The Future

Hey everyone! I hope all of you that took the time to read our posts through January have enjoyed it and maybe made you think a little bit. JD and I had a great time writing up our posts for you. We both hope to continue doing this, but it'll probably be at a less frequent basis because of the spring semester starting up. So check in soon and I hope that we'll have some new stuff up!

A Day Away from Media

So for all those who have not read Brian’s post or are interested in what my take is on our media experiment this is what I thought. As most of you know Brian and I decided to see what a 24 hour unmediated day would be like. Being the huge techno nerd that I am, I had huge doubts about this experiment and thought that it was doomed for failure from the get go. So on Tuesday we actually began our unmediated journey. My day began by me waking up at 11am, this was a feat all in itself because prior to my waking up I went to sleep at around 5am. Why did I go to bed at 5am you ask? The reason is because I could not go to sleep for the life of me. Since our experiment began at 12am and I usually go to sleep with the TV on I could not sleep. I tried to go to sleep at about 2am after a rousing game of billiards and “Skip Bo.” I sat in my bed and began to read, when I could read no longer I lay in bed trying to sleep. This began around 3:30am and the last time I remember checking the clock it was 5am. So right then and there the experiment was off to a bad start.

That morning after I showered and got dressed Brian and I began to clean the apartment. The cleaning expedition began at about 1pm and we cleaned from then until about 4pm. Our whole apartment is spotless. I have to say that the cleaning part actually wasn’t that bad, it was something that had to be done and because we had so much more time on our hands we did a thorough job of it. The most notable change was while we were cleaning how quite the place was. It was so quite that we could even hear the humming of the overhead lights and we had to turn them off in order to maintain our sanity. We tried to fill in the lack of noise by singing. That lasted for a good half hour or so and it also provided us with conversation. I have to say though that even while we were singing I began to sing the theme songs to some of our childhood cartoons, Duck Tales, Sesame Street, Pokemon, etc. Even in an unmediated environment media still played a role in our lives.

After we finished cleaning Brian and I went grocery shopping and made dinner for 9 people, once again the noticeable difference was the lack of background noise. Even at dinner we usually have music on just to fill in the silence between conversations but I felt that without the background noise the silence was more uncomfortable. For this reason I also felt more pressure to make conversation just so there wasn’t that awkward lull. I do have to say that after people finished eating we did sit and talk longer than usual. I’m not sure if the conversation was longer because of the lack of media or because we were all genuinely having fun but that was another difference that I noticed.

After dinner people left and it was just me and our other roommate. This was a huge pickle for me because this is where the experiment would really come into affect. I was now faced with the option of having one on one human bonding or the other option, sleep. Since it was only about 8pm sleep wasn’t a real option so me and the other roomie decided to go out and play billiards. We did this for a while and then we came back to the apartment, by this time it was about 10pm and I had made it to the home stretch. After an event filled day I had nothing to do, so I decided to read the book “The Neverending Story.” Our other roommate came in and she decided to read with me. I usually don’t read with other people and didn’t know how this was going to work, I wasn’t sure if there was going to be awkward silence or would we talk and not get any reading done. It was actually an enjoyable experience, she explained things that were going on in her book and I explained things that were going on in mine. Surprisingly two hours had gone by pretty fast but when it was over I was thankful. The reason I was thankful was because I was tired of looking for things to do that would occupy my time. I just wanted to relax and watch a movie. When midnight came around my other roommate and I had picked out a movie and committed to that for the rest of the night.

I don’t know what to really make from this experiment. I originally thought that I would see and talk to people longer than I would usually but that didn’t really happen. The thing that I noticed the most was the silence. I did talk to people more but it was to avoid the awkward silence, it wasn’t because I wanted a closer human experience but it was just to avoid awkwardness. Maybe media has made me uncomfortable around people in silence but I don’t see how being around people in silence could help me either. This experiment has led me to the conclusion that background noise provides topics for conversation which in turn leads people to learn more about one another. Without this medium of background noise there would just be silence and that doesn’t really help anyone.

