Final Post: Our Relationship with Technology

 

              Why do we use social media? Is it to connect with others? Is it to connect with ourselves? To make us feel like we belong? Or to make us stand out? Your answer could consist of one, two, all, or even none of these reasons. but we all have our reasons.

Personally, I do not use social media all that often. I just recently made an Instagram to stay up to date with friends both here in college and back home, but still find myself hardly using it at all. I guess for me I just never found social media as appealing as people made it out to be.

While I feel I have a pretty good relationship with social media, my relationship with technology is a completely different story. We all have those days where we rethink our lives after staring at a screen for twelve hours straight. When your eyes start to hurt and you wonder what you’re even doing on your phone anymore. I’m sure we all have those moments where we wished that technology didn’t even exist. However in this day and age we do not really have much of a choice but to stay surrounded by technology and different screens constantly. Even our public school systems have begun to switch over from using traditional pencil and paper to the latest new Chromebook or iPad.

Of course technology is a huge part of our lives – probably a much bigger part than it should be honestly – but at some point it stops even being a choice at all whether to look at a screen or not. At school writing papers or doing homework, on your phone to shoot someone a quick text, or even just in your car driving to work – in newer models anyway – there is a screen.

I think that technology has many benefits. We are able to calculate complex mathematical problems with the click of a button, look up any words definition, watch and create videos and pictures on a tiny screen that fits in your back pocket. The possibilities are endless. But with these great advantages comes many unintended side effects.

The internet can be a dangerous place. There are many scams and scammers trying to mislead you, steal your information, or even give you misinformation. The sad thing is that many of us do not even give these things a second thought anymore. It has been accepted as simply another annoying thing we are forced to deal with.

I am fortunate enough to find very little to no information on myself when I search my name online. My name of course is not the most uncommon name out there, so it is not too difficult for me to blend in with hundreds of other Rachels out there.

Of course there are many things we could all do to better protect ourselves and our privacy online, however, many of us simply will not take the steps needed to do just that and will end up with a less than ideal online footprint that may just end up coming back to bite them in the future.

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              The Great Reset – the theme of the 50^th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, or WEF – was convened by Prince Charles of Wales and the World Economic Forum themselves. It was held in June of 2020 and “It brought together high-profile business and political leaders”. The theme – “The Great Reset” – was based on “seizing upon the global crisis to rebuild society and the economy following the COVID-19 pandemic”. “The Great Reset” was also set to be the main theme of the World Economic Forum’s May 2021 summit in Lucerne, which unfortunately was postponed due to COVID-19 until 2022.

              Kristalina Georgieva, the keynote speaker for the event, listed her key aspects of the sustainable response the organization was trying to achieve. These include green growth, smarter growth, and fairer growth. Some critics however, only saw The Great Reset as a continuation of the World Economic Forum’s strategy of “focusing on connotates activist topics such as environmental protection and social entrepreneurship to disguise the organization’s alleged plutocratic goals”.

              The Great Reset, as intended, would greatly affect society as a whole. There are just three core components of The Great Reset. One being to create conditions for a “stakeholder economy”. Two is building in a more “resilient, equitable, and sustainable” way. This would be based on “environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics which would incorporate more green public infrastructure projects”. Finally, three would be to “harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution” for the good of the public.

              The goals and ideas of the World Economic Forum are basically intended to create a greener, more sustainable life on earth for generations to come. At the event’s launch event, Prince Charles listed off important areas of action for the organization to take. These points included the “reinvigoration of science, technology and innovation, a move towards net zero emissions globally, the introduction of carbon pricing, reinventing longstanding incentive structures, rebalancing investments to include more (though not all) green investments, and encouraging public infrastructure projects”.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset

Online Privacy

 

            Privacy is an important issue in today’s evolving world of modern technology. Privacy and the lack thereof are great worries that affect us daily whether we realize it or not. Private companies gather information on us all the time, even when we may not know about or suspect it. Along with this, governments – domestic and foreign – are also spying on our online information, stealing it to get a better understanding of different people and their online tendencies.

