And lastly....

Over the course of the term I have learned a lot about my own personal views on progressive technology. As someone who participates in all sorts of modern conveniences like; iphones, texting, skype, facebook, pinterest, etc, it would seem like I wouldn’t have a problem with people being heavily invested in their personal devices. The more I read and the more videos I watched on different topics the more I felt that our society was losing its personal touch and people my age didn’t seem to care. I think have better ways of staying in contact and up to date is great, but it’s an issue when we decide we’d rather use those ways as our primary mode of communication. I definitely look at things differently every time I go online, and think about how different sites affect people and what the point of those websites are. I definitely have a new perspective on how “hooked” I’ve been in terms of technology and how hooked everyone around me is.

Too much

Thinking about Lanier’s argument that the old web is better confuses me. I don’t think it is fair to say that one version of the internet is more harmful than another because really it is all what one personally chooses to do with it. I could simply use the modern internet for research not necessarily all social media things. Or I could have used the old internet to search people’s personal webpages all day. I think that the more the internet progresses there are good parts and bad. With a more advanced internet we have the ability to learn all sorts of wonderful things. I can learn about a Queen Alexandra's Birdwing Butterfly, what they eat, their mating seasons, all sorts of things in a matter of minutes. That’s the great thing about the internet, obviously there are some negatives, and people do useless things and waste hours on the internet doing dumb things like surfing facebook and pinterest.

Jaron Lanier

I’ve watched many clips of Jaron Lanier and done the readings. Lanier makes it clear that he feels that the modern web is a huge problem because it isn’t individualized and it is mass produced. He talks a lot about the glory days of everyone having a webpage rather than something like a facebook or twitter account. Jaron Lanier is an impressive individual; he is a huge figure in the technology community and is well known for coining the idea of virtual reality. At first he was a huge proponent of progressive technology but now he has chosen to preach against it because it is tearing people away from reality.