1ST Draft Big Paper: The digital world (ideas that will be included in the final draft) VERY UNORGANIZED!

When I think about the term "digital" many thoughts come to mine, I think; computers (facebook, myspace and AIM), cell phones, television and just about everything we come across in our everyday lives. To be honest I never questioned how the digital media effected my life, I never thought much of it and just accepted it for what it was. Every since I was little I always had some sort of new "gadget" that was the new and hot thing, 10 years ago it was the huge and heavy black and white game boys or the classic CD player. Today i can safely say we have come a long way! Just 24 hour later of being introduced to the topic in class, i was able to make a embarrassing yet very relevant connection to how the overwhelming influence of "everything digital" had directly effected my life. In Emily Birdens room Binta and I discovered it was not as easy to set a clock as we expected. I was the first to take it off the wall before i realized i did not actually know what i was doing. It took about 7 trys, 15 minutes, Ms. Cole and Emily trying to explain to us how to operate this thing, and countless laughs and looks of astonishment to set the clock to exactly 2:57. I don't remember being taught how to tell time in first grade and the only watch i ever owned was a Baby-G which was digital as well. This really made me pause and think! How is the digital world effecting our education, and how bad is it gonna get? Seems like technology is being more and more advanced every second of everyday. Most of us feel lost and just panic if they forget the cell at home or god-forbid the cable box is out! We freak because we have not been trained to adapt any differently. we wonder how people were able to survive with out any of those crucial items, but the truth is we did it and not even that many years ago (computers were just becoming a hot item on the market in the 90's, you used to be able to pick from a variety of bubble-gum colored I Macs that weighed about 50 pounds.)

On a personal note cell phones have become an obsession of mime. It goes with me EVERYWHERE, im not proud of it but i will admitt we have been through lots of hards times together and i try and take as good care of it as possible. Just a month ago it took a nasty fall in the toliet bowl (clean water... well as clean as it can be considering everything) and got stuck in the bottom for what felt like 20 minutes. My first instinct was to reach down and pull it out, so i did, after my many failed attempts it was my mom turn next. Luckily she got it out but it seemed to be completly ruined. I panicked and did everything to save it, i tried to get all the water out of the screens sticking it in a bowl of dry rice. Nothing was working and i convinved my mom after hours of harassing her that i needed a phone. 2:00 the same day i was in line paying for the same phone i already had as soon as the new phone was activated an incomnig flow of 19 new txt messages popped up in my outbox and my life seemed back to normal.

As much time as i am on the phone most of it is having multiple conversations over txt messaging or AIM conversations, not even actually being surved for its main purpose. My parents have discovered that if they ever want to get in contact with me and i am not answering my phone know to send me a txt and i respond almost everytime 5 mintues later. They don't even bother to leave voicemails cause i never check it. People have converations through screens and keyboreds cause they are places that being on the phone is not accebtable (school and office enviornments), Students can normally pull off txting through a teachers lecture of lesson but would not beable to pull off talking in front of them.

I read the excerpt written by Steven Johnson about how he feels reading is better for you then video games, but he did not completely put video games to shame. For me this brought up the idea, are reading and playing video games (screens) any different? They both instill a sense of disembodiment. When you read a book that you enjoy, your eyes become attached to the page and you get involved in the story being told, you lose your sense of self and your sense of surroundings. When we play video games we become part of the game, we are literally "in control" which makes it seem even more like real. I have never been any good at them but whenever i watch someone else play, the game seems to toy with their emotions, if they are playing a game where zombies are jumping out or they are a solider fighting in WWI they flinch or shrike, games that are more calm and relaxing just make the player look possessed. People always assume that one person spending 4 straight hours reading is more intelligent than the one who sits a just play video games.

Johnson made it clear that he did not think it was fair for people to judge people who play them or generalize the games them self. He stated that video games actually involve thinking (more than some might think). One of the last questions he asked was why are video games fun? The consumer spends a ridiculous amount of money on not only the game system itself but the games which sell on average for at least 60 bucks (this is where the companies make all their money!) To try and solve complicated puzzles that most of the time we look at cheat sheets and manuals to get to the very end of the game.


When i first started reading the book i was a little lost about what was really going on, i am not a very strong reader in fact it is one of my weaknesses so it helped to have many class discussions about it. One connection i made quite fast was how his friend had a overbearing attitude that reminded me of some of the people i go to school with. It is natural for all of us to find a group and we tend to stick together, at this age we all want to fit in and do what we think will qualify us to be accepted. we go to parties, experiment with drinking and drugs, most of us want to be dressed in the latest fashions and will drop ridiculous amounts of money to do so. We are"tend" followers... just to "fit in". From Titus especially i got the sense that his look on the ordinary life was that it was uneventful and pretty much all the same, he was looking for new things to do with his time. In our generation teenagers think the same thing, we are active creatures and having a limited amount of things to do gets boring, but i think for us it is more doing something that breaks the rules that excites us rather than finding a new museum or movie to go to.

Someone is always gonna copy someone else. No matter how different you are trying to be, your fitting someone else's stereotype, we are all followers. That idea was represented a few times in feed, one that came to mind was when Quendy wanted to fit in so badly that she got lesions all over her body because they were cool. Essentially they were open sores eatting away at her flesh. I can make two connections to that, our version of lesions are marking our bodies with tattoos that are almost impossible to remove or getting obscene body percings in places that our bodies should not have holes in. But i also think there is a deeper meaning that Anderson was trying to express that is not as obvious as other connections made, we are living in a world that is becoming less and less natural everyday. A lot of what we used to do by hand can be done with machines and technology. The natural way of life in a sense is being sucked out of us, we are losing the ability to be able to distinguish between our imagination and reality, similar to the lesions on their bodies eating away at there sucking the life out of them.

There are also a few ideas in the book that are not necessary possible yet in our generation but have been in the talks. The feed was able to design people personalities, programming them to like and dislike certain things. I have seem movies and watched shows on TV about how couples will eventually be able to monitor the gender of their baby and ultimately design the genes of their children. Not only does this relate to our digital unit but also to the unit which we covered last year about the American way of birth, on top of how unnatural most American births are (using unnecessary medicines that can negatively effect the babies) eventually we will be able to in a way "build-a-baby".

We no longer have to depend on out memory for much anymore, most everything is done on a computer or over the internet. we even have website to record our thoughts now (blogger.com) this is all information that we will have access to in the future.