For the longest time, this was also true of textbooks. However, many people are now creating interactive e-textbooks, meant to engage the reader in the material. One new textbook, “Principles of Biology,” sounds like a fantastic online textbook. It is hosted on a website, and if you buy access to the website, you have the textbook for an unlimited time. Throughout the textbook, there are video and audio clips, and quizzes and other ways the reader can interact with the textbook, and as a result, hopefully better learning the material than they would have with a paper textbook (Eisenberg, “Making Science Leap From the Page“). I think, for many students, interactive textbooks like this, textbooks that make the reader apply the information as they are learning it, could be extremely helpful and successful.

The problem, however, is that most online textbooks do not allow this type of interactivity. Yes, they might have an audio or video clip here or there, but that doesn’t add much to the information already presented, other than possibly explaining the information slightly better. Many readers might even choose to skip over the clips, simply because they don’t want to spend the time. Unfortunately, there are an astonishing number of e-textbooks that don’t even have these clips; they are simply the paper version, offered in a digital format. For ten bucks more, I would much rather just have a hard copy.

Some people believe that digital books will become the dominate form of reading, making paper books completely useless. Personally, I don’t see it. I read in an article by Audrey Watters that Apple recently came out with textbooks for the iBookstore, which, basically, is the same type of digital reader that has been out for years now. But more than that, there’s nothing new. And, for me, there’s nothing about digital books that makes them better. I love having a physical book. I like turning the page. I can highlight and tag the pages however I want. It’s way easier for me to find a specific part of the book. And I can actually see how much more I have to read, which is something that I really like. Will digital books take over? I don’t know. Maybe. But unless we see something innovative, something new, I doubt it will happen in the next ten years.

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

http://storify.com/Ben_Jamin17/viva-la-social-media-2

(Click here to see a representation of the Internet’s “cyclical” nature.)

There is a limit to the amount of information that the Internet contains, yet there is not an infinite amount of use to be achieved and ways to navigate this data.There is so much information stored in one location that the average person could never understand every detail, however, the beauty and intelligence of this imperfect system is that it is organized for each person individually. The Garden of Forking Paths shows that the use of links creates an ever-changing map of the Internet that varies person to person and purpose to purpose. The average person can find the information that they are looking for simply by using a search engine such as Google or Bing. Meanwhile the astrophysicist may also locate information that he needs in this complex, yet simplified collection of ourselves, our works, and our dreams.

Databases collect information that you search. These topics could have very incriminating or personal details about a person’s life. Databases, like Google, are able to use this information for their own use and third-party searches. Omer Tene states in his article What Google Knows: Privacy and Interest Search Engines, “Every day, millions of users provide Google with unfettered access to their interests, needs, desires, fears, pleasures, and intentions. Many users do not realize that this information is logged and maintained in a form which can facilitate their identification.” This information can also be criminal and used against the searcher during a trial. Is this system approaching a Big Brother level of control? Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report, has a system of surveillance that uses preemptive attempts of constraint to reduce crime.

Similarly, in Bentham’s “Panopticon,” he describes a prison system of such complete surveillance that those subject to it begin an unconscious process of self-surveillance.  If surveillance is instilling personal unconscious systems of control is that inhibiting our right to privacy? How much surveillance is too much? Is the U.S. reaching that point?

The internet provides an immediate source of information capturing. This type of surveillance is new and evolving. The amount of control this grants databases is extensive. How much of our information will we learn to censor? How much of our detailed, personal data will we allow the system to use against us?

It’s not just photos and thoughts and occasional videos of ourselves and others that we have the decision to publicize and keep track of anymore. It is now easier than ever to pinpoint the location of someone or something, whether it be with a GPS, tracking system, or through an app on your phone. FourSquare has become extremely popular, allowing you to become mayor of a certain place the more you visit it. Other apps let our friends track us to see if we’re close enough to hang out with. Some tracking devices are harmless enough. As noted in Ambient Findability, pets can be injected with radiofrequency identification tags in case they get lost. Personal locator devices can be used to help care for people with Alzheimer’s disease. The Digital Angel alerts caretakers by email when a patient has wandered out of a designated area. At Legoland in Denmark, parents can pay three euros to have their child tagged for the day. The locator, attached by disposable wristband, tracks the child anywhere in Legoland. But when do tracking devices cross the line and start to invade personal privacy? Wherify Wireless GPS Personal Locator for Kids is a watch, pager, and tracking device that parents can lock on their children’s wrist with a special key fob. Would you consider that acceptable? If you want to spy on someone without them knowing, a wide variety of covert tracking devices are sold at websites like spyville.com (Morville, ch.4). Although these websites sell hundreds to thousands of products daily, most people would consider these devices to be a violation of privacy.

