Today's class was, I think, one of the clearest ones yet. As we move along the course, understanding and distilling the readings gets easier and a little less stressful.
Developments in mass communications and technology are certainly impacting our society. We talked about how the "normal" way to do things changes changes simultaneously to such developments. For example, we talked about how we would never even consider opening an encyclopedia to research something. We have even made "googling" a working verb in our vocabulary. Past generations had a completely different way of doing things based on their time's technological stance. I love hearing stories about how my mom went through research papers. I can't even imagine myself doing one without the internet.
The internet unleashed information to a scale nobody knew was possible. All of a sudden, you can access anything from anywhere. This shift, however, has various positive and negative consequences. We usually tend to categorize the growth of technology was entirely positive. An implication that stood out to me is that of ownership and the distortion of information. The internet is too big, and too user-oriented to have every source of information validated. Who owns what and what is real? I think that this shift has brought a lot of legal loopholes and complications. I find it amazing that we have all broken the law my downloading music for free. Movie streaming, the use of images from google etc... These are all examples of how easy it has become to obtain and reuse information.
At the same time, would we be able to survive if the web disappeared tomorrow? It's interesting to think about this because humanity existed before it. It is a matter of learned dependence. Technological developments mesh with everyday life and therefore become part of our behavior.
Developments in mass communications and technology are certainly impacting our society. We talked about how the "normal" way to do things changes changes simultaneously to such developments. For example, we talked about how we would never even consider opening an encyclopedia to research something. We have even made "googling" a working verb in our vocabulary. Past generations had a completely different way of doing things based on their time's technological stance. I love hearing stories about how my mom went through research papers. I can't even imagine myself doing one without the internet.
The internet unleashed information to a scale nobody knew was possible. All of a sudden, you can access anything from anywhere. This shift, however, has various positive and negative consequences. We usually tend to categorize the growth of technology was entirely positive. An implication that stood out to me is that of ownership and the distortion of information. The internet is too big, and too user-oriented to have every source of information validated. Who owns what and what is real? I think that this shift has brought a lot of legal loopholes and complications. I find it amazing that we have all broken the law my downloading music for free. Movie streaming, the use of images from google etc... These are all examples of how easy it has become to obtain and reuse information.
At the same time, would we be able to survive if the web disappeared tomorrow? It's interesting to think about this because humanity existed before it. It is a matter of learned dependence. Technological developments mesh with everyday life and therefore become part of our behavior.
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