Archive for January, 2008

Analog v Digital

{ January 28, 2008 @ 9:56 am } · { Reading }
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How can you define intelligence? The article “Being Analog” argues that computers won’t be truly intelligent until they are able to deceive. So that implies that deception equals intelligence. Hmm. Does the opposite apply, as well? Are humans who can’t deceive not intelligent?

Donald Norman points out that it now takes several decades to become a well-educated citizen, because our knowledge is cumulative. If we look at computers, we can really say the same thing; without cumulative knowledge in technologies we can’t further develop these either. In fact, you could argue that computers are far more intelligent, simply because they don’t have to start the learning process all over every time – the information is already stored in its system.

So it takes several decades now to become a well-educated citizen. Being a well-educated citizen means you’re intelligent. But look at our society a few decades ago, and compare it to today; I know plenty of generation X people who’ve had limited education, and they are very successful today. These are intelligent people. It is true, however, that more education is needed today to acquire a similar kind of success. I feel an enormous pressure to continue my education, even after I finish my B.A., to be able to compete in the market.

What I think is happening is simply that times have changed. And the word “intelligence” has changed. What intelligence used to mean has been replaced by a different kind of intelligence in which man and machine live and work together. Machines can’t live without humans, because we create and operate them. We can’t live without machines, because they are helping us in becoming intelligent, and are aiding us in our ever-expanding education. We just need to find a balance in combining the two, a way to be analogically digital, or digitally analogical.

  • How much education will one need a century from now, as a result of the move from analog technologies to digital technologies?
  • What sort of new issues do you foresee arising given our rapid globalization and digitization?
  • How can you define intelligence?

Reflection on Time Worthiness

{ January 24, 2008 @ 4:45 pm } · { Assignment }
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Time is money. Whether we want to or not, we have to make decisions what is worth our time, and what’s not. I think time worthiness is closely related to what you want your return on investment to be.  In class the example was given about booking your travel online, and that it’s often better to just book it and not worry too much about getting it $10 cheaper elsewhere after looking for hours.  But how do we know it’s going to be a savings of only $10? Maybe we’ll be able to save $200, or even more. And then, all of a sudden, it may become more interesting to do some more research.

If you have an abundance of time and you can save a few bucks, why not? If you have nothing else to do, and you need to find a way to save as much money as possible because you’re close to, say, filing for bankruptcy, why would you not spend as much time available as you can on saving money? (Granted, the people who have this kind of time should probably be looking for jobs, and not go traveling, but this is beside the point.)

Personally, I like knowing that I did my best to get the best deal. This may not be as important for a loaf of bread, but when you decide to purchase a car, for example, you have to know what’s out there to negotiate the best price. If you know that a car with X miles that is X years old costs $15,000, why would you simply pay $25,000 for it, without doing your research? Maybe the people who do this are the ones who should just give their money to those mentioned earlier – that would be a win-win situation.

The Online Search

{ January 23, 2008 @ 10:10 pm } · { Assignment }
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The difference in results between between <information AND overload> and <”information overload”> is that when a search is done for information AND overload, the search results are much higher because it looks for both words, but not necessarily together. Not only that, the results that come back aren’t necessarily related to the topic of “information overload,” only related to “information” and any type of “overload.”

When searching for the same criteria, but with the tick box “Scholarly Journals” selected, it comes back with less results, because it eliminates anything that is NOT a scholarly article. The difference between the tabs  of “Scholarly Journals” and “Magazines” is that the magazines are any magazines that are NOT scholarly, and the scholarly journals come back with a much larger search result.

In an advanced search, when entering the same keywords of “information overload,” it defaults the search within “citation and abstract.” If in that field you select different search criteria, for example by only selecting “abstract,” then the results are much smaller, because it eliminated any search results that in the previous search were included as a citation. If, instead of “abstract,” you search in “document title,” it comes back with a smaller search result still, as it becomes a narrower search.

Doing a search in Google proved quite interesting. Starting out with a search of <information AND overload>, it came back with about 1,070,000 search results, and included a comment ” the “AND” operator is unnecessary — we include all search terms by default.” The difference between doing a search on “information overload” and information overload without quotation marks is that in the latter the words information and overload don’t necessarily have to be together, but somewhere in the text – this yields more results. The same thing happens when the search is done in scholar.google.com, except that in these searches only scholarly articles are searched, as opposed to everything. This works in a similar way when a search is done on images.google.com.

