Reed Chapter 4-7

For my blog post I would like to talk mainly about chapter 4 in Reed's Digitized Lives which is titled "Is Everybody Equal Online?" In this chapter Reed visits the issue of whether we are treated equally in the online world and refers mostly to race and gender. He comes to the conclusion that we are not treated equally online or anywhere because there will always be discrimination and cyber bullying. So far we do not see these problems ending any time soon especially within the online community. The reason is, there is really no way to stop everyone in the world from making these decisions to contribute to cyber bullying. Also, there is a lot of stereotyping that apply online as well as in real life because people still post discriminatory jokes such as Blonde jokes or jokes about African American women's attitude or the way they dance. This also ties with sexism such as women being used as sex symbols in a lot of online games, memes, and comics, etc. These are some of the reasons that Reed explains why we are not treated equally on the Internet.

 Race is still a very important issue that is not getting any better, for example Reed even mentions in this chapter of the book that the online world is primarily white-created simply by default. Even though this is unintentional it is a serious issue and in my opinion the Internet needs to be more welcoming to other races and cultures. I think this can be done by expanding the variety of languages that can be possible to input on a computer. The fact that the keyboard for all computers are in English shows that white people or anyone who can speak the English language are more privileged and have more access than those who cannot speak English. I think this is a large contribution to lots of people not having Internet access, because they do not know the English language.  

Reed, Chapters 1-3

This book is very much related to all of the other books we have read for this class, and I like this one the best. Reed makes some very good discussions in this book about how the new technologies and digital communications have changed the way people live their everyday lives. Sometimes we even ask ourselves and I am guilty of this, 'What would we do without the Internet?' because people who do have access to the Internet are using the Internet almost everyday. We use the Internet for a lot of important things such as research, communication, school work, business work, etc. and more and more jobs and classrooms are very reliant on Internet access or professional computer programs. Even the registers in grocery stores are touch screen computers these days. In my opinion we might be a little too reliant on computers because it has made us very dependent and also lose some human-to-human communication skills. Our Digitized Lives are a very big part of our living experience. Those who do not have access to the Internet however, are not getting access to the important things that make our lives easier such as easier access to information, research, communication, jobs, etc. The Internet has been a big help in the way we learn and communicate because we can research on the web anything that we want to know and we will find the answer. Also communication has gotten much easier and is very affordable especially for long distance because you can just make a free email or social network account and you can talk to whoever you want. These things have made our lives a lot easier but I think maybe it has made our lives too easy. I think these new technologies are also shortcuts that we have provided for ourselves for achieving things in life.
Reed makes and interesting point that we humans have created these awesome advanced technologies for ourselves which a lot of people forget. But he also says that a technology is a tool and they are only as advanced and effective as the user makes them. I agree with this and thought it was very interesting to think about it this way. "We are dealing with two ongoing processes, the human development of digitizing technologies, and the human use of those technologies. They are not the same thing because humans do unexpected things with the tools we create." This quote makes me realize how creative we are as humans and that we can create anything because we have very strong imaginations and ideas to help.

Grown Up Digital by Tapscott part 3

Part three of Tapscott’s book, Grown Up Digital was all about our generation today and how messed up it is and to be honest, it was sad. He said the net generation is inheriting a mess which I believe is very true, it is hard to keep up with all the new technologies, things happening with the government  are getting more intense and violent, and people are falling way behind. Not only are people falling behind because only a little more than half the population has internet access, but more and more people are going hungry/thirsty and do not even have more than a dollar in their pocket per day.  Everything that Tapscott talks about in this part of the book relates a lot to the position in which our current government is right now. The way our money is being spent is not the way it should be, and nuclear weapons are pretty much all around the world and could easily get into the hands of a terrorist. On a better note there was a quote that I read by the Comedian, Jon Stewart who was doing a stand up for graduate students. It is a fairly long quote but it is very true and puts some humor into our situation. He says “Let’s talk about the real world for a moment. I guess this is as good a time as any. I don’t really know how to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it. Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry. I don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately, but it just kinda got away from us. Somewhere between the gold rush of easy Internet profits and an arrogant sense of endless empire, we heard kind of a pinging noise, and uh, then the damn thing just died on us. So I apologize.”

I also believe that this new generation is making our education a little more challenging and especially harder for college graduates to find the right career for them when they are out of school. The education system has gotten so much more online-based where students need to have access to computers or their own laptop in order to turn in school work or even take quizzes for their classes. Even though things are more complicated, our generation is adapting to the new technologies very quickly, in fact the previous generation barley can keep up with the amount of knowledge our generation has for this technology. 

Grown Up Digital by Tapscott Part 2

Part two began to introduce the problem of both high school and college dropouts and that the reason might be because of the old fashioned ways of teaching in the new digital world. Tapscott says "Instead of focusing on the teacher, the education system should focus on the student." I think he is making very good points about an issue that I rarely hear/read about which is that teachers also need to interact and work with students instead of just lecturing them.
We need to be learning about more modern day technologies in school, and school systems need to do a better job of keeping up with today's new technologies and business strategies/tools. Instead of teaching us things that will never be useful by the time we graduate college and start searching for a career. As Tapscott says "We are now faced with the fast-paced world of the information age, where, as jobs change, you can't take the time to send workers back to school for retraining. We have entered the era of lifelong learning." I definitely agree with what this author is saying and I think college students today have a lot higher expectations than college students did in the 80s and 90s because of the fast-paced world we live in now that is hard to keep up with. The ability to learn new things is the most important it has ever been so that students can be ready for their careers they will pursue in the future. "Students need to expand their knowledge beyond the doors of their local community to become responsible and contributing global citizens in the increasingly complex world economy."

