need to be removed for a time. More importantly, people need to realize that nobody is great at multitasking. Those people just happen to more accustomed to multitasking so assume that means they are good at it. Once this realization is made hopefully they can start improving their work.
1. Future of Learning: “Digital technologies enable and encourage social networking and interactive, collaborative engagements…but K-12 privilege individualized performance..”
I do feel that this statement is completely true, HOWEVER I think that it is emphasized a bit wrongly. The comment is trying to get across the point that institutions are way behind technology and the Internet (which I agree with) and that schools need to enforce some more collaborative work with this new technology. That last part is the part that I don’t agree with. If things become collaborative in school how is a student going to find her own, individualized voice? Or form her own opinions without the input of someone else? Or how is it going to be known that she understands the information all on her own if everything is group work? Couldn’t she just ride on someone else’s hard work? I think that giving individual praise first is good. That way the student can develop her own opinions and gain her knowledge. That is a crucial step before collaboration.
2. Digital Nation: “Internet has changed from what one does to who one is.”
With this quote I tried to imagine the world 20 years from now: what I’d be doing, where I’d live, what I’d own, even what I’d be wearing. The only thing that I could picture for sure was technology. I could see a phone attached to my hip that could do absolutely everything: Skype, talk, voice text, play movies, music, Internet, read books out loud, shop online…everything! This quote is so true, especially with my generation. I am in the Internet. I am e-mail, text, picture. Everything I do revolves around those things. When I’m bored, what do I do? Facebook, text, read online, talk on the phone, go to iTunes. When I need to talk to someone, what do I do? Text, call, Skype, e-mail. When I’m doing my homework am I doing something else too? Text, listen to music, check Facebook quick. It is me. Now I try and imagine myself without any of those things. For one, this class wouldn’t exist and I’d probably drive myself up a wall. And, I’ve realized the Internet isn’t just the computer. Now it is music, homework, communication, boredom, friendship, relationship, family, shopping, educating, listening. It has become a lifestyle!! Wow…
3. Sherry Turkle: “Some people claim that they cannot think without their computers….they need the keyboard to think and to write.”
My first thought is “What ever happened to the old paper and pen combination? Why do they need a keyboard?” I guess the answer to that is that people feel like they need a computer to survive. They need the keyboard, the feel of the keys, the mindset that they are on the computer, to know that it is important since they are typing on the keyboard. Or maybe it is because they have only used a keyboard to write for so long that a pen seems foreign to them and they think that they wouldn’t be able to get any work done. Also, maybe they can type just as fast as their brain wants to spew out thoughts, and writing freehand slows down the thought process. Mostly I think it has to do with the reliance on technology…it is there without a doubt. I know for certain that I never start a paper with a piece of paper, but rather I open up a Word document and start typing away…
Though I have never considered myself to be “brilliant”, I do think that being part of this DH class has given me a much larger understanding of the Digital Humanities and their affect on the world. Here are my (hopefully) brilliant insights:
I was very excited to read Richard Dawkins, because I find him to be not only incredibly intelligent and rational, but frank, honest and hilarious in his analysis of humans. I enjoyed his piece “Net Gain” and especially his acceptance of the merits of the tool, Wikipedia. This, to me, was an example of the amazing collaboration that the World Wide Web offers us. I, too “am repeatedly astounded by how good Wikipedia can be”. While of course there are the random facts added by the occasional good-for-nothing, for the most part the information on Wikipedia is useful, easy to access and easy to understand. And, as pointed out in class, incorrect information is quickly weeded out- another example of Wikipedia’s outstanding collaborative characteristics. Dawkins also states that he almost always corroborates the information he gathers from Wikipedia with other sources- this also shows the way that collaboration helps us with learning. Other sites help us to verify information and make our information gathering more efficient and factual. The most important aspect of the changing climate caused by the world’s digitization is the amazing potential for collaboration, and I feel that Dawkins’ example is a very pertinent and impressive one.
