Choice.

The freedom of choice is the foundation upon which our country was established. Freedom to choose which religion to believe in, or freedom to not believe in any religion. Freedom to protest about the government, freedom to choose what we want to choose ( as confined as legal by our constitution, i.e. It’s illegal to choose to smoke marijuana in the bathroom stall of your high school). In Douglas Rushkoff’s book, “Programmed or Be Programmed” he states that the digital age is decreasing and blindsiding society away from the freedom to choose. He says in chapter three,

“The digital realm is biased toward choice, because everything must be expressed in the terms of a discrete, yes-or-no, symbolic language. This, in turn, often forces choices on humans operating within the digital sphere”

To Rushkoff, everything is yes or no, digitally. He believes that all this ‘choice’ is actually negative. What if someone doesn’t want to make a choice at all? I believe we have the choice to not make a choice at all. I cannot recall on whether or not Facebook allows me to not choose what gender i am, but i do know that many online surveys and accounts such as Ebay require me to fill out whether I am male or female. I do not have the choice in many cases to not choose at all. I do have the choice to lie about my birthday and e-mail in order to obtain a certain subscription or whatever the case may be. In most cases, computer cannot discern whether or not i am lying about my choice. Rushkoff also examines whether having too many choices is good or bad. He says that choice can stop us, making us make a decision to move on and that too many choices can be overwhelming.

I believe that I can choose to go back on my web browser. If i choose to click a certain link and i get to the site, i can choose to stay on the site or i can choose to go back. There are only two choices. Which does coincide with Rushkoff’s ‘Yes or No’ theory of choice.

Chapter three starts out with the quote ” You can always choose none of the above” . I don’t believe this to be true, unless you find the loophole of just exiting a program all together then deleting it and saying ” I don’t feel like choosing any of those options, so I’m not choosing anything at all.” Then, you’ve made no progress to the choices that you made just up until making the ‘none of the above’ choice. Choice is a good thing to have. I can agree that too much choice can be a bad thing, but so can too little. Sometimes, and most of the time, people ARE just looking for a yes or no answer. Sometimes, there ARE only 3 choices, and ‘None of the above’ doesn’t even make sense. (i.e. What is your favorite color a) blue b)Green c) another color d) none of the above) In this case, D would be selected by a crazy stubborn person who didn’t get his/her way because their choice wash in the ‘another color’ category and they didn’t get their voice heard.

In this case, ‘Other:________’ is always the best option.

Picture from : NASET