Big Paper 1 Revised Draft: ; The Polarities of the Digital World

Introduction: Sleeping with another person. Whether it’s a five year old who has a bad dream and goes into their mother's bed for comfort. Or two people who have just had sex and are now cuddling together intimately while sleeping. Sleep is a very intimate thing that allows closeness and togetherness. At our age, most of us don't share a bed with a partner, and if we do its usually not the way we would like to. But almost all of us sleep with our phones right next to us in bed! The problem with America today is that relationships are so superficial. Not that we are fake with our girlfriend or boyfriend, but its that digital media has reduced relationships to a sort of cyber-relationship, where we say the most intimate things in a text, or I-M. We actually have names for it, like "sex text". Meaning that people know what their doing, but are too wrapped up in the addiction of cyber-intimacy to come out of it. In this paper I intend to explore how technology (computers, phones, and television), has impacted the way human relationships are formed and operate. Yes technology has managed to connect us better than ever before. We can now talk to people across the world with the click of a button. We can reconnect with friends we have not seen in years. We can get decades of information with one Google search. On the one hand we have ever been as well connected or had as vast an access to information, but on the other hand we have never been more lonely or anti-intellectual. (In spelling the word intellectual, I spelled it wrong and a little red line came under the word implying that I had spelled it wrong. With one simple “right click”, the correct spelling came up and I checked it. Bada bing bada boom the word is correct, yet I still don’t know how to spell Intellectual.) The digitalized world is a world of paradox. We function on a plane of profound polarity.

Paragraph 1 (Social Connectivity vs. Lonliness)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1CDZ408rzM

The new Motorola DEXT. Slogan: "Take Your Entire Social Like With You". Or "The first phone with social skills". Go to the homepage (http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/GB-EN/Consumer-Products-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/ci.Motorola-DEXT-GB-EN.services), and you will see a very encouraging promotional blurb: "Meet the fully customisable home screen that's as unique as you are. Your Facebook™, MySpace and Twitter happenings are right there, along with your emails, messages, news and favorite apps, and widgets. All just the way you like them." If a phone screen can be just as unique as you are, how unique are you? This commercial ironically provides revealing social commentary. Jay-Z says in an HP computer commercial that his "whole life is on this thing". (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsE0g-8CDQo). As stupid as that may sound, I can't help but agree. What would we really do without our computers? Our Phones? Our Facebooks? We would be out of the loop. Our social life, gone. Until of course we get a new one the next day or two. Facebook has just reached 350 million users. If Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. It would be larger than the United States.

Paragraph 2 (Access to information vs. Anti-Intellectualism)

"Droid by Motorola. Enough Brainpower to think ahead for you." On one hand, how can a phone think for you? But on the other hand, we do so little thinking during usage of technology that it is very possible that the phone does actually do more thinking than us.

$100 dollar laptop

The decline of print media in favor digital media, particularly free digital media on the internet, has allowed for an unprecedented breath of information to be obtained, but theres also no quality control. so the quality of information is often compromised. as is the rigor with which it is examined.

Paragraph 3 (Freedom of Expression vs. Culture of Surveillance)

Technology has allowed for a culture of surveillance. Video Cameras in shops: everybody is a potential thief? On the other hand people have never had more freedom. Internet etc.

Loss of privacy while at the same time people on youtube sometimes become world famous. The everyday person can become as a celebrity. That guy who defended Britney Spears. He is a household name now. Chris Crocker. Meanwhile people like Jay-Z who make music and try to sell it are suffering because of the internet.

Paragraph 4 (Interviews): Over the course of the year we had had a chance to interview our family members, our friends, and some strangers on different aspects of digitalization. I had a general outline for the questions I wanted to ask, such as "how many hours a day do you spend using something digital and how productive is it". Most of the answers I got were similar. Most people spend from 3-6 hours a day using digital things, and they say that half of those hours are productive. But after reading the answers and really thinking about them, I realized those were not the questions I needed to be asking. So I decided to ask some more questions. They went as followed:

Q1: What form of digital media do you spend the most time on?