Individually-owned tracking devices aren’t the only types of surveillance that are keeping track of people every day. Cameras are everywhere. Almost every business, whether they be stores, restaurants, or offices, and most public places are now being filmed by surveillance cameras. Some cameras record the footage to be viewed later, but many send the footage to live feeds that can be watched in real-time. Many public cameras, such as certain beaches or a live feed of Times Square, can be viewed online in real-time by millions of people at once. How many of these cameras do you pass in a month? A week? A day? How many times have you been recorded doing your every-day activities? Certain cameras are being programmed to serve specific functions/look for specific things. The SENTRI system in Chicago and L.A., for instance, uses microphones to recognize the sound of gunshots; it can then precisely locate the point of origin, turn a camera to center the shooter in the viewfinder, and make a 911 call to summon the police (Morville, p.88). This technology is becoming more advanced every day. One group of scientists are working on a set of flying cameras that look like robotic insects; these cameras will be able to pinpoint specific activities, network with each other, and record virtually anything. (SwarMav). Eventually, all of these networks will be interconnected, and able to be accessed by almost anyone. As quoted in Ubiquitous Mobile, Persistent Surveillance, “Not only will governments and large institutions posses the technology of surveillance (Big Brother is watching) but individuals will be monitoring as well (everybody is watching everybody).” The movie Eagle Eye illustrates a terrifying possibility of what our technology could one day be capable of doing. (You can watch the trailer here.) Although this technology definitely has positive advantages, we need to start being careful of the dangers it possesses.

While some people feel more and more secure with the advanced tech, others are beginning to worry about their privacy, even becoming paranoid. How do we stay anonymous with the technology that is being unveiled every day? How do we keep our private lives private? And if we can’t, do we begin to challenge it, or accept it?

What are we doing to ourselves? Lots of people are starting to ask this question about the wave of dependability Americans have shifted on to the electronic devices that are starting to define our culture. We all knew this day would come, or at least it’s started to come. It seems like just yesterday I was sitting on my couch in the ’90s watching futuristic movies starring characters who could communicate and interact with a simple screen that they held in their hands. (I’m not going to get into holographs and teleportation because we still haven’t crossed that threshold yet, but you get the point) Well that day is here and are we really better off?

In Morville’s book, Ambient Findability, on page 67, he states, “.. our mobile devices also enable us to become smarter (or at least more informed) individuals.” Morville does go into how the technology is almost at a standstill right now because of limitations on hardware, but it still leaves the notion dangling that we are still yearning for more — still infatuated with the stuff that makes our lives easier to handle.

Morville’s statement regarding the technology making us smarter and more informed is somewhat misleading, because it’s not addressing the steps backward we have taken. This has been a hot subject in our classroom discussions — the fact that we no longer have to memorize phone numbers, birthdays, passwords, names, addresses, etc. We have something there to do it for us! My question is, what information have we used to fill that void in our brains? Are the memory cells once filled with information about our best friends birthdays, our emergency contact information, and our meeting times now piled up with even more song lyrics and other society-deemed useless information? Maybe. Maybe not.

In the midst of our changing culture, it’s really hard not to conform to society’s new guidelines. There are those who can manage, but there’s going to be a breaking point when it’s just not plausible to function outside of the box anymore. Consciousness is going to be key here. Consciousness to remain in touch with the information that we really need to remember. Consciousness to put down the phone or the kindle for a few minutes and re-acquaint yourself with what is literally around you at that moment. Consciousness to remember that, while knowledge is a wonderful thing and access to that knowledge is essential, life is not lived through that machine.

Tufte may describe the usage of confection to sort and integrate complex topics and information for the reader, but Lanham makes an equally interesting observation, that we are driven to consume throuhg our love of attention—and furthermore—that the modern society has become a “comedy of commons” that is the internet is an ever growing, usage-fertilized, insatiable plant consuming our identities and ideas and we let it.

But still you might be questioning, ‘where does that leave Tufte and Lanham in discourse?’ Well I shall tell you, just as Tufte describes the authors means of organizing information so that we can memorize and learn it easily through collection or a separation of ideas, we do the same thing while constructing our personal image on the internet, through products, or through our very intellectual property.

