The Cross-Dressing Psychiatrist

This article really made me open up my eyes to the technology world that we all experience everyday. When Lewin created the Julie persona, people believed it for years and she developed very deep freindships and relationships with the people she came in contact with. People really opened up to her, confided in her, and trusted her. I feel that as a psychiatrist, Lewin should have known better than to create a false persona online and let it get that out of control with things. I understand that it started as a way for him to help women more because they would open up to him thinking that he was a women, but you can not decieve people like that. This article also demonstrates how easy it is for someone else to create a false persona online or to present false information about themself. I know a lot of people have facebook and myspace and this article has really made me reflect on how easily it would be for people to create false facebook or myspace accounts. They could post a picture that isnt them, and profile information that is all made up. This article shows how scary it can be to trust people that you have met online that you do not actually know. If a psychiatrist is decieving people, how many other people out there are also decieving people and lying about themselves? And how safe are we when we meet people online and talk to them? Should we trust them? This article posed a lot of interesting questions and has really made me think about how honest or decieving the internet, and chat rooms really are.

Smart Mobs

I wonder if anyone was astounded as me to hear about Filipinos' text messaging habits. In America we use text messaging a lot but i would both blown away and disguisted if i was at a funeral and saw someone doing it. I thought he article made a lot of interesting points. Will our continued use of non-verbal communication lead to a deterioation of social skills? I think so because of the differences in non-verbal and verbal face to face communication. The way you talk over instant messages, text messages, and email is worlds apart from the way we talk to someone in person. Another point i thought was very interesting was about the potential of events such as the Rodney King video. How would have things been different if the video was sent through networks of people instantaneously? The phenomenon of electronic communication has potential for a lot of good things. Imagine you were on your way to Taco Bell and recieved a text message about a recent E. coli outbreak. You later find out there was E. coli at the Taco Bell you were going to visit before you recieved the warning. The example used in the reading about the terror alert was easy to relate to. I use text messages less than often and have never thought about some of the possibilities discussed in the text. Have any of these uses for text messages crossed anyones' minds?

Cyberpunks

In the essay "The cyberpunk: The individual as reality pilot," Leary gives examples of cyberpunks from different periods of history. He reminds us that our label of our species, Homosapiens, declares us as "the animals who think." He also accredits us to the fact that we are coming closer to a mature stage of human life when we can actually think for ourselves. Most people follow, some lead. I personally think that everyone is a mixture of both. Most of the people I have come across in life have taken the leading role if it is something they know a great deal about and I have watched the same people fade into the background and allow others to lead on a discussion or an activity that they know. To be a 'cyberpunk'you have to be self reliant or your own 'pilot' steering your decisions and life and I agree with leary to an extent when he refers to the aspect that during the 21st century, almost all of humanity will be self reliant and independent thinkers and the world will be full of 'cyberpunks.'

The Banking concept of Education

Pedagogy of the Opressed is the essay we read by Paulo Freiere. He believes that education is a narrative model. That teachers are simply feeding information into the student "recepticles" , and that the students really weren't learning. I can kind of identify with this. When I was in high school there were several classes I took that simply had me memorize a lot of information, but I never really learned. Freiere has thrown away the concept that "we construct the world" he says that by learning to read and write we learn a way to understand and interact with the world. This is very true, when you think about the developing countries and their literacy rate, you can't help but think how lucky we are to live in a society where we are forced to be educated up to a ceratain age.He says that man is not a conscious being, but the possessor of a consciousness. I guess this is true in a way too. That we get into such a routine after we graduate high school and college that sometimes we aren't still willing to learn. I believe that we should never stop learning, never stop growing, and never stop trying to enrich our existences.

The UFO Meme

I'd like to start off by stating that I don't really believe in UFOs, or anything of that nature. The stories are interesting, and it makes you wonder if they do exist, and sure, sometimes I doubt my own beliefs. But, what I do believe in is the fact that every piece of data will get twisted by everyone who hears it and decides to pass it on.

So let's say that UFOs MIGHT be real, and the government MIGHT have some sort of "secret" agent in charge of keeping Roswell a "secret." And let's assume that this agent told ONE person of this incident. Well, that one person probably passed it on, and then that person passed it on while adding a dramatic theory to the story. Then that person told another curious human being, etc... So when it finally reaches us, are we hearing the right story? Or are we listening to only what others have made up? Probably.

Then you get into the whole idea of the internet. It's so much easier to put lies and made up "facts" online. There's no confrontation, and as long as your web page looks professional, it might as well be true. Heck, I doubt anyone is going to think twice about it anyway. I think it's going to get to the point where lies become our reality, and those made up stories become a part of our history. There's not going to be a way to identify what is real, and what isn't... unless you were actually there. It all comes back to what Pluto states, "You couldn't know what was true if you didn't have the person right there in front of you... the dialogue providing a necessary check."

"Television has become our eyes, the telephone our mouths and ears; our brains are the interchange for a nervous system that stretches across the whole world..." I don't know about you guys, but this analogy is extremeley disturbing for me, especially when I think about just how true it is. Although to say that technology has become a lifeform of its own may be a bit of an exaggeration, I believe that this statement is not that far from reality. When you think about it, we do most of our socializing through e-mail, on instant messenger and over the phone and most of our cultural exposure comes from television and surfing the internet. As a society, most of our relationships are really with technology, not with people . Even our most intimate relationships are essentially driven by technology.
Ironically, although we see each other four days a week, most of us could probably only pair a few names with the faces of our classmates. We would, however, recogonize most of the names from The Blog. We do virtually all of our communicating through this website despite the fact that we spend four hours a week sitting in the same room. Could there come a day when we won't even be doing that? When we'll be sitting in our rooms on our computing chatting online about the material? It's entirely possible. The question is, how would that affect our traditional interpersonal networks?

Birkerts post

Hey everyone, just making my post on the Birkerts article that I said I was going to do on Friday, sorry it is so late, hope this is what I am supposed to be doing!

Firstly I would like to state how ironic it was reading this article on my computer, when the article is mainly about the fact that nobody reads books anymore and they just use their computers. Other than that I don't really know the point that the author is trying to get across. This article is like a desperate attempt to save something that cannot be saved. He talks about how many people don't read books anymore, and just get their information through the TV or their computers, but he contradicted himself in the article when he talked about the evolution of storytelling (verbal storytelling, the homer period; things finally getting written down; the written type, Gutenberg) so through evolution this is just the next step in the process. Change happens and people need to just acknowledge that fact and deal with it, if we didn't accept change then we would probably still be riding around horseback, or using asbestos in building material. Personally I enjoy reading books, and don't really like staring at my computer screen to read things, but if that is what is going to happen in the near future then I will accept it.

Welcome

Hello Everone - Welcome to The Blog - We are going to be spending a lot of time here, and I hope we manage to have some fun.