While online for an hour of my time, I did the following:

-Spoke on the phone with my best friend

-Listened to music on YouTube

-Went through my newsfeed on Facebook and Instagram

-Looked for an apartment

The way we do things has definitely changed in our digital age. All the activities I did within that hour would have been done differently in another era.

Before phones were created you would have to send someone a handwritten letter to communicate with them, which would take days, even weeks, depending on how far away that person is. It is amazing that with just a phone, we are able to dial someone’s number and contact them, or better yet: even see them through video chat. With social media and technologies like cell phones, computers, etc, proximity is not an obstacle for most of us anymore.

There have been many inventions before listening to music online, like the record player, CD player, etc. Listening to music online though is the most convenient. You can listen to anything you desire, you just have to type in the name of the song and artist–incredible.

I go through my newsfeed on Facebook and Instagram like if it’s the morning paper. I read, skim, skip, and so forth.  This activity definitely only occurs during a digital era. Before digital times, there was no way of getting to know someone or know what is going on with them without communicating with them or someone else, now you don’t have to. With Facebook and Instagram we can see the posts of friends and strangers with just a click. Social media brings people together.

I have been apartment hunting, and during that hour I did so online. Online is the best way now to find an apartment because you can see photos, know the details about the place, and know the area it is located as well. Before, you would just see signs around or look at the housing section of the newspaper, which is less productive because there are minimal details and no photos.

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Below, I have added a YouTube video. This magnificent video talks about many different things, but at some points, it does focus on the effect technology has had on human kind. It gets me thinking about all the things that technology has changed, which leads to the question of whether the changes are positive or negative

Have we become disconnected? Has technology along with media changed what we see as important? These questions can sway us to open our eyes to the possible negative side effects of technology/media.

Adrian Athique made me consider the questions above further with his statement/s: “In their youth, the baby boomers also became particularly enraptured by the transformation of popular culture that took place as they were growing up. With the massive expansion of the cultural marketplace and the rising purchase power of ordinary people, pop music, film, fashion, art and television were all newly accessible was taking place. These developments, by their very nature, touched those in all walks of life, but it was the youth demographic in the educated classes that came to demonstrate (quite literally) their impatience to take up the reins of steering the information age” (pg. 9 of Ch. 1). Technology is changing us. My generation grew up with the best of both worlds in a way, we had a childhood with little to no new media/advanced technology, and then as we grew to become teenagers and young adults, we saw the advancement of cell phones, computers, etc. The children now are so wrapped up in their tablets and phones; they do not have the same experience I had. Is that good or bad though? It goes back to how you use technology.

A question that arose in my head due to Nick Couldry’s statement/s: “There is no agreed starting point for answering the question: what is it to live ethically with, and through media? And yet the fact that our lives are supersaturated with media makes it increasingly difficult to be satisfied with an ethics that is not, in part, an ethics of media” (pg. 28), is if the changing of media platforms and the changes taking place in the era with new media are molded around the need to protect the environment? If we use more digital then we use less paper. However, we still waste resources on digital media, like electricity for example.

 

Digital media, technology, etc bring us both good and bad things. Like stated in an interesting article published at Dartmouth University, computers can improve anything, but at the same time come along with fallacies and failures. I agree. The question is not if media and technology is positive OR negative,  because it’s both. The question should be, is it more positive or more negative?

Do the positive aspects of technology and new media overpower the negative or do the negative overpower the positive?

We  have so much information at our disposal, but we many times do not use it how or as much as we should. However, I am a believer that technology has improved our lives for the better, but to a certain extent. That statement highly depends on how we use technology and how it affects the environment. We have come far with technology; the inventions are great and helpful, but human kind tends to never be satisfied. Our ambition (or greed) is probably one of the main contributions to why we have come so far, but we sometimes try to take things too far. We start trying to create and mess with things that should maybe not be messed with—It sometimes seems as if we are playing God on a planet that was not meant to have one.

With our creations of technologies and our ambition (or greed) to always have more, are we trying to play God?

 

Our responsibility is to try to make our use of technology and the media as positive as it can be, and if possible, the efforts of human kind should be in advancement toward cutting out the negative aspects of technology as much as we can, which we have done so already with some of our creations.