This week’s reading was chapters 3 and 4 of “Program or Be Programmed” by Rushkoff. I personally did not agree with both of the arguments Rushkoff was trying to make during these chapters. Chapter 3 of Rushkoff’s piece went into great detail about choices we have to make on the Internet. He explains that the digital age is forcing people to make choices based on restricting questions. For example, Rushkoff talks about how the digital realm is biased towards choice because everything must be presented in the form of discrete, yes or no, symbolic language. I disagree with his theory of how decisions are being forced upon us. It is completely up to you to fill out the information when creating a profile for a social networking site. You get to choose your gender and age but nobody is forcing you to complete the information unless you really want that information out there. People have the common sense to understand that if they enter their address and other personal info, that it could very well be leaked to a database. That’s why it is your choice to let the information to go on the web, not a force pushing you into giving your personal info to the Internet world.
Chapter 4 of Rushkoff’s piece talked about the complexity of the Internet, and how it seems to be making things less complex. When I heard this stance on the complexity of the Internet, for some reason I thought of how confusing The Library of Babel made the Internet seem. If anything, the Internet keeps getting more and more complex in my opinion. There is an almost seemingly unlimited amount of genres and topics you can search on the Internet. This can give people multiple answers for the same question they pose to the Internet. People will search an illness on Google, and find about one hundred different things their illness could possibly be. The Internet is a gateway for accessing an extremely complex assortment of information, with different paths and answers for the same question. It’s up to the user for which path they would like to take.