A Better Pencil-Baron Part 2

This book talked a lot about how writing has evolved and ways in which people communicate. I think it is crazy how much things have changed from writing on clay tablets, to paper and pencil/ink, to typewriters, to modern day computers and technology. I would like to compare and contrast this book to the Orality and Literacy book that we read in the beginning because that book talked a lot more about oral language and communication but A Better Pencil was all about different forms of written communication. I learned in Orality and Literature that language was substantially more oral than written which I believe was definitely the case during the time of the clay forms of writing. People were a lot more use to communicating orally through hierarchies in communities so they came up with clay to write on only when it was extremely necessary. These people did not have unlimited amounts of paper or even no paper at all to write on so clay or drawing on walls was their best option. I think this is very interesting because in our world today that would make things so complicated especially for communication within states and countries. How would a state law get passed around on a slab of clay for everyone to be informed about? This is why I believe so many things with both oral and written language have evolved for the better because we now have really great communication compared to what they had long ago. 

A Better Pencil - Chapter 1, 3, 5

This was an interesting read in my opinion and my favorite part was chapter 5. This chapter is titled Writing on Clay and it is about different writing technologies including the early days when they used clay tablets and stylists, writing with paper and ink, typewriters, and now modern day computers that have advanced word processors such as Microsoft Word. I thought it was really interesting because I had never really thought about people actually using clay to write on and keep documents on. They used clay tablets, even the size of credit cards at first, for keeping records of inventory and sales.  Then people finally started keeping laws, contracts, and other legal texts on larger tablets of clay about the size of the paper we use today. Writing technologies have evolved immensely since writing on clay, there were a lot of technical difficulties with the clay method such as it did not come ready to use and you had to create a paper shaped tablet of clay and let it harden a little bit each time you needed to produce a written work. While with the paper we have today there is pretty much unlimited supply of it and it is ready to write on which makes the paper and pen/pencil method a lot faster and more efficient. Also carving letters into clay takes a lot more time because it is harder to make legible and there are shards of clay that rise and have to be removed without smudging the content that has been written. One benefit though that I thought was interesting about clay is that they could reuse the clay tablets all the time. When people did not need a certain document anymore they would just get the clay tablet wet a little bit and smooth out the surface so they could rewrite more important things and reuse it. I think this was a way more environmental friendly writing technology because we throw out so much paper every day and it is a waste.

One benefit of using ink and paper though is you can write endless amounts on the front and back of multiple pieces of paper and just staple the pages together, with clay you only had one or two sides of the tablet to write on and that’s all you get. The clay tablets did not allow a person to write a lot of information because there was such limited space. I do believe that the most modern form of writing is the best and most efficient way especially after reading these chapters. One reason I believe this is that typing on a keyboard is very fast after learning how to in school and it is the most legible and professional way of creating a document/any piece of work. Without this modern writing technology we would not have legible documented laws in place and clay tablets especially would not be a good long term record-keeping method.

Response to Second Half of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

When I finished the last bit of this story I realized this was a pretty good story and that I could probably read it again in the future. I think Achebe is a good author and I would like to research other stories that he has written and maybe read those as well. I also got to read essays and author’s responses to this book called Things Fall Apart because I purchased the critical edition of the book. There were lots of positive responses to Achebe’s book but there were also negative responses. One section that I read after I was through reading the story was an essay called Problems of Gender and History in the Teaching of Things Fall Apart. This was about student responses to the book who have read it for class and lots of students told their teachers that this book has a lot of sexism and they think it should be taken out of the curriculum. I understand why the students find Okonkwo the main character sexist but they should think more about the time period that this story is supposed to take place in. At that time there were specific gender roles and things that females simply did not participate in. Times have definitely changed and I think all that matters is that it is different now for the better.

Also there was another essay I read that I would like to respond to, it relates a lot to the last one. This one was called Character and Society in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and it talked most about the main character, Okonkwo as well. First of all this essay points out that the author did a great job of accomplishing complex artistry in this story which I do agree with. Second, it points out that there are definitely divided opinions about the main character such as whether he was a product of the values and norms of his society or was not a product of his society. This essay also says something that is related to the gender and history essay; it says “Where his society is noted for its discrete blending of the masculine and feminine principles Okonkwo is openly contemptuous of all things feminine.” I think this is interesting because Okonkwo did have three wives and I do not remember him being that sexist but maybe I just do not remember those parts of the story. I think it was a good story and even though these issues could become a bigger problem and criticism of the book in the future, I think it is a common issue and sometimes it is what makes these stories interesting. For example, how different their society was from ours today was interesting to me and the sexism is one of the differences.