Thursday, November 8, 2012
Ayo Technology
We spent the better part of the class today discussing modern day technology and it's role in our lives. Even as I sit here typing this blog, "spell check" corrects any mistakes I make. It's just another responsibility we've used technology to remove. As D.r J pointed out, just eight or so years ago, there was no such thing as a "status", at least not in the way we use it. Most of us that had cell phones probably didn't have texting yet. Most of our plans were made through a phone call, or talking directly with a friend. As I mentioned in class, nowadays we can have entire conversations over our computers and cell phones, without ever coming in contact with other humans. Another strange aspect of communicating through texts is that although we create and respond to messages, as of yet it's impossible to convey much emotion. Know how frustrated you get when someone completely misinterprets what you meant and so begins the cyber-battle over whether your message was sarcastic or not. How many times do we find ourselves on Facebook messaging all our friends? How strange does it feel when someone actually calls us and we have to directly interact with another person, without the barrier of a keyboard to relay what we want to say? These habits are all formed from the constant incorporation of new technology into our daily lives. I've already seen several pictures of people and their glorious new iPhone 5 on Facebook. Speaking of pictures like these, do we put them on the web for all to see for personal reasons, or social ones? The truth is that we know people will look at our photos, our profiles, and this forces us to create a digital identity for ourselves. What do we do with this almost separate identity? Unlike our physical life, in which we cannot always control what people use to judge our personality, digital profiles like facebook allow us to tightly control how people see us. The flip side to this is that the digital profile of our actions and memories will always be there, whereas in real life many actions go unnoticed or are quickly forgotten. So, are we beginning to experience the digital version of our life as more real/important than our physical existence? What other technology in the past decade has required us to change how we socialize?
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It is very curious indeed how we can choose to present ourselves in very particular ways on our profiles. I am not convinced, however, that we control our physical lives any more strictly or loosely than our facebook profiles. Both of these "identities" (if they can be considered to be 2 separate identities) are monitored by us as we present them and then are utterly out of our hands as other people then have the power to interpret and judge for themselves. Sure, we can pick a particular profile picture for people to see every time they view our page, but don't we also pick a particular way to present ourselves when we get dressed in the morning and then interact with people in relatively predictable ways? And can't profile pictures or statuses and our physical actions both be interpreted negatively or positively depending on who sees and what they know or don;t know about our character/tendencies? Perhaps the internet doesn't so much TRANSFORM the way that we interact and judge so much as PROVIDES A MEANS FOR those ways we interact and judge?
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