Reflection on Wikiegoism

iWeb is a web development program, produced by Apple, that comes with the Macintosh iLife program. That one sentence probably took longer to craft than the rest of my entire wiki, and rightfully so, it is the introduction. W hat strikes me as more amazing, is that I did not technically write it, someone else did and I edited it. When I began work on my wiki, there was already an article written, and I underestimated the amount of time that I would have to put into it. However, "just" proof-reading and revising became about as engrossing as I thought writing it from scratch would be. The pertinet information was all there, but I would either catch grammatical errors like run-on sentences or redundancies, or I would simply decided to reword it to reflect my own personal style. In my vanity, I would think that I took a literary disaster and turned it into a masterpiece but, when I would reread it, my version was just as bad. Now, I have reached a point at which I am satisfied. Yet, I can not help wondering what the next writer will do. Obviously there will be updates to iWeb that need to be added to the wiki, but my ego wants to believe that he or she will be so impressed with my work that my successor will not dare touch my masterpiece. Somehow, I do not think that will happen. If there is one thing that I learned from my constant revisions, it is that another look and another set of eyes can always improve a situation, even if it is nominally good. We need a variety of perspectives to make a complete message, and technology like wikis and blogs are ideal for that. The wiki literally allows each reader to adjust the last, and in all likelyhood, improve its accuracy and detail. The blog lets me convey my thoughts in a formal pattern, and invite feedback so that I can modify my message and learn from others. I hope that I/we can do this in all other things as well.

Technology Fatigue, OneStep Forward, Two Steps Back

If technology allows us to extend ourselves, does it also allow us to overextend ourselves? My experience this week led me to think so. Trying to balance between school and work, I tend to use an old-fashioned technology to support myself. That's right, I'm talking about coffee! Every Saturday I work till 3 A.M. and drink coffee to stay awake; on Sunday I tend to sleep late as a result, and stay up late to make up for lost study time. Because of a Geology test, I kept myself up late each night this week to study, and by Thursday evening, I basically crashed. I wonder if this is not a symptom of our society's embrace of technology.

The internet allows us to connect globally, and our personal computers allow us to store and access exponentially higher levels of information beyond our physiological capabilities. Theoretically, the availability of all this information should facilitate intellectuals to examine a diverse range of ideas. Certainly diversity of thought would not foment any kind of consensus, but I initially thought that some streamlining of the discussion would take place. Yet, if you look at the website, www.realclearpolitics.com, you see that the opposite is true. Instead of reigning in the wackiness, we seem to have an even larger expansion of Mickey Mouse journalism. Half the magazines portray the Republican Party as racist, mysoginistic, servants of the ultra-wealthy and the other half argue that the Democratic Party is group of pot-smoking, sex-crazed socialists. A bit of a tangent I will admit, but my point is that the technological advances of journalism and politics have not really brought any maturity to the discussion.

I also wonder if this applies to our current dilemma in South Asia. I wonder, if our country had not mastered its global military reach, maybe we would have been forced to find less fossil fuel-exhausting methods of generating electricity and transportation. Technological advancement has also enhanced the power of international terrorism. I mean seriously, why else would the Pashtun tribesman of Afghanistan matter to us (or us to them)? In the context of two wars, it seems that our advancements have facilitated destruction more than growth.

Sadly, my fatigue has reduced me to yet another "Negative Nancy." I blame technology.

Camping with Ihde and Rambo

On page 14 of Chapter 1, Ihde discusses American campers that go camping with a "cocoon" of technology and presents, wittingly or not, a new case for the argument of Natural Born Cyborgs. Not many of us could just walk into the woods and survive like Rambo, but we still want to establish some connection back to our roots (pun intended). However, that requires us to use machines to survive in the environments where our ancestors thrived. I think this is a case where we experience the world as the human-machine. We are now so accustomed and dependent on technology for our survival that the car, camper, etc stops being a vehicle we travel in, and becomes an extension of ourselves. We can not survive without our technology, it is one of our vital organs. So what does that mean for our Navy SEALs and Green Berets? Are we not the same same species, and if not, which one of us is the advanced species? Most of them can learn technology, and often have to given the advances military weaponry has made. Yet, I sincerely doubt that most of our class (myself included) could ever handle the primitive life styles that they thrive in. So, I wonder, if our technology is causing us to devolve.