I am absolutely fascinated with the way that the onset of digital technology is changing our social interaction. Both Dr. Mason and the film Digital Nation discussed the way that social networking, virtual worlds, and online games have affected who we talk to and how we talk to them. In Digital Nation, we saw how people could live entirely differently lives on the site called Second Life or spend hours a day in South Korea playing Starcraft (don’t ask how I know that was the game that most of the people in those cafés were playing). For example, before the creation of computers, the only interaction we experienced with those who live in faraway places was traveling to said places, or them visiting our homelands. Now, you can talk (actually with your voice) with someone who lives across an ocean. My boyfriend is ecstatic about the release of the new Star Wars video game, mainly because he thinks it is amazing to be able to talk to someone living in China, who he has never met but can have “intellectual conversations” with. The internet has given us the incredible ability to meet people we never would have experienced otherwise, but I also personally see a downside to this: while some people can say what they want and be who they want online, in some cases, this can give them severe deficits in interpersonal interaction skills. I think, though, that we need to spend more time looking at the effect of the internet on our socialization before making assumptions and conclusions on its pros and cons.
My last observation of the effects of the digital era on our lives lies in the area of work. Specifically, there have been vast changes in the way we complete tasks. In Digital Nation, the idea of multitasking was explored. Students from a major university were shown using several electronic devices as they completed tasks, as well as using different applications within those devices (surfing different websites). I, like many college students, tend to do many things at one time, thinking that I am getting real work done. After watching the film, though, it is overwhelmingly apparent that we are not as efficient as we believe we are. The experiment looking into how efficient a confident multitasker truly is was eye opening. It turned out that he really wasn’t cranking out as much work as he thought he was. This made me realize how terribly ineffective my own work methods are because of the problem of distraction. While the internet has given us infinite potential, it has also curse us in some ways, and we need to work harder to reign in our usage and get real, quality work done.
Sorry, I copied my post from Word and the wording got messed up.
Argh! I meant the spacing…..
1. “The most important prerequisites for success lay not in higher-order talents such as critical thinking, which enthusiasts of technology often underscore, but in lower-order thinking skills, that is, the basic mechanics of spelling, punctuation, and arithmetic.” – Bauerlin “Screen Time”
Bauerlin definitely does not grasp the concept of future and change. The reason test scores are down and children seem to be doing worse is because the school system has not adapted to the changing world. In this new world, historical facts are not something necessary to our futures. The knowledge of how to do an advanced calculus problem is not a trait we need anymore. With the advancement of technology, the memorization associated with intelligence is outdated. Any one of us could look the fact up online or go to a website dedicated to doing math problems in under a minute. Bauerlin is holding on to old definitions of intelligence and not looking for new changes. He seems to dismiss the better spacial reasoning scores of IQ tests, yet these are the most important traits to have in the future world. We no longer need to be great spellers or memorize the table of elements. These traits no longer make an intelligent person. The person who is a good problem solver in real life, not in school or on tests, is the one who will better succeed. Ask most employers (besides perhaps a book editor) if they would rather have a highly evolved critical thinker who occasionally has spelling errors or someone who never misspells a word but is more of an average critical thinker and I think we know who they would choose. Bauerlin seems to think that not knowing nuances of history makes you dumb, yet this is something you need in school, not in the workforce (unless you work in that field) or in daily life. The average person will never encounter a situation where the memorization of a history fact will save their life or career. Bauerlin’s opinion is just him holding on to the past and not embracing the future.
1. Mark Bauerlein: “Children leave the dinner table, which is often accompanied by network news, reruns of Seinfeld, and other 6p.m. fare, and head off to their rooms to turn on their own shows or crank up iTunes while pouring over some homework” (p. 78).
