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

iPod Determination and The Fall of Humantiy

I would like to return to our discussion on Wednesday about iPod Culture. Almost everybody mentioned ways that using iPods have changed our behavior. I think that this has strong parallels with Technological Determinism. Potts says, "as media technologies change, profound cultural effects ensue. These effects operate on both the level of the individual psyche and the social formation as a whole." Our discussion was largely centered around this idea as it relates to iPods. We automatically recognize that someone with both earbuds in should be left alone, that it is common courtesy to take on bud out when you talk to someone else, and we do not talk to each other on the bus anymore. These examples of our cultural norms that have changed from iPod use, suggest that some technological changes are powerful enough to be more than one more element within a larger social movement. The technology itself is the catalyst of this social movement by tapping into parts of our psyche that previously went ignored. In the case of iPod, I am concerned that this technology may have a dehumanizing effect. Instead of socializing with people around us, we dwell in the isolation of iPod music. We are using the iPod like a drug o escape from the pressures of big cities and crowded buses, and we become dependent on it for constant stimulation and when forced to cope without it we have lost the ability to reintegrate into the society.

The Power of the Dream in Scientific Revolutions

This title is for the last post. I forgot to add it before I posted it.