On The Importance of Silence

In Silence and the Notion of the Commons, Ursula Franklin that modern sound technologies have created too much false silence, particularly in the common place like shops. The problem Franklin discusses is that no one seems to notice or care that their silence is being taken away from them without their consent. Nobody gave stores permission to play background music all the time, but they do it anyway, stealing people's silence in which they can think. Stealing people's silence is done as a way of manipulation with background sound so stores can sell more and people can be influenced to feel a certain way at sporting events. Franklin argues that silence is valuable and people should fight to perserve it. She asks why people aren't fighting for their right to silence like they fight for all other rights because silence is valuable. The Quakers believe that silence was necessary for people to worship, true silence that is. The problem with today is that many instances of silence are false silences, created by people shouting through microphones or megaphones so that a particular audience can be easily taught one idea. People are being robbed of their right to silence and no one even seems to notice what has been lost, what has been taken from them without their permission.

"Silence, in addition to being an absence of sound, is defined by a listener, by hearing" (Franklin 643).
Silence is generally defined as the absence of sound, no more or less than that. A person must be present, a listening person, in order for there to be a definition of silence. Sound must be known before silence can be.

"But in many cases silence is not taken on voluntarily and it is this false silence of which I am afraid" (Franklin 643).
Franklin goes on to define this false silence as the silence forced upon people by loudspeakers and megaphones. This silence is unnatural. It's there so people can experience a singular planned event instead of experiencing life as it would normally be.

"... we also have the right not to be assaulted by sound, and in particular, not to be assaulted by sound that is there solely for the purpose of profit" (Franklin 645).
Sometimes sound is piped into stores so people feel happy and want to buy things. In doing this, the store takes people's silence away and assaults its shoppers with sounds, just for the sake of profit. The use of the word "assault" is an interesting choice because assault has a violent connotation and generally background store music isn't thought of as violent.

"We are programmed. And we don't even ask for a quiet space anymore" (Franklin 646).
Do we really never ask for quiet spaces anymore? Isn't this too extreme? Some people prefer to study in silence or do work in silence.

"Flying is no longer a big deal, but a handmade dress or a home-cooked meal may well be special" (Franklin 645).
Once again, isn't this too extreme of a statement? Some people could get home-cooked meals almost every night, but are rarely ever on planes, yet they're still one-hundred percent involved in the modern world.

(I didn't know how to cite this source, like the Eiseley one, without a copy right page.)

We Are Not Machines

In "The Bird and the Machine" by Loren Eiseley, Eiseley gives his opinion on the new, modern idea that people are just machines, and to an extent, that the entire world is a machine made of smaller machines. Humans, upon the discovery of the cell, began being seen as a machine made of billions of tiny machines, obviously cells. Eiseley sees that there's something different about the human machine: whenever it changes, it's because it changed itself. Eiseley goes on to say that before he learned that life separated humans, mice, and birds from machines, he learned in the dessert that time "is a series of panes existing superficially in the same universe" (Eiseley 603). In this same desert, Eiseley captured a hawk in an abandoned house. This hawk had a mate who frantically waited until Eiseley returned the hawk he'd taken. This is where Eiseley learned the difference between beings with life and machines. A machine wouldn't wait around for hours for another machine, a machine wouldn't hurt for another, a machine wouldn't care about another machine, a thing with life does, setting itself apart from machines.

"It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it" (Eiseley 601).
The idea that specific memories come back when our brain makes new, specific connections to teach us something is interesting. Sometimes certain memories are shoved aside when they come back because they're painful to remember, but they're a reason for those memories coming back, to teach something crucial.

"It's life I believe in, not machines" (Eiseley 602).
Eiseley sums up his entire argument fairly well with this one, simple phrase. Eiseley acknowledges that machines are smarter and can complete similar tasks like creatures with life can, but that there is something fundamentally different about creatures with life and machines.

"... if the electronic brain changes, it will be because of something man has done to it" (Eiseley 602).
People say, at least in sci-fi movies, that machines will one day start improving and building themselves when this simply isn't true. Machines will only change when people, who have something they don't, change them.