In short, if you are looking for a specific phrase or set of words, it’s better to use quotation marks, because it gives you better results, and it eliminates results that are of little relevance to what you are looking for.

Houston, We Have a Problem

{ January 19, 2008 @ 5:29 pm } · { Reading }
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Last quarter I had to write a few articles for a class that were related to the different roles that communication media play. For a couple of these, I had to use external data to illustrate how some of these roles work in real life. So I started my search on the Internet with full confidence that I would find information I could use. Boy, was I wrong. Doing a simple search through Google is not too hard. The hard part was interpreting the data and ensuring that I was looking at something that was not only accurate, but also appropriate, and current. I also had to make sure they weren’t “false drops” as Nelson points out in his article “We Have the Information You Want, But Getting It Will Cost You: Being Held Hostage by Information Overload.” Eventually I found what I was looking for, but it took a long time.  

Just the other day I had to obtain a copy of an easement at the King County administration. Again, finding their website wasn’t too hard. It was getting through the design of the website to find a record that supposedly is “public” that proved to be almost impossible. Time is money, so when I still couldn’t find what I was looking for I decided to simply e-mail them. They replied by giving me a URL through which I found my easement in about 30 seconds. It WAS actually on their website, but without that URL I wouldn’t have found it without spending my expensive time on it.  

Long story dull; my success in life depends strongly on information. I can’t do my job without external information, and in writing insightful papers, information is crucial.  I wouldn’t say that my life is affected by information too much or too little. I would say that we simply have a problem getting to it. Quantity isn’t important – quality is.

  • If everyone has so many struggles finding information on the Internet, what can we do to make finding it easier?
  • How can we get around “false drops?”
  • Instead of being held hostage by information, how can we change the hall of mirrors back to a window to the world? 

Seattle Times RSS Feed

{ January 16, 2008 @ 6:11 pm } · { Assignment }
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I often read the Seattle Times, both the online version and the paper version, but I don’t always have time. So I decided to set up an RSS feed for the Seattle Times. When I clicked on the icon, it asked me if I wanted to add the Seattle Times to my feeds, and when I clicked “yes,” it got added to a section called “feeds.” This is a section that works similar to my Favorites or History, which, when you open it, lists all the feeds you are subscribed to, and when you click on a specific slide, it lists all the items that were put on the feed for me to read.

 This is a great way to keep myself up-to-date on the latest news and events I’m interested in, even when I don’t have time!

Revisited – My Digital Life

{ January 15, 2008 @ 2:39 pm } · { Assignment }
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Ever noticed the digital influences in your life?

Here’s what my life looked like about 15 years ago: An analog alarm clock woke me up every morning, at which point I would get up, brush my teeth, get dressed, and head to school or work. The only digital item that I used then was a calculator, and maybe a microwave to heat up a snack of some sort.

Today, almost EVERYTHING I do is done digitally. I thought about it first in the sense of work and school, studying on my laptop, using the internet for research and what not, and watching television. But now that I think about it, it’s a bigger influence in my life than I thought. When I take the bus to work or school I use a bus pass that I have to slide through a reader that knows I have a pass with the right fare. When I get to the office, I use a card reader to open the door. When I want to do something fun, I browse the internet, or respond to emails I get from venues about specific concerts. I even buy my tickets for these concerts online. When travelling abroad, I buy my plane ticket months in advance, and when I show up at the airport and enter my name in the system at the self-check-in counter, it has all the information in there that I provided months ago! I pay my tuition online, take classes online, check my grades online, and track my progress toward graduation.

All my family live in the Netherlands, Germany, and Israel. Because we live in different time zones, it has proven very difficult to keep in touch on a regular basis. So, we now talk through MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger when I’m at work. Without this technology, it would be much harder for us to keep each other up to date on what’s going on in our lives, and I would completely lose touch with my home country. Thanks to the internet I can now live 4,000 miles away from “home” (although I now consider Seattle my home), and still feel as if I’m close to the Netherlands, even though I’m not. I can order Dutch foods if I’d want to, and listen to Dutch music, or Dutch radio. I could even watch an episode of a children’s program in which my niece could be seen playing and running around, and answering questions.