Wow! We were warned in class that Mr. Bauerlein relies heavily on out-of-context statistics to prop up his arguments, true, but it quickly became apparent that his other crutch is constructed out of gross generalizations. In that paragraph, he goes on to list other distractors of 10-year-olds, including MySpace and Mortal Kombat. I’d like to think otherwise, but in this chapter from The Dumbest Generation, he comes off very strongly as a black & white thinker. What about the folks that deviate from these impersonal statistics. Is every American a Christian, every Iraqi a Muslim? Does every black man have incredible rhythm?
Hey, Digital Humanities Community! I am a white 20-year-old (with solid rhythm) who loves Seinfeld, eating dinner with his mother, playing Mortal Kombat with his older brothers, incessantly listening to music (from my laptop and phonograph), backpacking, communicating vocally, keeping up with friends who are in more exciting places via Facebook, and reading entire books! And I think it’s safe to say that I’m not some sort of anomaly or mutant, attending Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters (wishful thinking!). I’m a pretty average guy, at a good old fashioned state school in Pennsylvania. I hope the existence of myself and others like me doesn’t come as a shock; but if so, there’s your first point of illumination. So please, even if you think that the majority of the Dumbest Generation is, in fact, dumb, don’t sacrifice your credibility by merely skimming the surface of this topic: it’s just as varied and complex as the individuals within it.
2. Clay Shirky: The Internet could become “the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change” (last paragraph, “The Shock of Inclusion”).
Despite a valid fear of the internet becoming “Invisible High School,” full of “narcissism and social obsessions,” Shirky entertains hope of it becoming something more noble, something more akin to the spirit of Digital Humanities. So whose responsibility is it to promote this refined internet culture? Mr. Shirky seems to be doing his part, what with writing illuminating articles such as this one, but what about the rest of the DH Community? What is being done to promote Shirky’s (and surely your own) vision of what the Internet can become?
As a regular observer of various news sources, I had never heard the words digital and humanities used together prior to signing up for this course. Granted, this is a pretty sheltered town, where the First Day of Deer Season is a revered holiday and mediocre journalism dictates popular thought. Had anyone outside of Bloomsburg heard of DH prior to this class? I can’t answer that, but would the Internet as “the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change” become a reality sooner if Digital Humanists become more vocal about their work? It’s an exciting field, there’s no denying that.
Shirky mourns the idea that we won’t live to see the coming of this Learned Man and/or Woman’s Internet. In class, we’ve touched on a plethora of tools and websites helpful to learning/mind expansion (Van Gogh Letters and the like), psychology (text analysis as a means to enter the brain of an author), and social change (the British Parlicrooks crowdsourcing site). It seems to me that this new Internet Age is already dawning; unfortunately, nobody has the time for sunrises anymore.
3. Davidson & Goldberg: “…learning is happening online, all the time, and in numbers far outstripping actual registrants in actual schools” (p. 10, “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age”).
I don’t know that I can offer insight on this, brilliant as it already is. On the previous page: “Only the Catholic Church has been around longer and, like the Catholic Church, universities today bear a striking structural resemblance to what they were in medieval times.” What’s the deal with that? Canon Law 1084 denies certain disabled people the right to marriage and centralized learning is inconsistent and resistant to our internet culture. Everything is wrong with that. A man or woman’s impotency shouldn’t exclude them from marriage and a book shouldn’t be viewed as the only respectable source of knowledge. That’s laughable, really. Institutions of learning ought to be teaching students how to discern between a quality and unreliable source and encouraging them to use these as healthy supplements to a book (or vice versa).
I am by no means an expert, but change needs to come quickly. Give us diversified learning! Throw away standardized tests! Write truthful history books! I would normally toss in something cynical here about how none of that is going to happen in the foreseeable future, but I’m feeling hopeful today.
