Digitalization Paper

Digitalization Paper

By Sam Jossen

Humanity as described by the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “the quality or state of being humane.” The state of being human is one thing but the quality is another. What is a good quality of humanity and what can affect it? What would make the quality better or worse? I think the answer is pretty simple. It all boils down to communication. That is the reason why we are on the top of the food chain. We can communicate with each other. Humans as a whole do not like to be disconnected from everyone and because of that they like to have people who they can talk to or even just be in the presence of. They need to be loved and feel compassion. That is what separates us. Now this doesn’t apply to all people. Some people turn to a god for assistance and others turn to another human. It depends on your beliefs but in the end it is the idea of someone else being there that gets you through the day. What the internet is doing to us is pulling each other away from one another, but giving us the idea that we are still together by putting a middle man in there. This middleman comes in the place of a cell phone or a computer with AIM or facebook on it. Technology is slowly taking us away from people and replacing those people with the very computer that sits on my lap right now. This computer gives me access to an infinite amount of knowledge and all I have to do is type in the right words and I can have it. But now is this trade worth it? Is the knowledge really worth the loneliness? I think that it isn’t that is why I believe that the digital age has caused us expose our inner souls and show that we are exchanging our humanity for technology.

We are becoming less social and more digital. With the ever-friendly Internet at our fingertips people are beginning to loose what is really human to them. Going outside is becoming a chore and meeting new people is becoming scarier then ever. Staring at a screen for hours at a time. While writing this much of the paper I have had little to no interaction with other human beings. I have either stopped for a second to go browse the Internet but other then that I have been sitting in the same spot doing nothing but staring at this mind-numbing screen. I can’t even focus, not because this paper isn’t of interest to me. But because this is getting increasingly lonely and that is a feeling that I don’t personally enjoy. In Feed By M.T. Anderson, you are introduced to characters who are thoroughly unhappy but they don’t know that because they have everything they could ever want.

“I ordered a pair of draft pants from Multitude. It was a real Bargain. I ordered another pair, I ordered pair after pair. I ordered them all in the same color. They were slate. I was ordering them as quickly as I could. I put in my address again and again. I was shivering with the cold on my butt. My arms were around my legs. I ordered pants after pants. I put tracking orders on them. I tracked each one. I could feel them moving through the system… I stayed up all through the early morning, shivering, ordering, ordering, and was awake at dawn, when I put on clothes, and went up to the surface, and watched the shit-stupid sun rise over the shit-stupid world.” (Pg 294).

The reason that he is unhappy is because having everything you want just given to you isn’t very pleasing. He is realizing that there was more out there then the Feed and bargains. They were living in a protected bubble and when that bubble popped then the spell is broken and everything becomes very scary all of a sudden. He overloaded. He didn’t know what was real anymore and he just did all he knew how to do, which was buy and consume. He did what he was breed to do. He never knew anything else because he was given the feed at a very early age. It is similar to putting advertising for Pepsi in a preschool. I don’t think that parents would stand for that, yet in Feed if you don’t have one you are an outcast, so in a messed up sense, the parents want their kids to be advertised to by all the major corporations. They are sacrificing what was once right for the ability to know everything. Is this really a stretch from what we are doing? My cousin has a cell phone and he is only 8 years old. He has his own computer and email address. These kinds of things are just the roots for how any big corporation can get in and take hold.

Another excellent example of antisocial behavior also comes from Feed. Everyone has AIM in their head so when he doesn’t want to talk to someone he can just ignore them and delete their messages so its like they were never even sent. “She tried chatting me a few times since she sent me the list, but I had on my busy signal.”(Pg 237). This quote is short and sweet; it really shows how having AIM in your head is better then talking. You can avoid people but not be offensive about it. You can pretend like you aren’t getting messages when you really are. It gives you the option to talk to people or not too. This is exactly how becoming antisocial starts. If choose to avoid people then it becomes a trend. It doesn’t happen automatically. But when you are given the option, you will slowly begin to phase out people you don’t like and therefore miss out on many possible social experiences. So infinite knowledge, yes, being able to hold an interesting conversation, no.

