Artifact 4

The first part of this artifact was very interesting to me because when I first saw the woman I thought that she was definitely real.  Then it was quickly easy to realize that she was a robot because she was mimicking everything that the guy was doing into the camera.  I had no idea that we were so advanced with robots now days that they look exactly like a real person.  That scares me when i think about it because it seems like in a few years that they will become so advanced that we will not even know that they are walking among us and if it is so extreme that we end up flirting with robots thinking that they are real hotties when, in reality, they are not even real humans.  This great advancement in the production of robots could serve as a great weapon for whatever country decides to start replacing their real human troops on the front lines with robot troops.  It would be great because it would save many lives for whatever side of a conflict decides to use them to fight the most devestating wars.  The second video seemed very fishy to me because I think there is a lot more to it then just showing off a pencil sharpener.  It seemed like the only advanced thing about the pencil sharpener was that it could get your pencil to a slightly sharper point than some of the other pencil sharpeners that were made before it did.  That made me think that there had to be something a lot deeper into the video than the sharpener.  I studied the man's hands in the video and they looked very pale and sort of abnormal.  The voice, while sounding very realistic, did sound a little bit like an automated voice.  These two observations have led me to believe that the man in that video that was showing off the pencil sharpener was a robot.  I do not know for a fact that my belief is true but it certainly seemed like that had to be the reason behind watching a short little video about a pencil sharpener.  I tried to look at everything in the video to make sure that I did not miss any other obvious clues of what the video was really about.  The hands and the voice were really the only thing that caught my attention in the two times that I watched it so even though it may not be wrong, that is the only conclusion that I could really come up with.  If this is the case and there is a robot doing this video, then it is hard to believe that we have advanced to robots being on videos with it being almost impossible to even notice it.  Once robots continue to become even more real, more readily available, and a lot cheaper then companys might start buying just one of them to do all of their commercials so that in the long run it will save them money because they will never have to pay human actors to do the job.  I can definitely see many companies taking advantage of this and we could see this become a new trend possibly even within the next decade.

artifact 3

This weeks video talks about how technology could be bad for us because it makes us not want to focus on things that we use to easily be able to focus on.  The speaker of the video uses the example of how when he sits down to read a book he always gets easily distracted by the common things that most people do today like checking their email, facebook, surfing the web, or messing with their cell phone.  It seems like that happens easily with me as well when i try to write a paper or do other homework.  With all of the new technology today most people are so interested in trying to keep up with it and figure out what is going on at the current time that it is hard for them to concentrate on the task at hand.  The speaker in this video, Nicholas Carr, also talks about how just putting the spaces between words is a rather new invention in history compared to the millions of years that the earth has been around.  Before 1000 years ago there was not any spaces between words, so when spaces were invented it became a huge invention and helped people read much easier than they did before because they could figure out when new words started and ended.  Then when the printing press was invented that made it very easy to read because more people were exposed to books because it was very easy to print them.  Now the new big thing is the internet so the great new advancements just keep coming.  He talks about how now that it is so easy to multitask on the web that it is easy for us to make our attention go elsewhere.  He says this might hurt our ability to learn because we do not have as many deep thoughts because now we think about so many things at once and are extracted so easily that we do not think about one thing long enough for much deep thinking.  I think this is common in this day and age because with me many times I will start thinking of something else and totally forget what I was thinking of before that.  He also says how this effects our short term and long term memories because there is so many things to think about that we never think about stuff long enough to store it in our long term memory.  His opinions sound very right on this matter because it is very important that people have better memories and internet will continue to hurt this because the technology will keep making it easier and easier to multitask.  The brain is large but it continues to have very much information that it has to be able to comprehend so if we keep feeding it more information by concentrating on a bunch of different subjects on the internet then we will continue to have problems with focusing on one certain task or goal.  This book sounds very interesting because it is a very imortant debate in society today about how much internet hurts or helps every persons brain power. 