Continued:
2. As I say this, I admit that I am also concerned by the changes. As portrayed in “Digital Nation,” people are becoming increasingly dependent on their devices and the web. I’m taken to the E.M. Forster piece “The Machine Stops,” a sci-fi future where people live in their own cells and only interact with each other via the “machine.” The rate at which we are using our technology makes me worry that one day we will meet a fate such as the one Forster foresaw. Will we merely video-chat about the earth, yet never go out and see it ourselves? Will our only idea of the sky be the pictures we see on the internet? While I doubt that I will live to see this day, it is still a daunting future to think about. I hope that this is not what happens.
3. Back to my first point, I’d like to touch upon educating this new generation. Both the film “Digital Nation” and the piece “The Classroom and the World Wide Web” discuss educating the digital nation. I really loved the example of the classroom featured in Digital nation where the students hosted a blog like ours about “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It seemed like a really great way to capture the attention of the students in a way that they would understand. I believe that higher learning institutes and secondary education need to embrace the change of life style that has occurred and begin educating for the real world. We need to focus on real world skills such as problem solving, reasoning, and leadership. We need to step away from memorization.
Haha accidentally closed the browser and lost it all, so here goes round two.
1. The Dumbest Generation, Screen Time:
On page 86 the author, Mark Bauerlein, quote Richard Sweeney. He says, “Millennials ‘want to learn’, ‘but they want to learn only what they have to learn, and they want to learn it in a different style that is best for them.’ Bauerlein then questions if kids know what is the best way for them to learn. This leads me to respond with a question, who better to understand the best way to learn in a digital age than those who have grow up in it, and those who best understand the use of technology, aka the Millennials. That is even to debate whether there is a “best way to learn”. Whereas the idea of what we need to learn may still belong to those not growing up in the digital age, it is also bound to change.
2. Also from The Dumbest Age
The Author on page 89 quotes a study that showed that those with higher grades watch just as much television as those with lower grades, but have a dramatically increased amount of time put into reading. Bauerlein looks at this (without stating it) as a causation. While there is a very strong correlation between the numbers, there is not enough empirical evident to suggest a cause. There may be in fact a reverse correlation, whereas those in with higher grades do not have higher grades because they read, but read because they have higher grades. It is possible that those with higher grades find it easier to read and thus enjoy it more or that they are smarter and thus recognize the importance of reading or even understand the material more easily. It is even possible to explain this correlation with an outside factor. It is possible that those with better grades have parents who are more involved in their studies and press them to read more. This is an example of the importance of taking care to make sure any kind of DH work needs to be backed with empirical evidence. If we are to taken seriously, we need to be able to have scientific reasoning behind most of what DH does. Otherwise, we run the line of just Philosophical Musings.
3. Mainly from the Clay Shirky article:
The final paragraph makes the analogy of the internet’s possibility of being like an “invisible high school” or “invisible college”. With the high school being the use of the internet for lesser extends and the college being it used to increase knowledge. I feel that this a little bit of an exaggeration. The internet is just like the computer, the printing press, or the pencil. It is a tool, with only the capabilities of those who use it. The internet is also not a limited space where only specific things can fit. There is plenty of room for both places of thought. It is not limited to one train of thought. Rather than thinking of the of the internet as a building that can only house a high school, or a college, think of it as a giant open valley, with room enough for a high school, college, middle school, and elementary school and you may cross from one to the other simply by walking down the road. Public thought is wonderful not because it is guaranteed to bring us the most brilliant of ideas, it is wonderful because it gives us the thoughts of all, both the “proletariat, scholars and bourgeoisie”.
3.
It’s sad that, at 18 years old, I already feel old. Even as a digital native it seems as if things are already slipping out of my grasp, moving too quickly for even someone as young and agile as me to grasp forever. However, there are three points I noticed in our course work that helped quell my fears about growing old in a society where staying fresh means survival.
1. The Korean children in the “Digital Nation” documentary were really interesting in the sense that they are what our children will probably be. Their entire schools are devoted to technology and internet usage. At three years old, they are using word processing programs and singing songs about “netiquette.” Rushkoff even says, “At Korean elementary schools, kids are taught to go on line around the same time they’re taught to read.” However, this country does not have much more problems with technology than we do, even though their products are much more advanced and children are beginning to use it earlier. This gives me hope for wherever our society takes the digital technology. Sure, there may be internet addictions in Korea, but there are the same kinds in America. This portion of the video really gave me hope for the future of our generation, because the children who are living our futures are relatively fine.
