Chapter three of our reading talked about choices that seem to be more or less forced on people every day because of the digital age. Rushkoff believes that being forced to make all these choices restricts people and that “a forced choice is no choice at all.” He brings up an example of online profiles and being forced to select your gender, age, marital status, etc., and seems to argue that even these little choices become restricting. One thing he does not seem to realize though is that you don’t always have to answer these questions. A lot of times you can choose to not answer these questions and can even sometimes skip these questions. Where Rushkoff seems to argue that this forced choice is restricting, I think having the choice of not choosing is exactly what the freedom of choice is all about.

Rushkoff went on in chapter four to discuss the reduction of complexity. Where he seems to think the Internet and the digital age make everything less complex, I disagree. In some areas, technology of the digital age has definitely made things less complex. With search engines I can find exactly what I’m looking for at a very quick speed. Rushkoff thinks that being able to do this can make us take the data out of context; but, with a little extra digging this really isn’t true. I can quickly search for some piece of data but then I can also search for that data’s proof. I can find how someone came to the conclusions they did and the context of how the data was discovered. It is true that data can be taking out of context, but if someone truly wants to know about something this does not seem likely to happen.