Steven Johnson, “It’s All About Us”; Brian Williams, “Enough About You”; danah boyd, “Implications of User Choice”; Ian Daly, “Virtual Popularity Isn’t Cool—It’s Pathetic”; ICMPA, “Students Addicted to Social Media” (469-487)
One. What are the drawbacks of Web 2.0 according to Steven Johnson?
A throng of ignorant amateurs has diluted the content so that web content is a morass that you must slog through in order to cull a morsel of goodness. As it is, the web is full of lies, myths, misinformation, legend, paranoia, repetition of the lie that becomes the truth, banality, twisted facts, faulty reasoning, etc.
Two. Is the “celebration of self,” as described by Brian Williams, really a celebration?
Williams writes that anything to do with you is considered important enough to record, post, publish; therefore, the banality of minutia, it could be inferred, is evidence of narcissism. This narcissism, and solipsism, if you will of reading news that has been pre-selected based on your cookies, viewing habits, Facebook friends, and personality profile becomes even worse as you live inside a bubble of your own tastes and preferences. Williams points out that people should be informed of real news events that might not penetrate their narcissistic bubble. Additionally, Williams observes, no one is listening to what’s going on because everyone is talking in a desperate attempt for attention and relevance.
Three. Are there really racial and social class divisions between MySpace and Facebook?
Answers will vary. Since I don’t use MySpace, I can’t comment on it. Cleary, the teens in Boyd’s research see such divisions.
Four. What are the dangers of using Facebook that Ian Daly observes, many of which you may not have thought of before?
Clearly, there’s the “hyperventilating” from having likes and friends and being “quasi-famous.” But a more troubling danger lurks: People on Facebook “think they’re actually accomplishing something.” As a result, Facebook is a bottomless pit of wasted time and a source of procrastinating from your meaningful tasks.
You also lose control of your image on a site where anyone can tag you, photo-shop images of you, and portray you as a party animal if they want to. Employers would love to screen applicants by looking at the Facebook profiles, we learn.
Five. What evidences social media addiction in college students?
Separation anxiety
FOMO anxiety (fear of missing out)
“I might become irrelevant and die to the world” anxiety
“Boredom without my social media” anxiety
Comfort dependence on social media and “that instantaneous flow of information”
Dependence on sharing every trivial aspect of my life experience on social media
Paradox of information: Students wanted to be plugged into constant stream of trivial personal information, but they had little hunger for real news and real information.
The most common addiction Launchpad for the students are smartphones.
Part Two. Dehumanization and Social Media
Example of an Effective Introduction and Thesis
If our posts on Facebook get us a lot of attention in the form of “likes” and comments and we find this attention makes us gloat like we’re the King of Facebook, we have to ask ourselves: Should we be getting our thrills in this manner? Of all the things to get thrilled about, the birth of a baby, the expulsion of a fascist leader, the discovery of a cure for some terminable disease, why do so many of us jump for joy upon getting Facebook “likes” and comments?
Could the answer be we’ve lowered our expectations about what defines our own happiness? Before Facebook, we had more exalted expectations that drove us, that defined our goals, which made us truly happy. But now we sit in a robe while eating a Pop Tart and copy and paste something someone else wrote on Facebook and the attention we get from our posts makes us happy.
Maybe we shouldn’t be happy. Maybe we should be ashamed. Maybe we should be full of self-loathing. Maybe we should be full of disgust.
In addition to a Facebook “like” category, there needs to be a “Get a Life, You Pathetic Loser” category, so that my real friends can remind me how far down the rabbit hole of a wasted life I’ve allowed Facebook and Twitter to send me.
Such are the sentiments of Sherry Turkle, the author of Alone Together who argues convincingly that Facebook and other forms of social media have denigrated the human condition by ________________, ________________, __________________, ___________________, and ___________________________.
Intro: NYT article about how connected and alone we are.
One. What is the liminal world and how do we get lost there?
See page 213 in which we see there are worlds beyond our daily life routines where we feel encouraged to experiment with our identity and alter ego, giving it a powerful life that can get out of control. This is where we nurture our avatar and we lose boundaries with ourselves and others, surrendering to a life of excess fantasy and cutting cut off from reality.