2. Despite Bauerlein’s attempts to make me see differently, his description of the sleek, shiny Apple store actually entices instead of scares me. You see, to me, his descriptions sound ordinary. He takes care to point out that a clerk has “three inch spikes in a mohawk from head to nape.” Why? Who cares? Off the top of my head, I know six different people with mohawks who are normal, functioning members of society. All Bauerlein is doing is making himself sound dated, causing me to realize that I am not old ahead of my time. Maybe this happens every generation. When the television was first released, I am sure the generations who had grown up without the machines had contemplated writing books entitled “The Dumbest Generation” about all these new “diversions.” What I am trying to say is that I am not getting old ahead of my time; in fact, I am aging just as every generation does. It is something we all need to accept in life. New technology will come along and overshadow the old every few years. Our generation is not abnormal. We simply need to learn to accept it.
3. “What I would like more than anything else is for young people to prove every single harsh judgment in that book flat wrong, right? We want them to grow up and to blow us away with their literacies, their reading and writing skills, their knowledge about- about history and art, and their civic activity. But we just don’t see it.”
Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, Bauerlein. But you know what? We will grow up with literacy and skill even with technology, maybe despite it. Even if I do grow old and my grand children roll their eyes behind my backs because I don’t know how to operate the brain chip properly, I will still have literacy. I will have knowledge, and so will my descendants. That is the main part that quells my nerves about becoming a digital immigrant. Technology changes, we change, but the information does not.
1. Dawkins states “Perhaps the main downside of the Internet is that surfing can be addictive and a prodigious timewaster, encouraging a habit of butterflying from topic to topic, rather than attending to one thing at a time.” This is an important point for the Digital Humanities community. The digital natives today tend to multitask. They do not tend to sit down and do a large project, they do it in bits and pieces. They switch between work and pleasure. This is important for digital humanists to understand because it is important to understand how the digital natives operate. It is not like it used to be where you come home and do your homework and then play. Now you do your homework while you are playing. They play a level of a game and then do a problem of homework and then switch back. Digital Humanists should take this into consideration when building their sites and doing their research on these digital natives. The sites should allow for some fluttering. It should allow the users to save what they have done and let them come back. Let them flutter. As far as research goes, the digital natives learn and do things differently today than it was once done. This do not necessarily mean they are stupid or lazy. If anything I would say they are more advanced than the digital immigrants. I technically fall in the category of a digital native, but compared to my sisters I feel like a digital immigrant. I am still in the age where I need silence to do my work and I sit down and do it all at once. If I have interruptions I loose my train of thought. My sisters however, can listen to music, check a game online, have the tv on and do their homework all in the same 5 minute time span. And the kicker is that they are doing better in school than I did and my younger brothers did. If anything I would say that the fluttering that the internet allows is a good thing and digital humanists should take this into consideration.
2. Shirky states “We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won’t matter much, but the norms we set will.” This is such an interesting and true concept. Digital humanists need to be aware that we are currently setting the standards of how this medium is to be used. This is very important for dh considering the fact that it is a new field. What you are doing now in this field will set the precedent of all other digital humanities. What you do now will set the norms and expectations of how others will be digital humanists. We are currently forming a new field and it is important that we get it right. We are making the future of digital humanities and we need to be sure to do it correctly. It is also important to apply this quote to the internet. This is also a forming field. The norms that digital natives are setting now are the norms for how the internet will be used in the future. That is a lot of responsibility. If you think about it, what we are doing now and the norms we set now will be the norms of our children’s children and down the line. This is so extraordinary and all digital humanists need to consider this when they are working in this field.