Lanham makes an argument that art is an example of our attention economy—that is the economist of this commerce are the visual artists. He hits directly on the usage of Cubism and the modern art revival that places the “locus of art…not [on] the physical object that occasioned the aesthetic response but the response itself.” (Lanham 15) Later in that same discussion he would state, “its aim was to teach us how to toggle back and forth between seeing the art object, and hence the world, as stuff and seeing it as attention. It taught an economics lesson.” (Lanham 15) Here Lahnam and Tufte can be brought together, after all what is art but a way to forward information.

Tufte would interpret the micro-economic properties—if you will excuse the horrid abuse of the word for a poorly attempted pun—of the art, analyzing its confection—why one pictogram is placed here and its meaning compared to the general scope of the piece, where as Lahnam would say that this addresses the purpose of the piece to the piece itself—stuff—rather than the fluff which he believes the modernist and cubist attempted to evoke—the emotion of simply seeing the picture: the reaction itself.

But there are other-ways in which we might coalesce these two individuals. Lanham noted discusses the issue of ownership and property as a means of being an attention grabber. He specifically uses the phrase “walking sponsor”. At what point do we look at ourselves and thing ‘ I wonder if I am wearing this to look in style’ or ‘this will make people think I have money.’ My personal answer to that question is—all the time. I feel that we are always attempting to assimilate and cover the gap between the id and the super-ego. That is, our ego is ultimately at battle with the two forces to bring balance, but it is never able to do so according to Lanham—at least not in this society. Thus as we stylize ourselves we can think of ourselves each as a work of art, each as a confection of work—and we are the artist. Each specific area describes an aspect about us, allows people to learn about us—connect us with those esoteric qualities every person carries and never forget.

Most succinctly we are in a world of economic attention as Lanham would describe it—many would call this unfair—and Lanham might agree as to its undemocratic nature. But perhaps it is for the better, for example, as described by Lanham only a few can have the breadth of the popularity and money spread to them. As Lanham points out, Andy Warhol’s solution of 15 minutes of fame, is a falsehood as it would destroy that which creates fame’s endearing qualities. But what is most interesting is how this plays into a Darwinian structure of social competition.

In this modern era, we do not necessarily compete to become the superior being by reproducing the most—perhaps a distinction which separates us from animals. Instead, we compete to show who is the best, a sort of ritualized matting game simply to show off ones prowess but not necessarily to gain any growth from the matter. In fact, I would make the argument that rather than reproducing physically fame allows us through some social transmutation to forward our ‘genes’ through thought not amino acids.

Think about it—are we not all the products of a cultural generational explosion? To illustrate I shall return to one of my favorite examples, Lady Gaga. I think it is fair to say that she is simply a ‘re-run of Madonna’ to put it in quoted terms although I am unsure of the source. However, in some cases, isn’t Madonna just a rerun of Marilyn Monroe? Don’t believe my postulation here? Please take a look at the following videos:

First here is a video of Marilyn Monroe’s Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend:

Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend

Now you do not need to watch the entire video to see my reasoning here, but through the sometimes overused cliche please compare it to this video produced later by Madonna:

Material Girl

Now finish with the following video by Lady Gaga:

Bad Romance

I’m sure you’ve heard the connection a thousand times, and more than likely will hear it again. My point here isn’t to drive home a bent nail, but to create an image pathway–a confection if you will.  Lastly, I would like to look at this quick clip from a commercial I noticed a few weeks ago, what took me to remember it was the clever juxtaposition of the main character–Charlize Theron–to both Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, and a few other famous model that I am not aware of.

Ja’Dore Dior Commercial

Now what is interesting as Tufte would point out is the placement of characters and singlets to show some sort of connection among the parties at hand. That is to say–the director intended for you to make a connection between Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, and Charlize Theron. I ask you to make this connection so that you can see that perhaps it is how we act, our ‘natural behavior’ that is transfer socially to people rather than a genetic means that makes us superior. Perhaps in this attention based economy, that is how we survive, sire issues, and create a dynasty that lives forever. I probably could have used any number of connections from the popular to the unknown such as the late Lady Di to the new Princess Kate Middleton, or even a counter comparison to Elizabeth II Royal: or for those more inclined to think of a popular TV series, just think the assumed quirks and character types that hopelessly flows from one Dr. Who to the next–and yet they aren’t even the same actor. Perhaps this ‘stuff and fluff’ that Lanham refers to in our economy is actually how we reproduce and spread our ‘genetic’ code in a Darwinian fashion.