How are you letting technology damage your child's future?

I’d like to put a twist on my blog today.  When thinking of the effect of technology on children, I’ve been thinking a lot about how children’s use of technology takes away from their time outside and their ability to think for themselves.  However, what about the information, pictures, and videos that technology allows to be shared so easily of children by their parents or other people in their lives?  I’d like to use the example of the Time magazine cover that just hit the news this past week.

This shows a three year old boy breast feeding.  He’s not just breast feeding though, he’s standing on a chair to reach his mother’s chest, breast feeding, and looking at a camera along with his mother.  Before television and internet became so popular, the only way someone would have seen this cover is by seeing the actual magazine.  I haven’t seen a copy of the magazine, but I’ve seen this cover featured on news channels and talk shows, and numerous times on various websites.  The internet and television have allowed the cover of this magazine to go viral.  This three year old boy has no idea what effect this may ultimately have on his life.  The cover of this magazine will probably always be accessible in some source of technology, and this picture will never be able to be taken back.  When this little boy is 15, he may no longer want to have been on the cover of this magazine, and he may have really not wanted it to go viral all over the internet and television, but technology allowed and pushed this to happen. 

Everyone knows about that moment when you start dating someone and you bring them home to meet your mom, and she has all of your baby pictures ready to show them to embarrass you.  Well, maybe that doesn’t happen to everyone, but with technology today, pictures and videos of you as a child are all bound to be shared technologically.  If you have a cell phone with a camera or a camera and the internet, then this technology is allowing you to take as many pictures as you want of your children and post them online.  Who knows who is seeing and spreading the pictures you post of your children who have absolutely no control over it? So the next time you see someone allowing technology to spread picture and videos of their children, remind them that they will still probably be accessible years from now and that child may not like it once he or she is old enough to understand!

Youtube: The New Silver Screen

The possibilities of how technology will evolve are truly endless. When the iPod was released in 2001 it completely changed how we listen to music and impacted the music industry forever. The iPhone was released only five years ago and Apple yet again completely changed the way we would use mobile devices forever.

In 2009 Apple released the iPhone 3GS, which was the first iPhone with high-resolution video recording capability. That same summer I first started working for a video production company in Dayton, Ohio and we had an idea to buy this new iPhone and in collaboration with a local artist film one of the first music videos using only an iPhone. By using the iPhone 3GS and building a jerry-rigged camera stabilizer we were able to produce a very successful project.  The music video only took one day of shooting with Ben Rivet, a musician, using different locations in the Dayton area and currently on YouTube has over 120,000 views.

http://youtu.be/saDguIg9CIE 

After the video was released using primarily YouTube we gained major exposure for Ben Rivet, the production company, and I was even interviewed by Wired magazine on the pros and cons of shooting a music video with an iPhone.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/07/iphone-shoots-high-quality-music-video-with-jerry-rigged-handycam/ 

The purpose of this story is to elaborate on the possibilities of technology in relation to film and music. The iPhone video capabilities have improved significantly since 2009 and the amount and uses of photography and video apps are endless. The easily accessible exposure one can gain using Youtube is also phenomenal. We are all aware of Youtube celebrities famous for all the wrong reasons, but the positive approach that small time independent artists like Ben Rivet can use to gain exposure is much more important. The rise of independent projects using only high-resolution mobile devices is rapidly increasing and it will be astonishing to see how this changes the industry forever.

-Kyle Brock

Technology and real labor work

         Technology as ever increased our production and profitability in the work place. The world has grown exponentially in the tech field the last ten years than ever before. With the introduction of faster more advanced computers in the workplace, we like to think that our tasks on the computers are equivalent to what real labors do. Often at  times we finish and complete tasks on the computer and other devices and do complete tasks that are on a higher sophisticated level, no doubt about that. For a vast majority of people who are connected with the technology world we know this to be self evident that the shift between tech and real labor is somewhat of a gap.
         No matter how much we can plan, figure out, etc.. on the computer, the step from screens to job-site will be a bridge that many people must endeavor. The correlation between people who work on the labor force i.e. construction etc. and people who have office jobs is that obviously people who have office jobs are more in tune with technology and being on computers more. However the difference is that the amount of people who work in the labor force or people who have trades vs people who do office jobs and deal with computers is sharply declining. i have noticed that with labor comes skilled trades that are needed every day regardless of the tech age. The homes, buildings, schools, and almost everything we encounter has to be crafted in one way or another. Many people now days would rather do a computer job than go out and work and learn a trade. Of course it is harder and human nature does find the easiest way to do or get out of things generally speaking, but we need more people who can work with their hands. Kids who play video games on a nice sunny day should be outside doing hands on activities playing in the sun instead.
        The Relation between tech and real labor says a lot about us and who we are and how we communicate. Those who work in labor tend to be easier to communicate to because they may interact more in their environment. The computer environment is much more centered around a single person since they are called (PC) personal computers . The demographics of labor are more for people who come from rural areas, where as suburban areas appeal more to computers in that sense. Rural areas tend to have more people who work labor than suburban areas that have more people who are computer based for their lifestlye
             

