Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Tech-savvy society

In chapter 16 Shirky begins by explain how the people in the industrial revolution coped with the changes surrounding them, which was done by drinking to the point where it turned into alcohol abuse.  Once people woke from this slumber, they had to deal with the advances in technology.  Instead of turning to alcohol again people dealt with this through comedic sitcoms on television.  These sitcoms were a way out for people to express themselves instead of creating unwanted tension in this new society.

Ironically today we have emerged ourselves in this new tech-savvy society.  Almost no one has had trouble becoming part of today’s technology world and I say almost because the people who seem to have issues are the older generation, but even they seem to be adapting well.  Also, virtually everyone is involved in technology whether it is through social media or smartphones. 
The technological advances have created so many new ideas that it has altered today’s society from the industrial revolution society.  Our society today has not had difficulty adjusting, instead we have fully and willingly immersed ourselves into society and as Shirky recommends, we should embrace technology and media in all forms.

The main issue with immersing ourselves into this tech-savvy society is that it is not always a good thing.  While many good things can come out of it, so can many negative things.  For example in this tweet:

  

The message is telling you what you can do to obtain flatter abs, get rid of you muffin top and apparently it is easy to do.  While this can motivate some people to get in shape it can also destroy the confidence of a person who does not look like the girl in the picture. 

Due to how much our society is involved in social media they are greatly affected by what they see.  Young girls aspire to look and have the “perfect” body that is portrayed on the Internet.  Some of these issues become so damaging that it leads to people developing eating disorders and sometimes they are severe enough that they lead to death.  There is no fine print saying that some of these images have been photo shopped i.e. making them unrealistic to obtain, even by the model.  In my opinion with today’s technologically advanced society there needs to be some censoring on what is posted by people, mainly because it can have a negative influence.  This is also the responsibility of the authoritative figure.

Not all of social media is evil.  Some of the things posted on the web can have positive influences and even bring truth to some things, such as this:

 

In this tweet fitness models were asked what their daily routine was like and as stated it is basically a 12-hour workout day.  I bet some people believe it is all fun and no play, but this article basically informs the reader that it is work, and lots of it.  This tweet is also, in my perspective, inspirational and positive:

 

In chapter 16 Shirky was asked by a reporter “how do people find the time” (p 237).  I understood this question to be how do people find the time to be involved with this much technology.  According to Shirky’s response people find the time when “someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, the desire to participate, and the collective goodwill of the citizens to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago” (p 238).  

While I agree with Shirky in the fact that we should embrace this tech society, I do not agree with completely immersing oneself into this technological society.  I believe there is a time for technology and there also has to be a time for person-to-person interaction. If we lose this we basically lose what makes us human.  After all we are not robots. 
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2 comments:

  1. speedysam31@gmail.comJune 2, 2015 at 6:26 PM

    I enjoyed your post about fitness and social media can connect us in many different ways by having the same similarities as a celebrity as well as characteristic that may be similar. However, when a we don’t look like some other people, for instance, ripped abs or skinny as a model. This can be a bad influence on our children. We want to uplift the next generation to become who they are are not a mirror image of a false and pretend person. Social Media can do both uplift and cut down a person’s confidence therefore we should monitor what is posted.

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  2. UnknownJune 2, 2015 at 9:53 PM

    I'm not sure that person-to-person interaction in any form is a valid thing to base humanity upon, but supposing that it was, at what point does person-to-person interaction begin? Fifteen years ago we could draw a pretty clear line between the people we interacted with "IRL" and the people we chatted with on message boards. Now, the line's a lot fuzzier. Where on the continuum does Skype, a technology that adds the real-time face-to-face component of in-person conversation to online communication, fall?

    I'm not sure that most of us have the option of immersing or not immersing ourselves in "tech society" anymore. Even those of us who delete Facebook, replace cell phones with call/text only phones, and avoid the internet except for research are surrounded by people who get instant notifications every time someone comments on their status. There's not really a 'tech society' and a 'non-tech' society anymore.

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