"I learned there that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe. The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm" (Eiseley 603).
How does this connect to the previous paragraph? How does this relate to the rest of the story?

"I stood on a rock a moment looking down and thinking what it cost in money and equipment to capture the past" (Eiseley 604).
What else does it cost to capture the past?

(I did not know how to cite this source without the copyright page of the original book.)

TED Talk

Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel talk about the creation of the Ngram in their "What we learned from 5 million books" TED Talk. Aiden and Michel began by asking if the well-known statement, "A picture is worth a thousand words," is true or not. They came to the conclusion four years later that a picture is definitely not worth a thousand words. It's worth 500 billion words. They did this by figuring out a way to analyze human culture through Google's scans of 5 million accredited, useful books. With these scanned books, they can search for a particular phrase or word and find out how many times it was used in a particular year and then graph all the years on the same graph, showing a trend of a particular word's use. Through these graphs, people can see what culture was focusing on in a particular time period and the influence of suppression and propaganda can be seen as well. Now, Aiden and Michel's Ngram technology is available to the public through Google. They quickly discovered that it was just as interesting to see what words people graph as it was to graph words themselves. In conclusion, Aiden and Michel set out to see if an old saying was right or wrong and instead discovered a way to graph cultural changes throughout the years.

"What we're left with is a collection of 5 million books, 500 billion words. A string of characters a thousand times longer than the human genome. A text which when written out would stretch from here to the moon and back 10 times over. A veritable shard of our cultural genome.
Considering the fact that over 129 million books have been published, Google has only scanned 15 million, and they're only considering 5 million of these 15 million. The true amount of characters of "the human cultural genome" would be multiple times more astounding than this. This is already an astounding amount of human culture, but it is absolutely no where near all of it.

The idea that no one cared about a year before it got there and that, progressively, people care less about a year sooner after it ends now than they used to is mind blowing. How would this graph look for years like 2000 where there was lots of anticipation for it? Or 2012?

Aiden and Michel's point about censorship with the artist Mark Chagall in English literature versus German literature was extremely interesting. The use of a famous person's name generally progresses in an upward direction, unless there's an outside force changing the data, such as censorship. Chagall, a Jewish artist, was censored in Nazi Germany, so his name wasn't mentioned at all at this point in German cultue. When Nazi Germany was defeated, his name became popular again. Outside influences on culture like censorship and propaganda show very clearly in the graphs of word usage as well.

"We found some pictures that are worth 500 billion words."
This concept is both extremely impressive and extremely confusing. How is a single picture worth 500 billion words? How does the original question of whether or not a picture is worth a thousand words connect to the rest of the talk?

It's interesting to see what everyday people type into the Ngram. What does this say about culture, that people find what other people are curious about interesting?

Aiden, Erez Lieberman and Jean-Baptiste Michel. "What we learned from 5 million books." TED. Boston, MA. July 2011. Guest Lecture.

Computers Everywhere

There’s been a noticeable increase in the amount of technology, specifically computers, in my house since I was little.  According to my mom, my first real experience with using a computer at home was when I was two. It was one of those large, tan desktop computers and all I did was play games on it. Still, my experience with computers began very early, early enough that I don’t remember my own first encounter with computers in 1998. I think that’s strange considering that home computers weren’t really a common thing until the 1980’s.

            My personal earliest memory of computers was a few years later when I was about six. My dad and I used to sit together and play this one game that was full of math questions. I don’t remember how it exactly worked, but you had to do basic addition and subtraction to move onto the next level. If I tried to play it now, there would be a few problems. One, I’m pretty sure we threw it away a long time ago. Two, I’m pretty sure I could pass all the levels easily. Three, it wouldn’t be compatible with the computer I’m typing this story up on, so I’d have to go grab another computer to use it. The last one sticks out because now I can casually say, “Oh, this game isn’t compatible with my laptop’s operating system, so let’s go grab another one that nobody is using right now,” when I could have never said that back when I was six.