Q2: Where is your phone during the day? The Night?

Q3: If someone asks to see your phone, for no apparent reason, what do you say? And why?

Hannah:

A1: Text Messaging.

A2: In my pocket. At night it’s right next to my bed.

A3: No.

Jacara:

Q1: My computer and my ipod.

Q2: In my Pocket, and at night it’s charging right next to my bed.

Q3: No because my phone is my business I don't let just anybody look at it.

Sarah:

Q1: My Phone. Texting.

Q2: In my hand or my pocket. At night it’s either right next to me on my night table or in my bed with me. It’s on and on vibrate.

Q3: No, a phone is my business.

Paragraph 5: (Pros) Facebook: Stay in touch with friends

Paragraph 6: (Cons) Facebook: Rips Families Apart

Phones: Distracts from work/ rips family apart

Paragraph 7 (Connection): In my past relationships, and a lot of my friends’ relationships, a big problem between the couple is that they don't spend enough time together. When in a relationship, at least one of the partners always wants to be with the other. I know that’s how it is with me. Obviously no one can spend every second with a person, yet we do it with our phones. People are so over protective of their phones that they don't let anybody see them. They won't let anybody use them. They want them all for themselves. They share information with their phones (pictures etc.), don't want anybody to use them, and sleep with them. Sound like a girlfriend or boyfriend?

Feed: I kept making these parallels and connections that was getting me depressed. The feed is the internet, M-chat was texting/iming. Up-cars were GPS's. Everything that the characters in Feed had, we had less extreme versions of. These thoughts were getting me depressed because I really do not want to live in a world where people can sense when I'm there, they can know what I'm thinking, they can just get into my head on command. But the problem is I can't picture a world without a phone; without the internet. I tried to stop thinking about it, so I wouldn't be so depressed, but then I remembered what M.T. Anderson said. That "We can only become responsible citizens of the world once we start to acknowledge that there's a complex world out there that's not easy to assimilate.". Meaning that we can't just avoid the topics we don't want to think about our whole lives, we need to access them, and really think about how we can change it; If not for the world, then at least for ourselves.

In Feed there are many tragedy's going on. Some of them collide with each other making them even more tragic, but some are just tragic on their own. We talked in class about the tragedy of Violet dying, and of Titus and his "crew" not even knowing about the Feed taking over their minds, but I think the tragedy goes deeper than that. The only person who tried to resist the"feed", ended up getting killed by it. Does that not say something about our society?

Paragraph 8 (OPV): About 99% of people over the age of 13 in the United States cell phones so he's basically telling us that we're all going to have tumors. People know what is said about cell phone usage, and it's their choice if they want to use it. On wikipedia

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_radiation_and_health),

scientists say there is no real health risks from using mobile phones. There have been tests as recent as 2007, saying that the radiation coming through the phone, is not nearly enough to really have a significant effect on your health. People say that cancer takes about 10 years to develop, so some say the 2007 test is not viable, but over 4 other national tests have been done and 10 years later, no cancerous effects have been found.

I find this interesting because so many people just go along with people when they say the Cell Phones give you brain tumors, but no one has actually stopped to do the research and find out for themselves. I am still skeptical about mobile phones and cancer, but for now i have to trust the scientists. It's their job to find out.

A kids relationship to their parents is one of the most fundamental but important thing in a persons life. They are the closest people to you. You're supposed to be able to talk to them, and tell them things. They should know about your life -- they created it! So when things like Myspace, and Facebook came out, you can see how our generation went to the shitter. Kids stopped talking to their parents, and started social networking as a way of therapy. Telling basically complete strangers (people you have met maybe once) about all of your problems. Seeing what people have to say about it.

In an April article of Globe and Mail

(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article763859.ece),

Patrick White interviews 3 parents whose kids all have Facebook. Three of the three families said that their relationships with their kids have changed. Two of the Three families said that their relationships are worse. One mother even says She thinks that her daughter's generation is losing the ability to socialize in person. I couldn't agree more.