Tapscott Pt 3

On p. 294, Tapscott claims the Net Generation is the most social generation yet.  He talks about how many NetGeners prefer to talk via IM rather than in person, but that's making us more social and not less.  I disagree with this statement to a certain extent because my roommate prefers online communication to in person communication and it drives me nuts.  She never wants to go out with friends anymore, she'd rather be at home on facebook chat, skype, msn and her webcam.  I would define her behavior as antisocial rather than social.  The people she talks to online are not people that she has spent a lot of time with in person and few of them are actually good friends.  While online communication is helpful to keep in touch with people you don't live close to anymore, I believe that at times it does make people less social.  Talking on IM is easier than talking in person, just like texting is easier than calling someone on the phone.  However, I feel like talking to someone in person is a much more valuable experience and while IMing or texting can break the ice, I feel like in order to have true friendships you need to get out of your living room and experience new situations.  New experiences are fun, and the ability of people to become like my roommate and be able to talk to people instead of going out drives you to become introverted and scared to talk to people.  My roommate is only one example, but gamers are another.  They spend hours and hours on world of warcraft and they're talking to other people, but they're never leaving their house.  I think online communication is fine in small amounts but if too much time is spent online and not enough time is spent around people I think that online communication can become unhealthy and lead to antisocial behavior.

Tapscott Pt 2

In this section, Tapscott discusses how advertisers are scared that people in the net generation don't read ads in the traditional way.  We don't listen to the radio, we plug in our itrip, we don't watch tv, we dvr and watch hulu and we don't read the newspaper, we might go to a news website.  This was interesting to me because I've been hearing for a few years now that advertisers are worried about this problem, but it's starting to frustrate me.  If they are worried, they should be focused on advertising in a new way that will reach the net generation effectively.  All tv ads are really good for is making you remember the company name.  There are ways to do that visually, if you see Coke ads all over a website you will probably remember that it was there.  We've also discussed in some of my classes how the presence of an annoying ad actually deters you from the company rather than encourages you to buy from them.  You will remember the company, but in a negative light.  I think advertisers should be changing along with the times.  I'm excited because recently they have been trying to do this through online ads as well as social media.  While whether this is effective or not has yet to be proven, but I have to think it's equally effective as tv and radio ads and has the advantage that many online ads sit in the background rather than interrupt or annoy you.  I'm glad advertisers are finally focusing on the future rather than the past and are working to find ways to keep up or even get ahead of technology in order for ads to still be profitable.  Besides ads, there are few ways to find out about a company's existence.

Tapscott Pt. 1

I really like this book!  Our entire lives, my generation has been told that the internet and technology has made us worse-we don't really learn math anymore because we have calculators, we don't know how to spell because we have spell check and we can't find real information anymore because my generation looks to wikipedia instead of Britannica.  Tapscott tells us that this is ok, and in fact goes one step further, he talks about how my generation is changing the world.  He paints us in a positive light, saying we can change the world for better and not for worse.  The author also helps me understand a little better about why older people have the view they do, everyone's paradigms come from somewhere and while our generation cannot imagine a world without computers or the internet, our parents and grandparents had to learn to use the computer and the internet.  They were scared of it.

Tapscott really made me think when he talked about how his son went around to house saying that the refrigerator and the TV were technology as well.  It's true, but we don't think of them as technology because we've had them our whole lives.  To my generation, computers are not technology, they're established.  I can't remember the first time I used a computer.  The older generation can remember even Professor Arola remembers clearly-she told my class she was in college.  My parents majored in Computer Science before people had PCs in their house.  If you look around where you live, everything in your home is a technology.  When humanity began, we had nothing so we had to invent things to make the world better.  Computers and the internet happened to change the world in a big way, but so did phones, electricity, forks and everything else we use on a daily basis.

I also liked how he talked to Rahaf and she said part of the reason she changed careers was that she didn't like the hours she was working.  It's amazing to me how the internet allows people to break out of the 9 to 5 box that we've been raised to see.  That was one of the benefits of going into the field I chose when I changed my majors-I will most likely be working on projects that have a deadline but can often be done from home or not necessarily at regular office hours.

Overall, the first part of Grown Up Digital really made me think about my perspective and how lucky I am to have been born in this generation.

Baron 7-12

There were a few interesting points in the second half of Baron.  First was the idea that signatures have value, but why?  Really it's just someone's writing on paper.  Having their signature doesn't mean that you've met that person or that you know them.  He points out how a note from a friend has no value.  This makes me think about why we put value on the things we do.  A grocery list is trash, but a card from someone special might be a keepsake.  Email and texting doesn't really work like that.  Almost all texts or emails are trash.  Most people empty their texts frequently and wouldn't think of keeping one, no matter who it's from.  Online communication saves paper and also changes how we think of communication.  Written communication is becoming rarer and rarer, and may eventually disappear completely, but probably not for a long time.  However, I think it is likely that reference books like encyclopedias and dictionaries will disappear relatively quickly because it's much easier to use the types of searches that are available online to find the type of information you're usually looking for in a reference book.

Secondly, Baron says that people frequently ask if email, texting and IMing are destroying the english language, killing the art of conversation and rupturing social relationships.  I have mixed feelings about this, especially since presumably Baron is old enough that he did not have a computer growing up and possible not even in college.  Because of this, he spends an extensive amount of time discussing how computers are changing writing by making everyone an author and citing etiquette for email, IM and blogging.  For me, one of the big things about blogging is that there isn't really any etiquette for it.  Blogs are public, but the person writing them can write whatever they want.  I think that's the power of the online world as well as wikis like wikipedia and urban dictionary.  Lots of people can share their views for free.  If you don't agree with someone's view, you can write your own blog about it.  The internet opens up the world to so many different views and so much more information than books because it's so much faster and there's so much more room in it.

Baron 1, 3 and 5

One point that stood out to me from the reading was how clay is usually associated with art and not text.  This made me think about how much of art is derived from texts...cave art is called cave art and not cave communication or cave text.  Also, there were limited resources so clay was probably used for "paper" as well as pottery.  And pottery was a means of making dishes a long time ago, but now it is considered an art form and people buy pieces of pottery for hundreds of dollars with no intention of serving food or putting flowers in it.  Printmaking is considered an art form now too, but it's called printmaking which means that it's associated with print.  Printmaking is offered through the art department and not through the english department here at WSU.

Another quote from Baron that I found interesting was that "we don't notice our writing machines until something goes wrong" and how by fixing one problem we create another.  Before, if your pencil broke or the power went out, you were out of luck but you still had what you were working on.  A computer, especially a laptop, works in the dark and doesn't have a tip to break off.  However, if the computer crashes, you could lose everything you were working on.  It's true that in this day and age writing is natural to us, most of us in this class probably don't remember learning to read or write because we've been doing it for so long.  We might remember learning how to do math or learning geography though.  That makes writing different than many other subjects we learn in school.