Videos for 5-15

Tim Berners Lee -- The Year Open Data Went Worldwide http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide.html Julian Assange -- Why the World Needs Wikileaks http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_assange_why_the_world_needs_wikileaks.html

Videos for 5-10

Morozov -- How the Net Aids Dictatorships http://www.ted.com/talks/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_what_orwell_feared.html Shirky -- How Social Media Can Make History http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html

Research Now and Then

Libraries are not only a great place to have a flash mob…

 … but are also essential in college for studying, gathering research, and writing papers.

Library montage

Today we are able to do all of this from the comfort of our own personal computers in practically any environment. Fifty years ago, yes fifty years ago was how long ago it was that my father was a college undergrad like myself. He was an undergrad Psych student, and most of his papers that he can recall were on studies relating to psychological testing done on willing family members and friends. Many sources that he used were from actual physical texts, magazines, and news articles, when a time without internet and online databases sounds like a stone age to those of us blessed to have grown up in a time where we have always known computers and the internet. The idea of writing a paper this way, without the internet or word processors seems a far fetched, even impossible feat to me, already in this short typed blog I have deleted, and inserted multiple words and ideas. Not only is it amazingly helpful to have online sources available at any time, and to be able to constantly edit a document while writing it, the internet can also tell you how to write these papers step by step if you do not already know. Youtube serves many different video how to’s on the subject as well as the internet serving many many pages of instructions. 

Something that I thought was only possible thanks to the internet, buying papers and plagiarising them, has been around since the sixties however. My father tells me that while he never participated in those elicit activities and was always an honorable student, he admits that there was an underground method to buying and selling papers. It was a word of mouth process, only linked with local area schools, for instance Miami Oxford. 

 If one of use did want to go to the library and actually look for a book, we would only have to log onto a computer and type in whatever you're searching for. But there was a day when you had to actually go through filing cabinets and look through cards to find books. I found this great video that provides some understanding to the actual system and how it is classified.

Here’s another flashmob, just because I love them, at UC

I suggest that while all of our new technologies have seemed to make college work easier, that it actually provides many more distractions.

Technology is Worsening Our Grammar

As we progress in this era of rapid digital advancement, I've noticed an unsettling trend.  Many people are taking more and more short cuts in their grammar, and ignoring the proper etiquette and procedures on how to go about dictating their views.  Take for example the phenomenology surrounding text messaging.  More and more people use texting as their primary sources of communication, and take short cuts.  For example, in a classroom setting where one has to be discreet, the messages relayed are done in a succinct and swift manner, lest the offensive texter is noticed and reprimanded.  Therefore, acronyms and using shortened lingo is a must.  I believe that this is giving a skewed sense of spelling.  I have heard my peers use the "term" LOL in common place conversations without a hint of sarcasm.  And by the way, no one ever hardly is actually laughing out loud.  Its the nouveau version of our generic "haha" and one letter shorter.

Back in the eighties, National Geographic television ruled the ratings, and now in the year 2012, we are inundated with mindless and forgettable rubbish.  In the process of keeping up with our technology, we have also become lazy, creating shortcuts to get by with all the seemingly necessary multi-tasking.  On the show Real World, one of the main characters became a viral sensation after she said "it was not funny." Thanks to youtube, she will never get to live that down.  Also, newscasters and screen personalities pepper their language with expletives, which at one point would be a big taboo, but now creates a sensationalized sense of sick pleasure seeing others mistakes.  Other people's downfalls are something that we as a society relish in because it tends to make us forget and forgive our own personal downfalls and shortcomings.

We are completely saturated with the media presence and willingness to constantly communicate with ourselves thanks to the advanced technologies that are permeating our lives.  Because of this, to compensate, we have truncated some aspects of our lifestyle in order to accommodate this need to be constantly connected.  In email, text messages, websites and everyday language, we as a whole have become more carelessly errant in our rush to get the message across, communicate while playing a game, texting while driving, this is now our norm, and we aren't  seeing/caring that the beauty of proper diction and spelling is fading from our priorities.

This is the Real World clip where she uttered her classic statement.

Also,
damnyouautocorrect is a rather humorous site that thats screen shots of people with miscommunicated textual conversations due to iphone's auto correcting system.

And then there is the I can Has Cheezburger, the mini empire that was built upon the success of cleverly and misspelled captions on crazy cat photos...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/technology/internet/14burger.html