-J.D. (BigBear)

The Experiment

We made it through the day without any breakdowns of any kind, not that we were expecting any. There was definitely a noticeable difference between life with and without media. I feel that a majority of the difference came with the unfamiliarity of living surrounded with media and not connecting to it. For example, JD and I were cleaning the room, but there was no music or television on. The background noise is something strange to go without. The buzzing sound of the lightbulb seemed even louder than usual in the quiet dorm room. I think the conversations were pretty average, but the lulls in the conversation were a lot more apparent.

I would say that the lack of technology introduced many inconveniences. Trying to find another person in the grocery store is made a lot simpler with the use of cell phones. It made me remember about the times when people used to get paged to the front of the store where their parents would be waiting for them. Now it is easy to just call a person. This is a good example of using technology, but there is nothing which might suggest whether connections have become better or worse because of this. I suppose that the use of phones would allow me to call home and ask if there is any milk left. Without phones, I would have to make sure what I need before going shopping. I guess there would suggest greater attention to the things around us, but to me it just seems bothersome. The primary use of technology is to make more life convenient. I would say that technology does allow people to get more done faster and more efficiently.

The activities I participated in over the course of the day were fairly similar to what I normally do. However, I think I felt a little less rushed while doing them, thinking that I had to burn time in the day. Without technology, I felt at a loss in trying to accomplish many of the “important” things I would have to do like answering emails. The fact that we only went through the experiment for one day was pretty interesting because I simply put off many of the “important” things for today when I could use my computer again. If I simply had no access to a computer for an extended period of time, I would have meet people in person to get answers to questions or use a phone if they were far away. Trying to do things that normally would require a computer seemed pointless to attempt as a computer would allow me to accomplish my tasks much faster. I can type 60 words a minute, but how many words can I write in a minute? Again, this brings up a problem of inconveniences.

As for the personal connections that I made, I believe things were rather similar. One thing that was special is that we cooked dinner for a friend who is graduating soon. One might say that it was because we had more time that we could do this for our friend and make a stronger connection with him. However, I think that this occasion just happened to fall on the day that we were going through with this experiment. The dinner party would have occurred whether or not technology was available. In fact, I think my friends used technology to help coordinate the gathering. About the personal connections, they seemed the same, no stronger or weaker than usual. In fact, I believe that making connections is simply a matter of whether a person wishes to go out and make a connection. Today, we did not have any limitations on our use of technology, but we took the time to speak with a shopkeeper for a few minutes. If we were to go by Pappano’s definition of connection, then we were able to make one despite having technology in our lives.

In some ways, technology may make us feel like our lives are busier than they have to be. We find that news is filled with unimportant facts, yet we feel the need to always know what is going on. However, there are major benefits to technology, and these positives definitely outweigh the negatives. I think that the main point is that technology does drive us to a life as a hermit, shunning all human contact. In fact, technology makes it easier to stay connected to those who we already have connections with.

In Closing

The end of January is approaching which means that our project is coming to an end pretty soon. So for this post, we wanted to bring together some of the ideas that we have brought up in the past month. I believe that most of our work can be summed up into what different people place importance on. In terms of defining our connections with other people, things need to change to incorporate digital means of connecting with other people. Along with the telephone, the internet has extended our reach in connecting with others. While maintaining this idea, I feel that we should not take for granted the conversations we do have with others, whether in person or online. In some ways, I have found myself agreeing about how the use of telephones has degraded to quick questions and check-ups. Personally, I have thought about how I use technology to communicate, and I believe that my telephone conversations rarely have much substance.

Technology has evolved so rapidly that it is often overwhelming when put in perspective. The number of people with computers at home has exploded since the 80’s. It is amazing to see where technology has brought us. But there is also danger in that people can exploit the advantages technology lends us. Advertising on the internet is the main source of income for any website. As technology has evolved to a necessity of life, media and advertising has also become unavoidable. Movies, books, news, games, TV shows are always on hand now. Can we control ourselves from overloading our brains with all this content? Also, with the birth of HDTV and technology constantly placing us one step closer to realism, will we be able to separate ourselves from the fantasy worlds on the screen? There are examples for both sides. The majority of people are on the side that uses technology with moderation. The few deaths caused by technology, which JD pointed out in his last post, are simply insane. The key for anything is moderation. While things like this do happen, people have a firm grasp on reality and understand that the media is created.