              This kind of invasion of privacy can – and does – happen to everyone. It is completely plausible that someone somewhere knows exactly what you are doing at this moment, and you would never even suspect it.

              In order to limit this kind of surveillance, the government should be taking steps to limit the gathering of private information by companies and doing more to stop espionage from taking place.

              To better protect ourselves from online invasions of privacy, the simple answer is to just get off of online applications and technology. However, if we really want to protect ourselves, we should look more at the things we sign up for and use before we begin unintentionally sharing our information.

Rodgers' Diffusion of Innovations Theory

            Rodgers’ Diffusion of Innovations is a “theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations). Rodgers believed that diffusion is “the process by which an innovation is communicated over time among the participants in a social system”. According to Rodgers, there are five main elements that influence the spread of a new idea: the innovation hall, adopters, communication channels, time, and a social system.

              Through the lens of the Diffusion Theory, when the first camera was invented it caught on because of its ability to capture a moment in time and spread like wildfire. There were many early adopters of the camera, as people were just so excited to try out this new technology. Late adopters could have been those who could not afford a camera at the time, and the non-adopters may have either been financially unable to get a camera or they may have simply been uninterested. While there are a few downsides of cameras in today’s age (security cameras, phone/laptop cameras spying), I would say that – especially back then – the positives outweigh the negatives.

EOTO 1: What I Learned

        Typewriters, while old news now, were a big deal for those back in the late 1800’s. Going from writing papers, news articles, and even novels by hand to having the ability to simply push a button to create a letter on paper was a big step forward in technology back then, as typewriters are clearly much more efficient than using a quill and ink.

        This new piece of technology was quickly adopted and incorporated by the government and businesses for it’s easy usage and efficiency. It was certainly helpful when you needed a lot of copies of the same piece of paper at any given time.

        Typewriters were also seen as a faster form of communication, as you could now write a letter in a matter of minutes and it would be ready to send. Basically, the typewriter was like a personal printing press.

Antiwar Censorship

In this day and age, antiwar voices in the media are getting harder and harder to find. Just as it is getting increasingly more difficult to find reliable news outlets and forums, it is becoming harder to find what you are looking for exactly in the media.

So much information now gets censored by either the government or other third parties holding political agendas for or against one thing or another. A couple examples of this phenomenon would be from the websites https://www.antiwar.com/ (Antiwar) and https://www.theamericanconservative.com/web-categories/realism-restraint/ (The American Conservative). Have you ever heard of either of these websites before? I know that I haven’t before researching this topic.

Typically, it is easy to find whatever information it is you are looking for online, whether it be through news articles, social media, friends and family, you name it – as long as it’s not too controversial. There has been evidence that shows the government actually does censor information online, despite protests arguing that such a thing is a violation of our first amendment rights as American citizens.

Why is it that these basically unheard of websites garner little to no attraction while mainstream news outlets selling off fake/modified news to the public are still so popular? Why is it that finding antiwar voices these days is so difficult when there are clearly so many?

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   The VCR – also known as the videocassette recorder – was invented in the late 1950’s (1956 to be more specific). The technology was invented by Charles Paulson Ginsburg, commonly referred to as the “father of the videocassette recorder”. Ginsburg was born in 1920’s San Francisco. He created the VCR because of the desire for people to control their own home tv show and movie viewing experience.

   The videocassette recorder made it possible to record any television shows and/or movies you wanted and watch them back at a time more convenient for you. Along with this, people no longer had to sit at home all day waiting for a certain show or movie to come on during a scheduled air time as they could simply just hit the “record” button instead.

    Although at the time of its release the VCR was not widely availably or even popular, it did become more widely available to the masses during the late 1980’s and 1990’s. The last videocassette recorder was manufactured in 2016 by Funai Electric.

    Fun Fact: National VCR day is Juna 7^th

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