3. A final note that is crucial to the field of Digital humanities is participatory learning that was brought up in the futures of learning piece. This is essential to this field. Participatory learning is like collaboration, which is a major part of DH. Due to all of the technology being introduced, schools need to chance their ways. They need to change from individualism to collaboration. When schools make this switch, in my mind they will become like a dh community. This will be on a smaller scale of course but they will be collaborating with one another to form new questions, learn new things and help each other improve. This is exactly what dh is right now. I believe that when schools make this switch to participatory learning the DH community will explode with new users. Dh will become a staple subject because it will be the new basis of schools and learning. This is important for digital humanists to realize because this is the future. They need to understand that the future digital humanists may be as young as 2nd grade. I believe that when schools change to participatory learning the field of digital humanities will grow exponentially larger and the dh community needs to prepare for this switch.
1. In the overview section of The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, the authors claim, “we argue that the single most important characteristic of the Internet is its capacity to allow for a worldwide community and its endlessly myriad subsets to exchange ideas, to learn from one another in a way not previously available. We contend that the future of learning institutions demands a deep, epistemological appreciation of the profundity of what the Internet offers humanity as a model of a learning institution.” I think this is a proper overview of not only their project, but Digital Humanities as well. The authors go on to discuss how different forms of collaboration transform learning institutions. Like I have said before, I think collaboration is one of the most important parts of Digital Humanities. As we begin to write the proposal for our project, collaboration is something that we think about constantly. Digital humanities is about using the Internet to “exchange ideas”, and to “learn from one another in a way not previously available.” I think technology has definitely provided us with tools to help join us together to create, share, exchange, and discuss ideas that benefit the world. Because collaboration is such an important part of Digital Humanities, technology is equally as important, also, since it provides us with collaboration techniques. I think collaboration affects learning in a positive way because it helps people not only learn how to work well with others, but it helps people gain ideas and insights they may not have had before.
2. Dr. Mason made many great points during her lecture. She mentioned the idea that there is an abundance of ‘stay-at-home dads’ nowadays. I know when I was a child, almost every mother stayed home, and didn’t work. All of the dads went to work. But because of the evolving digital world, roles have shifted. Men may stay at home and take care of the kids, while the women go to work. Dr. Mason also mentioned that many fathers may stay at home, but work from home. I think this is due to a rise in technology. The increase in technological skills has allowed jobs to be performed at any location, as long as there is a computer. I think this is why many fathers work from home. But I think part of the reason why men have begun staying at home, is due to collaboration, as well. Men and women no longer place each other into roles as they did before. A husband and wife are now able to collaborate and find the best possible way of life for their family. If this means the wife goes to work, while the husband stays home, it doesn’t matter. I think this is very interesting to think about. Hopefully this means people are beginning to see the opportunities there are for everyone, and they are collaborating to make life better.
3. In Screen Time, the article lists numerous forms of technology that kids do at one time. Apparently the kids “act out as the natural thing to do, passing days and nights rapping comments into a blog, role-playing in a chat room, surfing paparazzi photos, logging onto Facebook, running Madden NFL, checking for voice messages, and uploading pictures of themselves while watching TV shows at the same rate they did before other diversions appeared”. These actions perplex elders, since they cannot use technology at such a frequent pace as the younger people. The article goes even further to say these kids are savvy, full of multitasking skills, and interactive. I think technology does allow for interactivity and savvy technological skills, but I am not sure the amount of multi-tasking put into technology is a good thing. Digital humanities is about interactivity as well. True digital humanities websites present research tools, and allow every day people to interact, and immerse themselves in material that normally experts would handle. This is crowdsourcing, and I think it is very important. But I’m just not sure if juggling multiple technological devices provides the same degree of multi-tasking as this article says it does. I am somewhat weary towards this idea, because I don’t like the idea of books being forgotten because of technological devices.