For Wednesday, we are going to perform a little experiment. Basically, we are going to (try) and go a day without contact with media. I guess it is similar when one goes camping to get away from everything, but as part of a generation so closely attached to media (having television and computers growing up) it will be interesting to see if we can avoid subjecting ourselves to media and technology for a day. Basically, this means that we are not going to watch television, use computers, cell phones, or read the newspaper. We will be recording our activities over the course of the day. We decided that books will be allowed. We expect frustration entering this experiment and already find ourselves preparing for the impending experiment. Basically, we feel like we must get most of our emails done illustrating how much we rely on technology. While this may seem like cheating, I think the feeling of not being able to check email freely will be a major annoyance. So is there such a thing as “internet addiction” or “technology highs” (getting a good feeling when finding new content on the web)? Well, we are going to take it a step further so stay tuned for the results.

Final thought... kinda

So this will be our second to last post for the month. For those who don’t know Brian and I started writing this blog for a class that we were taking. This doesn’t mean that the blog will cease for all three of you who probably read it but it does mean that the blog will slow down for a little while. Since we are both full-time college students our work will begin to pick up once again but we will try to continue posting at least once a week.

The point of this blog was and is to find out how media affects our social lives as well as our economy. When we first started writing we used Laura Pappano’s book “The Connection Gap” to help put our ideas in perspective. Both Brian and I being the huge electronics consumers that we are, we did not agree entirely with what this author had to say. Pappano’s main belief as I understood it is that we as human beings have to cherish the small connections that we share with people. She says that even if we don’t recognize it, these small connections with strangers, this is what makes up the human experience. She argues that in our day in age of multi tasking that technology seeks to eradicate these loose connections that we have with people.

What I have tried to argue throughout all of my own post is that with all the new technology that we have to let go of this rigid understanding of what social connections are and start a new definition. I believe that we can still have meaningful connections with people in our technological society without sacrificing human connection. I don’t think people really value the connections that we have with the cashier at the local grocery store or the toll booth clerk. The time spent with those people is so miniscule that it pales in the time spent with more meaningful individuals for it to have an affect on us. Instead I believe that technology allows us to expedite our time so that we can spend more of it with our loved ones.

I do believe that along with technology also comes our fair share of problems, like any social shift there will be trials and errors before people get it right. We have to learn how not to immerse ourselves entirely in technology to the point where we cannot separate reality from technology. This seems to be the main issue faced in my previous post about deaths caused by videogames as well as Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. In these cases people used gaming as a substitute for real life experience. This is a danger to social connections because instead of trying to coincide with technology they are using technology as a real world experience. When one does this and does not live the real world experience it creates issues for that individual and they no longer know how to live or behave in the real world.

The question that remains is whether the scale of real world versus technology is balanced or not? Can we as people who have learned to survive in a technological society still survive without technology? Both Brian and I have discussed how we just use technology and media as an extension of ourselves and it is a tool to accomplish what would take us longer than usual under our own devices. We want to test this to see if this is actually the case. That is why starting tonight at midnight we will take ourselves off the grid and disconnect from the media for a period 24 hours. This may not seem a long time for most but for Brian and I this is an eternity.

Both Brian and I honestly don’t know what the outcome will be. We are not sure if we’ll be able to make it 24 hours with no TV, music, internet, or any kind of media (we are allowing books just for the sake of keeping our sanity). We are both in a strange predicament because we happen to also be in rural Maine so it is not like we can just go out to a Starbucks and spend the whole day there. To be honest, I am dreading this experiment. The way that I usually spend my day is by waking up, putting on some light jazz, and check my email. As of recently I have substituted the light jazz with episodes of South Park but it is pretty much the same thing. I even go to bed at night with the TV on just so I can fall asleep.