ePortfolio

http://andymac22.blogspot.com/2011/02/artifact-2-blog.html

http://andymac22.blogspot.com/2011/02/artifact-1-blog.html

http://andymac22.blogspot.com/2011/02/cmc-units-3-and-4.html

Artifact 2 blog

Our lives in this day and age are very much about being connected with our mobile devices or our computers as much as possible.  It seems like every person in the world today has to have their phone with them at all times because they are afraid that they might miss something important.  When a message pops up on your phone it is thought of as essential to stop whatever you are doing at that time and respond to it.  William Powers is correct that it would help a lot of us out now days if we would just put our technology away for a while and just get in touch with the real world.  With us always having our technology on hand and ready to use that is probably half of what we think about everyday of our lives.  If its not us thinking to check what new message or update we could be recieving on our phone then we are thinking about our email or what new gossip is going on on facebook right now.  Since we constantly worry about this technology everyday we miss out on a lot of aspects of life that people use to enjoy before all of this technology was commonplace.  Back then people use to enjoy others company or they would take in the scenery around them when they were outside instead of like now days when they will be looking down at their phone the whole time when they go somewhere.  He talks about in the video about how in the days of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James that they also had times that they were disconnected.  But that was not about being technology, that was about being disconnected from deep thinking.  He also talked about the Romans and the Greeks and William Shakespeare.  They were reading and thinking about new ideas the whole time and they thought that the new books that came out was completely new and they could not keep up with it just like it is hard for us to keep up with technology today.  So it seems to me like no matter what age we are in that there is always something new that is just really hard for us to grasp.  Everybody likes doing it because it is something new but people throughout every age always wonder if peope are getting to caught up with the new technology and not taking in the simple things in life.  I think that no matter how little or how much technology that we have that we will still always think that we need to be disconnected from it for a while because no matter how much new technology that we have we will want to use it to try to fit in with the rest of society.  It is almost impossible to avoid using the new technology that is out but it is possible to take a break from it for a while to take in life.  That is what William Powers is trying to convey in his book and I agree because I think it is important to spend time with family and take in the things around you that you miss out on when you are constantly tapped into your different pieces of technology.  He talks about how his family would just turn off their computers for a couple days a week and I think that is a good idea that really makes you realize how much we depend on technology as a crutch even though it is not needed at all. 

Artifact 1 blog

While I am not surprised that the use of the internet as the primary source is growing rapidly, I am very surprised that the use of television is not higher than it is. With televisions high technological advancements over the past decade with the introduction of high definition and now 3D, it is astounding that more people do not use television as their source. For myself personally I do fulfill most of my news watching duties on television and I believe that I will probably always use it most of the time instead of the internet.  With the way that the internet is rapidly advancing I may not have a choice.  At this pace the local news will be broadcast over the internet before we know it and it will be almost impossible to avoid having to watch the internet for all our news needs.  The statistic that says that 65 percent of people from the age of 18 to 29 use internet as their source of news is kind of surprising because this age group is the group of people that were born in the booming technological age so I am surprised that it is not more than 65 percent.  While 65 percent is a large portion of the people I still would think that it would be a lot more people because a lot of the young people in this age group are very good at using new technology so I would think it would be more like in the 80 percentile rather than the 65 percentile.  Probably the most surprising stat that I saw is that 14 percent of people that are the age of 65 or older get their news from the internet.  A lot of the senior citizens that I know ae not very good when it comes to computers and they barely even know how to turn one on let alone use one every day for their news.  When you realize that the internet was not around for more than half of most of these people's lives it is very surprising that they would just grap a new concept all of a sudden when they were never used to it before.  The senior citizens that I know are very stubborn and are very set in their ways from the old days and do not even want to attempt trying something that seems impossible for them to grasp.  So that 14 percent number really shocks me and I am really surprised that it is not at least under 10 percent because of the serious technological advancements that the people of the older generation refuse to learn to grasp.  Twitter is discussed in this article about how it is one of the newest ways to feed news.  I have not even attempted nor do I want to attempt to try twitter so I can understand why many of these senior citizens do not want to try new ways of watching their news.  They have been use to just popping on their television or grabbing their newspaper off their porch their whole lives and those two things are still very accessible so there really is no reason why they should change their ways.

CMC units 3 and 4

As time goes on the newest means of communication is always just a luxury that the wealthiest people in society flaunt around to show that they are rich.  But usually as the new communication method stays on the market for a longer period of time, it becomes the centrally used piece of communication by everybody in the world because it is easily available and affordable for every average person.  Another item that is discussed in depth in unit 3 and in Tyler's blog is invisible technology.  It seems as time goes by that the latest and greatest phone or the newest way to chat on the computer becomes common place for everybody and they are so used to using it that they dont even really realize that it is there.  It feels like invisible technology has been around a long time and will always continue to be around because most people do not realize it, but after just a few years of using something for communication it is easily taken for granted and they do not appreciate how much easier it is to communicate now than it was before.
  With CMC it is much like face to face communication in that what a person interprets as the tone that the other person is talking in is very important.  When two people are talking face to face it is very easy to understand what kind of mood they are in or how they are expressing the words that they say because you are used to their gestures and actions.  Talking through computers is very new and many people do not understand certain quirks that there are in communication yet.  It is much harder to express a persons emotions or add emphasis to a phrase you are saying online than it is face to face.  Online it is very easy to percieve something that the other person is saying the wrong way and get mad about it so sometimes it is better to talk face to face.  This is a lot about what is discussed in unit 4 and the difference between CMC and talking in person is a very important topic that can be discussed in even further detail than what is depicted in the book.