Education and Multimodalitiy

In Hands and Writing, Sarah Arroyo wrote, "Thus, we would like to resurrect the notion of conferences as places to confer with others: a place to 'confer or consult with others [...] esp. on an important or serious matter.' " This is a part of her larger criticism of pedagogical conferences, that they tend to resort to the "sage on the stage" form of teaching that educators have lauded against. Although I do appreciate her observation, "An increasingly ubiquitous buzzword in the discourse of rhetoric and composition is "multimodal" since text, sound, and image are deployed with equal ease in networked environments." I would say that there is a definitive need for a "multimodal" approach to the classroom. In the context of writing, the various avenues through which the teacher and student(s) can explore composition is clearly amplified this way. However, I must take serious exception to criticism of a speaker in a large classroom that seems to be the latest educational gospel. I for one, learn quite well by listening to a speaker and taking notes and I find it to be the most efficient way me to learn a large amount of new information. However, I will concede that boredom can detract from the learning process and that, boring or not, the incorporation of online devices into this atmosphere can enhance the retention of knowledge. Bearing this in mind, I do feel that the "conference style learning," and online learning tools, that Arroyo promotes, have limited value. I feel that they useful in order to enhance the understanding of a part of a larger idea; I also feel that there is a tendency among students to digress off of topic, or to focus on structural aspects of online devices that detract from learning the primary subject matter. With this educational heresy aside, I wonder if I am in the minority in this, or if there is some type of group think within educational elites at hand.

iWeb, Writing, and Growing Up

While working on iWeb for our presentations, I became very upset at the difficulties I was having learning a new program. I see parallels between this and the ensuing frustration, even anger, produced by some writers. Through writing, a medium to transport ideas, people can introduce new ideas and when they are different from the norm, or challenge our preconceived notions, the differentiation of reactions is enumerable. I myself have been made to laugh, learned to think more deeply, and been outraged entirely. While reading President Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, I learned things I had not thought about before. However, I do not really grow as much as I would like to when I read things by people I already agree with, and I have found my best growth when I read works by authors I disagree with. Intellectual conservatives like Peggy Noonan and George will have presented ideas that forced me to rethink my own in order to justify them, and in doing so, I came to understand those ideas better. Through this process, I discovered more about myself.

The Rise of Technology and the March of Freedom

The last two chapters of Natural Born Cyborgs sum up the basic point that Clark is making. In his example of the scientists at the University of Warwick, he was able to present both points of view and also explain why the advantages of the technological advance of our society outweigh, and possibly cancel out the risks. Fortunately, he does acknowledge some of the complexity regarding this on page 179, "We really do need to pay closer attention to the many ways in which new technologies may impact our social relations, and our sense of ourselves and of others." It seems that through our technological advances we have the potential both to build up and to break down our society. We could descend, as John Pickering fears into a society of people that devalue themselves and those around them, or facilitate more developed cooperation within our society. My estimation is that we will see both evolving among our populace, we will eventually see the traditional conflict between development and deconstruction fought through the medium of whatever technology is developed. There will be governments (including our own at some point in time) to insert themselves within the private confines of individuals as occurred in the 1950s during the Red Scare. However, their will also be those that will use the informative capacity of the internet (or whatever succeeds it) to crush the oppressive regimes and warlords who enslave people through force of arms, by bombarding them with a force of truth (just as Radio-Free Europe did during the Cold War).



My estimation is that we will require an informed citizenry that can communicate and mobilize. The good news is that the advances of this technology only makes this easier.

Chocolate Rain by Chad Vader