Before we even begin the experiment I had to spend all day and yesterday immersing myself in the media and getting work done just so I don’t fall behind and miss out while I’m involved in our experiment. What I predict will happen is that Brian and I will spend all day tomorrow getting chores done around our place as well as visiting friends and talking with them. I’ll probably also read a book that I’ve been neglecting to pass the time. All and all though I have to say that I will fail at this experiment. For those who know Maine, you know that if you don’t ski then there is nothing to do. Well, I don’t ski so I really don’t know how to spend my time here. It should be interesting to see whether Brian and I are affected at all by this experiment and to see if we establish more connections with our loved ones. We’ll be back again for our last post of the month to tell you all how it went.

Killer video games

We all know that it’s said that videogames kill, they cause us to kill others and act violently. We discussed this in the post about videogame violence, but what about violence done to ourselves because of videogames? If you’re not familiar with the story there was a man in South Korea who died from online gaming after playing for 50 hours with no breaks. Are people becoming so addicted to video games that they are literally dying from it?

The story of the 28 year-old Man dying in an internet café may seem a little extreme but as I looked more into this I found that there or more incidents of people collapsing from prolonged videogame playing. One tragic story that I ran across was of 21 year-old Shawn Woolley who shot himself minutes after playing Everquest, the same online game that the South Korean man had died from. Shawn Wolley’s story is a little different though, the article I read explains that Shawn Woolley had quit his job, isolated himself from his family, and on Thanksgiving morning of 2002 Shawn had shot himself to death.

I think videogame addiction is real, personally, I don’t play games that you have to invest hours and hours in. I love videogames and there are plenty of games that I have days of my life invested in. I think for Final Fantasy X I have at least 60 hours logged in for that one game. This pales in comparison to most gamers but to me that is two and a half days of my life that is gone. I do have to admit that I’ve never sat down for a 50 hour marathon of videogames but even though I know some have died from it, it does sound somewhat enticing.

The question remains then, do videogames kill? There is no straightforward answer to this question. Like any addiction is it the substance that kills? Or is it the people who abuse the substance that kill themselves? As I have said before I think people make their own decisions. Videogames might have an addicting quality to it but I would not compare it to the addictiveness of an opiate. If the people who play these games realize that they have spent at least 24 hours in one session playing a game maybe they should reevaluate what they are doing with their lives. Easier said then done I guess.

Elite Media and Mainstream Media

Today JD and I will be talking about mainstream media. Some NBC commercials have recently shown the NBC symbol followed by all the other companies under GE. It is interesting to think that NBC a part of this major conglomerate. Noam Chomsky also points out this fact, speaking of other major media outlets, stating “what are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on.” By elite media, Chomsky is speaking about the structure of media. That media is broken up into the mainstream and elite media. Essentially, he believes that the mainstream media is used to distract the masses while the elite media is able to carry out their own agendas.

A real interesting point in his article ties into an earlier post on advertising. That is messages are constantly being sent to us. Chomsky talks specifically about the New York Times and how they are not in the business of selling newspapers, but in fact selling an audience of people to advertisers and also to those who wish to get a set of particular ideas to the public (ideas which conform to the elite media’s desires). Furthermore, the people reading the New York Times are people in positions of power. The New York Times is one of the major news outlets and is the many people go by to find out what is happening in the world. By seeing what is happening in the world, I mean that it is what the elite media believes is important for us to know. Heath Ledger’s death has been headline news this week, and one has to wonder why that is. Most of the news about Britney Spears is similar, but I think Ledger’s death has brought on a lot of attention. I was browsing the NY Times webpage and found that this was a front page story for January 23^rd. Also, there were 1100+ comments for the story after less than 24 hours. There were so many comments that moderators had to stop allowing people to comment. However, an article called “The Path to Super Tuesday” had no comments even after 20+ hours of being online.

When applying this idea that our attention is being diverted from the real issues at hand, there are many examples of this, and how this theory rings true. Celebrity news, sports, even technology are all topics which can be done without. Yet people are so drawn to these topics. I subscribe to the BBC news feed, which basically shows the stories of each day. There are a surprisingly large number of sports related items on a regular basis. Chomsky often uses football as an example as a way for the elite media to get rid of those who might get in the way (not a direct quote). We have questioned the importance of celebrities already, but it seems that the elite media is attaining success in distracting the masses with reality TV, sports, and celebrities.