Two. A flourishing human being experiences “flow,” we read on page 226. What is “flow” and how does the networked life impede it? What are the consequences? Flow means being fully immersed into the present, being fully focused, having undivided attention. People who are truly happy experience flow; people who are miserable distract themselves from their misery by texting and checking their Facebook status.
Three. What is the “seeking” drive and how does it make us addicted to being networked? 227
We crave connectivity so much that we're vulnerable to the ping of a new email or some other sound summoning us. As a result, we live a life of fragmented distraction.
Four. What are the rules of texting such as the ten minute response rule and others? See page 265. Also “full attention reciprocity” and its imbalance. One friend tries harder and feels less because of it.
“I text you more than you text me. And my response time is quicker than yours. What gives? Should I end this friendship?”
Five. What does the abused man on page 281 say about people, even sadistic ones, that makes them better than robots? They have a story. There is a "back story" like characters in a movie. They are part of life. Robots are not.
Six. What is the Facebook Friend Paradox? See 280. We have so many "friends" on Facebook but Americans say they've never had so few friends.
Seven. Summarize the abuse of technology and this abuse’s role in dehumanization. See 292, 293, 295, and elsewhere.
The abuse is gradual. As Marshal McLuhan writes, quoted from The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts,” but alter “patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”
In other words, the Net or the “Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself.”
The technology takes over our minds and our bodies. There are psychological changes taking places, chemical addiction, a tingle of neurotransmitter when you see a red colored “like” on Facebook.
The technology has become so small, little handheld devices, that it has become ubiquitous and as such inseparable from us. It has gotten inside us.
An example of the Net’s growing power: In 2005 adults in North America spent six hours online weekly; by 2009 that number doubled to twelve hours.
For young adults, that number is much higher.
The average American teen sends/receives 2,272 texts a month.
Average American is “on screen” 8.5 hours a day.
Our technology as “remapped the neural circuitry,” writes Nicholas Carr.
Carr points out that our powers of concentration have diminished. We quickly get “fidgety.”
Former good readers can’t read long books or even long articles anymore. They can only skim info-bites.
We call less; we read newspapers less; we spend face-to-face time with people less, we read less, we use snail mail less; the list goes on.
Eight. What is realtechnik and how is it an antidote to our dehumanization? See the definition and others in this book review.
Nine. Distinguish between our vulnerabilities and our needs. See page 295.We are vulnerable to technologically-driven narcissism, and we have lost our real needs, real human connection, replacing them with artificial needs, control and adulation.
Carr writes, “We are plunged into an eco-system of interruption technologies.” The effect is fragmentation and the atrophy of our concentration and focus.
Ten. Turkle’s book Alone Together expresses the view of a Net Skeptic refuting the Net Enthusiasts. Some would call Turkle a Luddite. Is that a fair criticism? Explain.
Nicholas Carr writes: “The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.”
Eleven. What effect does technology have on the brain? Carr writes that the brain is malleable, that it is shaped by technology, that parts of the brain die and other parts flourish depending on a changing environment. “The brain is very plastic.”
“There is evidence that the cells of our brains literally develop and grow bigger with use, and atrophy or waste away with disuse.”
Being hooked on the Net, we switch back and forth different interruption technologies and we lose competence, intelligence, and intellect.
Twelve. What effect does the Net have on our intellect?
Carr writes: “We enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.”
Considering the brain’s plasticity, “if you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Interent.”
“The Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli-repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.”
We read in The Shallows that researcher Maryanne Wolf says Net immersion makes us “sacrifice the facility that makes deep reading possible. We revert to being ‘mere decoders of information.’”
Carr writes that the Web is “an interruption machine” and “frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and makes us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of thought we’re involved in, the greater the impairment the distractions cause.”
Carr cites studies that when we go back and forth from two or more tasks, we impede thinking and competence.
Other studies show that the more we’re on the Web, the more we become Skimmers, not Readers. Brain and eye activity changes.