The internet has made my world smaller and within reach. I only wonder; what is the correlation between having digital gadgets and tools that supposedly make our lives much easier, and that I keep getting busier and have less time for activities? Why do I have more trouble keeping up with life now than I did 15 years ago?

The Rise of the Internet

{ January 13, 2008 @ 8:27 pm } · { Extra-Credit }
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Many of us, including myself, thought that the internet was an invention of the 90’s. It was, in fact, something that had been worked on by the U.S. government since the 60’s to share ideas and computing powers and programs. By creating a distributed network of information between the UCLA and Stanford Research Institute, it allowed different computers from different manufacturers and different operating systems to communicate information in a network that did not have a central “brain” but that linked those separate brains together; an internetwork or internet.

It wasn’t until 1991, however, that the internet became accessible to people for non-commercial reasons. This is right around the same time I started experimenting with the internet; I created e-mail accounts, and my own webpage on Geocities.

The internet has opened many doors for me, as I’m sure it has for millions of people. For someone with a curious mind, it makes it possible to search for information that was previously either not available, or took a long time to get a hold of. Now, everything is at our finger tips, and we only need some basic computer skills to get it to work in our favor.

Like anything, though, there are also downsides. In warfare, this medium can work against us. It makes me wonder; when do we have access to too much information? What information should be restricted or censored? With all the violence that is going on in the world, is it helping our society, or is it causing more harm? What effect will the internet and its “bad” influences have on kids today?

Time will tell, for the internet is still a relatively new invention. Let’s hope people will use it for good, as it was intended for.

Evolving Media

{ January 13, 2008 @ 7:24 pm } · { Reading }
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In both the reading by Roger Fidler on mediamorphosis and the reading by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin about remediation, the authors present media as ever-evolving tools in society. This seems fairly obvious. What hadn’t occurred to me is that every new medium is a compression of the previous medium. Cellular phones today, for example, are often smaller than a credit card, whereas the very first of these devices were too large to put in your pocket. I wonder; how small can we really go with all this compression that we’ve already gone through?

“A medium is that which remediates … earlier technologies,” according to Bolter and Grusin. And yet we have media and technologies today that we didn’t have a century ago. If we keep growing exponentially as we have, what new technologies will we have a century, or even a decade, from now? In “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush in 1945 describes a device he named “Memex” that for its time seemed like a futuristic idea, and hard to grasp. But here we are now in the 21st century with technologies that describe just that what seemed implausible. This device, Bush said, could be consulted with “exceeding speed and flexibility,” which is exactly what personal computers and the internet make possible. But not only that, it holds an incredible amount of memory as well, not to mention easy search functions to look up whatever we need more information on. But what will the Internet look like a century after Bush wrote his article?

I can see a very strong emphasis on blogs, or anything else that enables citizens to make their voice heard. It seems likely that more people will take on a journalist role, and maybe even go into danger zones to get a scoop they hope on getting and thereby making it possible for them to have their five minutes of fame. If new media is going to be further compressed, then more information will be at our fingertips. But, what impacts will all this have on our society?

Hello world!

{ January 9, 2008 @ 8:49 pm } · { Assignment }
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By unapproving the existing comment, it “deactivates” the existing comment by turning into a light grey. It changes the appearance of the blog post by showing my post on the home page.

Digital Media Use

{ January 9, 2008 @ 5:49 pm } · { Assignment }
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About 100% of my time awake I use digital media.

At work this includes using the internet for research or other purposes, composing e-mails through Microsoft Outlook, or working on spreadsheets or documents in any of the other programs that are out there. Even our company phone system, VOIP, is digital.

At home I watch television digitally, and am also hooked up to the internet through my laptop. My dear old BlackBerry never leaves my side on which I not only place phone calls, but also do internet searches, use Google maps to find my way to locations I haven’t been to before, use my camera, or connect to Yahoo! Messenger, or MSN Messenger.

When I’m awake, I’m online.

Sometimes I even use digital media when I’m NOT awake, by plugging my iPod in my alarm clock and setting the alarm or setting the sleep timer, for instance.

What does all this mean? We are surrounded by digital media – it’s everywhere we go, and even if we would try to escape it, we would soon find out that living a “normal” life just doesn’t seem possible without this new-er type of media anymore. We already depend on it too much. Why else would people refer to a BlackBerry as a CrackBerry?