1. In Mark Bauerlein’s, “The Dumbest Generation” (pg.82) he includes a statistic from Pew Research’s 2006 survey on cell phone which found that 32 percent of 19-29 year olds are willing to admit that “they couldn’t live without their cell.” This was very interesting to me because when I initially read this I thought how could people not live without their cell phones? We did it before why could we not do it now? As I pondered over this more and continued to read the article I realized that in this day and age it would be difficult for people to live without cell phones. I’m not saying that it couldn’t be done but we would have to change multiple aspects of our lives. I thought about my life on campus and the amount of times I use my cell phones. Most of the time it’s a simple text message to see if a friend wants to meet up later to study or grab a bite to eat, but if I did not have my cell phone I would not be able to stay in contact with as many people as I do now. Necessity…probably not. Now let’s consider a businessman working at a large corporation. Could you imagine them not having their cell phones? Our world would not be able to move nearly as fast nor support the large consumer conglomerate that we have now if it weren’t for the internet and cell phones. There is no way that we could get in contact with people at the rate we do now. So is it unreasonable that 18-29 year olds can’t live without their cell phones? In this day and age I would think that (depending on the job of the person) this is not an unreasonable claim. The real question is, are we too dependent on our cell phones and technology? I would say that we probably are too dependent on our technology. The advancement in digital technology has grown so fast we cannot see the consequences of what would happen if we suddenly lost the ability to use our cell phones, computers, televisions, etc.
2. The documentary “Digital Nation” also made a very good point. While exploring the campus of MIT and Stanford a study was done to see how well students multitask. Based on the video, we could see that students were tested in both situations and then provided some sort of test that analyzed the amount and quality of information that they took in. The results showed that students who have multitasked over the course of their lives and felt that they were very productive and capable multitaskers really were much better learners when focused on one task at a time. I think this was a big discovery because most of us probably think we multitask well when in reality we may not be that good. From personal experience I know that if I am forced to focus on one task at a time I am more productive and take in more information. When I was taking some of my practice mcats I would be multitasking by listening to music, have the TV on, or I would take the exam while I was waiting in the lab for reactions to run. Under those circumstances my score were much lower. When testing day came around and I was forced to sit in a completely silent room with the MCAT as my only task my score increased significantly. My own belief for the reason why our generation multitasks is because we get bored doing one thing at a time. Reading “The Dumbest Generation was a daunting task for me. Reading this excerpt without music was difficult because the points seemed repetitive and I was bombarded with statistics. I didn’t want all the extra stuff surrounding the main point. In my experience turning on music or the TV allows me to do work for longer periods of time. I’m sure the quality of my work is not the same but for some activities I would get frustrated very quickly and switch to a different task anyways.
3. In Clay Shirky’s article “The Shock of Inclusion” he references the Invisible College and the Alchemists to make his point that we have a chance today to use digital technology to our benefit and spread valuable information that can lead to a greater knowledge for all. Shirky states “The problem with the alchemists had wasn’t that they failed to turn lead into gold; the problem was that they failed uninformatively.” The internet allows us to share more information than ever possible. If collaboration is what drove the revolution for new discoveries in Chemistry then we should have the ability to solve virtually any problem we face.
From Screen Time: teenagers tend to “head off to their rooms to turn on their own shows or crank up iTunes while poring over some homework. Bored with that, they can check a Myspace forum of play Mortal Kombat.”
When so many forms of media are demanding your attention and there is so much to be distracted by and kids take on the challenge or trying to do it all at once. Teenagers are have a constant “awareness of numerous and dissimilar inputs.” Given the great amount of media, teenagers switch from device to device so quickly in order to keep in tune to everything. They are beginning to adopt habits similar to people with ADD because they cannot sit and do just one thing for a long time. As a whole, we as the younger generation are regressing to the attention spans of children. Because we are so used to being able to simply turn on a device, change the channel, or pull up another tab on internet explorer so quickly that we want that speed in other aspects of life too.