A skimmer is called a “Power Browser.” The PB reads more but more superficially. “Hyperlinks distract people from reading and thinking deeply.”
As skimmers, we no longer value narratives, stories that tell important truths about ourselves.
According to Douglas Rushkoff, "The traditional linear story works by creating a character we can identify with, putting that character we can identify with, putting that character in danger, and then allowing him or her to discover a way out. We meet Oedipus, Luke Skywalker, or Dora the Explorer. Something happens--an initiating event--that sends the character on a quest." The characters embark on, what Joseph Campbell calls, a "heroic journey."
With "interactivity," the remote control, for example, consumers of entertainment are less likely to absorb a meaningful narrative. They'd rather skim.
Without meaningful narratives, we become ignorant, even dumb, according to Rushkoff, who writes that Americans are immersed in a "mediated disortion field," with such misinformation that the number of Americans "unsure about evolution increased from 7 percent to 21 percent, while those questioning global warming increased from 31 percent in 1997 to 48 percent in 2010."
Skimmers are not apparently well educated.
The Internet, Rushkoff continues, makes us skinners of "Everyone Is Equal" so that legit and non-legit opinion makers share the stage. See Cult of the Amateur.
Doug's Critique of Networked World with comments
Review of Internet Dangers
One. Multitasking results in divided energy and mediocre work as we live in a state of continual partial attention.
Two. Death of intimacy results from preference of control and convenience over compromise and reciprocity. Everyone is "pauseable."
Three. A networked life encourages narcissism and constant need for social validation from others; also a networked life makes us feel we're the center of the universe.
Four. A networked life flattens our personae into emoticans.
Five. We suffer off-the-grid anxiety because we have an always-on mentality.
Six. We live in the New Solitude, which means we're mentally absent from others but at the same time we're tethered to each other in a degraded way.
Seven. We live in present shock in which we see "the diminishment of anything that isn't happening right now--and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is" (Rushkoff).
Eight. We suffer from digiphrenia, as Rushkoff writes, using technology to be in more than one place at the same time.
Nine. Internet alters our brain circuits for the worse, turning us into "skimmers."
Common Errors: Comma Splices and Sentence Fragments
Find the comma splice:
Grading freshmen composition essays makes you lose IQ points. Why? Because there’s only one of you grading over 500 sub-literate essays a semester. You don’t raise them up, by sheer numbers, they pull you down. Try telling this to your Dean and see how sympathetic he is. He’ll say, “We hired you to change the future of America, you nincompoop!”
Sentence Fragments on Owl Purdue
Identify Comma Splices and Fragments in the Following
I’m in a constant struggle to lose weight. I exercise like a fitness demon, that’s not the problem. My problem is that I eat like a crazed survivor of a famine whose every meal must compensate for the deprivation I’ve suffered in some cosmic universe that doesn’t exist. Except in my gluttonous imagination.
I embraced the six meals a day philosophy a long time ago. The premise is that you should eat several small meals, each one no bigger than the palm of your hand. Rather than eat three large meals and thereby overburden your digestive system. The problem is that my six meals aren’t palm sized, they’re more the size of a watermelon and even then I’m still hungry. Now that you mention it, I don’t even eat six meals a day, I eat ten. And not small snacks either. We’re talking substantial heaping cartloads of food.
Did I tell you I can’t stop eating after one plate? I like to take seconds and thirds. Sometimes fourths. And then there’s my daughters’ leftovers, Panini grilled cheese pesto sandwiches, popcorn, tortilla chips, pancakes, waffles, French toast. I snort it all up like an anteater as I clean the kitchen table.
Have we discussed chocolate cake? I need two large slices, about twice a week, to fend off the existential vacuum. I’ll take red velvet in a pinch. Though it doesn’t penetrate my craving sensors as deeply as the chocolate.
My wife is currently baking coffee cinnamon swirl cake because she likes to bake a dessert before we watch our favorite show Game of Thrones.
I told her I didn’t want any coffee cake as I’m trying to trim my waistline, but she reminded me that I already ate over half of it. I don’t even remember what I’m eating, I think I’m in trouble.
Comments