For all of its negatives, the Internet has given us one amazing gift, the gift of knowledge. Because of the Internet we have access to Millions of online databases that can tell us whatever we want to know, whenever we want to know it. On the Internet you can get other peoples opinions on matters that concern you, and if you weed through all the junk you might find something that might actually help you. That is one of the main problems with the information on the Internet; there is a lot of junk or nonsense. There are things that people put there just to mess with you or so you get the wrong answer. Many people think that everyone on the Internet is there to help you and if you ask a question, then they will answer is correctly and politely. But this very often isn’t the case. User run sites like Wikipedia.com can be hazardous to use as information in a paper. “If there’s going to be a free encyclopedia, I’d like there to be a better free encyclopedia. It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing in this way”(Larry Sanger, Co-Founder Wikipedia). Trust isn’t about what you do; it is about how you do it. An action can mean anything; it’s all about how it is presented. My words right now can mean anything but that is getting off topic. What this all means is that we are loosing ourselves in our trust to the Internet and because of that we don’t really know who we are. We don’t know what is true anymore because we can’t go out and get it. We always have to believe what some one else says. It doesn’t matter what they say, it’s all about credibility.

We are using the computer to become smarter but we are loosing our ability to talk to another person. When I think of a way that the Internet could be displayed in a life like manner. I think of a robot. Something without emotions that only feed you answers. In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, all the characters are very robotic in their movements and about what they think and feel because they are all, quite literally, conditioned to do certain things and believe them unconditionally. They don’t really have a train of thought, and when presented with a new idea they get scared.

“Bernard felt extremely uncomfortable. A man so conventional, so scrupulously correct at the Director—and to commit so gross a solecism! It made him want to hide his face, to run out of the room. Not that he himself saw anything intrinsically objectionable in people talking about the remote past; that was one of those hypnopaedic prejudices he had (so he imagined) completely got rid. What made him feel shy was the knowledge that the director disapproved—disapproved and yet had been betrayed into doing the forbidden thing. Under what inward compulsion? Through his discomfort Bernard eagerly listened. (Pg 96)

He didn’t know what to do. The director is the man in charge. He is the equivalent of President Obama, and when a person of such power says things that are so strange and new, we can’t help but be confused and a little bit scared. The only problem was, what he said in the sentences before the quote wasn’t something that was new information. It was information that was kept from the people because it would give them independent ideas and things like that are what make people start thinking revolutionary thoughts. When he was presented with this new idea he couldn’t think of anything to say really. He was conditioned to believe different ideas. That is the idea of technology, to introduce new ideas but integrate them. The only problem is when they are too integrated into our society. Then they become a problem. When people start depending on technology to live then there is a problem. When people don’t have their own thought process because of technology, then there is a problem.

Technology can make crazy people sane and sane people crazy. The idea of it is not to “inform the public,” but to advertise to us. Well that is what I believe. The Internet was invented as a defense system for the United States after Russia launched the satellite Sputnik (www.walthowe.com). It quickly became mainstream and quickly following, became a major source of advertisements. You could advertise to specific groups and have more successful ads. The point behind this is that something that starts out for a bad reason (war) could only end badly. We have had scares before with Y2K which was when all the major world powers were afraid that the computers would stop working because dates were saved as the last two digits so it would go from, 99 to, 00. Which many feared would reset the computers and set the banks back to zero. Although it was avoided, it still caused mass panic because people need technology. Everything is digital and if it were to fail us then we would be set back to the Stone Age. Now we are almost fully dependant on technology and because of that we wouldn’t know what to do if we had it taken away. For the most part, people need to be connected to each other. That is what the Internet is, the real time data from all the computers in the world being linked up. If they were all separate then it wouldn’t work as a system. That is what still confuses us as humans. We are willing to put our faith in technology instead of humans because technology doesn’t judge us. It provides answers. It doesn’t show compassion, it just answers and to most people that is what they want. So what are humans truly exchanging their humanity for technology? The answer comes simply in asking yourself; would you still be as close to your friends if you didn’t have a phone or a computer?

Sources:

• Feed By M.T. Anderson
• Wordpress.com (Lary Sanger)
• Brave New World By Aldous Huxley
• A Brief History of the Internet-Walt Howe (www.walthowe.com)