In the future, kids will be frustrated without the instant gratification they are used to from innovative media and fast speed internet. Teenagers like to be connected to the virtual world at all times, by having internet and music integrated into their iPhones. Later, the fact that younger people will not to be able to concentrate on one thing for long may eventually lead to long-term memory loss. This “media generation” that is emerging may have faster brain function but it does not mean that they get more done, they are distracted and doing too many things at once to truly excel. One cannot possibly remember what he is reading when six different media inputs are being used, not in the long run. Constant switching to different tasks can be a hindrance to learning because it makes it tougher to comprehend, learn, and store information in your brain. If we are switching away from the information constantly, the brain is being overloaded with a lot of unrelated text and data. All the Facebook updating and random internet searches are interrupting our brain from learning and makes it harder to focus on the information later, causing easy forgetfulness after reading.
Our guest speaker said that the “Oldest generations have no forced exposure to join in the new media.” I believe this quote is true only to an extent. If the elderly generation wants to keep up with our fast paced society, current events, politics, music or literature, they have to alter their lifestyle. They must accept at least a minimal amount of the technology to be able to keep up with the fast growing virtual world we live in. In addition, some young members of families are too lazy or stubborn to write a letter or any old school way of conversation because they are so caught up in the “media revolution.” In order to keep in touch with family and friends, older people may have to resort to texting or Skype.
In the Frontline video, they talked about how people feel anxiety about gun fighting in both real and the virtual world. They began to describe how kids playing a shooting game cannot distinguish between if they are virtual fighting or in a real war. The line is blurred because of how alive and interactive the games have become. A scientist, who works to transform individuals’ appearances into video game characters, says that “if it looks real, it feels real, then the brain says it’s real.” This statement is very dangerous because soldiers learn, practice, and sometimes fight virtually. By learning this way, when in an actual battle they may not consider the real circumstances and not take it as a life and death situation. The soldiers will be so accustomed virtual fighting that they may always consider themselves “safe” because their physical bodies are safe somewhere in a computer chair. This misconception will lead them to making risky and often dangerous decisions because they have a false sense of security.
Kids get hooked on video games in the same way, they are too realistic. Kids use it as an escape, a get-a-way from their usual boring life. For just a little while they get to act as the hero, killing off zombies or fighting in a war. I think that all this virtual fighting just boosts kids’ self esteem for the moment, but may have some psychological side effects when they truly think of themselves as living in the game. All in all, virtual violence can be instructive in the case of training for battle, and entertaining for kids, but it can also be dangerous to the users’ awareness and understanding of real life.
1. Bauerlein
Some of his statistics are staggering. Things like “They averaged fully one hour and 58 minutes per day on screen media … that’s three times the amount they devoted to reading or being read to (39 minutes per day.) Children pass as many moments in front of a screen as they do playing outside (two hours and one minute.)” What does Mr. Bauerlein think these kids would be doing otherwise? These kids are six months to six years old – what could they possibly be doing for those two hours instead of using a computer / TV / phone? Yes, some of these kids are probably avoiding learning the alphabet or numbers, but they’d just as easily find something else to do that isn’t learning. Isn’t it also possible that they are using the computer to learn their letters? My cousin’s daughter has several educational computer games that she plays almost every day and they are her exclusive use of computers, though that will soon change when she begins using them at school for classes like Creative Computer Usage in middle school and Graphic Design in high school.
2. Davidson & Goldberg
Davidson and Goldberg talk in the beginning of a possible shift in the teaching paradigm. Instead of being somewhere on time physically, we can learn in a different way. Wikipedia has taught me quite a bit. For what reason, other than tradition and “it’s worked so far” do we keep this strategy? I think Sara’s recent comment about her school eliminating snow days by skyping class. Why can’t this happen all the time? There’s always “distance learning,” but I’ve always understood it to be considered a negative thing. A degree earned through distance learning is usually seen as lesser than a traditional degree. Why can’t they be the same?