            Apparently no one in my house is one hundred percent sure, but the consensus seems to be that we got our first laptop in our house when I was about eight. It was a blue Dell laptop and it was my mom. It was absolutely massive compared to laptops today and weighed easily three, more likely four, times as much as the laptop I’m using now. Also, it would be incredibly slow to me now, but when my mom got it, there wasn’t anything more in the world that I wanted to play with than that laptop. I thought it was the coolest thing that had ever existed. I didn’t get to use it that often because it was my mom’s and I didn’t have a reason to use it since there aren’t a lot of papers to be written in third grade, but I still wanted to.

            I have absolutely no idea how many laptops we’ve had in our house since that first one. I don’t exactly remember my first laptop since all of mine we’re given to me after my mom got a new one. They blend together for me. Three laptops have died in our house, not all of them mine, and one of them within the last month. I got my first brand new laptop for my last birthday. My mom has finally settled with her current laptop, so I don’t think we’ll be getting a new one soon.

            In my lifetime, there used to be a singular desktop that we didn’t necessarily use every single day. Now, we have double the amount of computers than we do people and three of them get used for hours on end every single day. With that continued, every day use, has come a dependence upon each of our specific chosen computers working. Over the summer when my laptop’s screen was broken, I had to send it away for not even a week and it was like suddenly I had absolutely nothing to do. I had “nothing to do” even though there are more laptops in the house, even though I have a phone, even though I have friends I could’ve hung out with, even though there were plenty of other things to do, I still acted like I had nothing to do and complained about not having my laptop. My parents are exactly the same way now too. Without our computers, we all end up cranky and we complain a lot. It’s a weird thing to think that in fourteen years absolutely everything about computers and technology as a whole changed in my own house. If I try and imagine the three of us sharing one computer, the only possible ending is disaster simply because we all need and want computers for different things at the same time. What worked back then doesn’t even being to work now. 

Technology and Education

In the first chapter of Technopoly by Neil Postman entitled "The Judgment of Thamus", Postman asks whether or not technology has a positive or negative impact on culture, education, and life using the story of Thamus from Plato's Phaedrus. Postman discusses how technology drastically changes and alters a culture when it has been let in by the people of that culture. New technology and media change the meaning of foundational words and ideas in culture such as freedom, truth, and wisdom. Technology also changes the "winners" and the "losers" in the population. Those who fully embrace new technology are the winners in this situation. Those who don't embrace it, perhaps because they don't want to or because it might eliminate their job, are the losers. Technology also changes the way ideas are presented because the medium of delivery of an idea impacts how the idea is accepted, connecting well to technology's impact on education. Children these days are so plugged into the computer and the television that traditional education bores them easily and then they stop learning. According to Postman, as new technology is introduced, people personally remember less and less and rely on recorded data around them to know things. In conclusion, technology has a drastic impact on culture and the people in it as well as the main ideals upon which a society is built.

"Eventually, the losers succumb, in part because they believe, as Thamus prophesied, that the specialized knowledge of the masters of a new technology is a form of wisdom. The masters come to believe this as well, as Thamus also prophesied" (Postman 11).
The reason all people begrudgingly but eventually succumb to new technology and begin to use it is because they believe that the people who use this technology have new knowledge and more wisdom then they currently do. It's interesting how man seems to return to the quest for wisdom.

"This is the sort of change Thamus had in mind when he warned that writers will come to rely on external signs instead of their own internal resources, and that they will receive quantities of information without proper instruction" (Postman 12).
It's not just writers that come to rely on external resources rather than their own. All modern people in this modern age rely upon Google for a vast amount of their "knowledge" and this is not necessarily a good thing. It's not good because they're receiving this knowledge without valuable expert instruction. Some parts of society are almost devaluing expert instruction.

"The paradox, the surprise, and the wonder are that the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; it ended as the technology of the greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money" (Postman 16).
The clock is thoughtlessly relied upon and used in today's culture for literally everything. It wasn't always like that though. It's interesting to see how quickly, in the grand scheme of the universe anyway,  the clock was corrupted from its original purpose.

"Technology is neither additive nor subtractive" (Postman 18).
Postman goes on to say that technology "generates total change", but how is total change neither additive nor subtractive? Surely the change must occur in one direction or the other.

"Orality stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility which is the context within which Thamus believed proper instruction and real knowledge must be communicated" (Postman 17).
Doesn't a text help communicate knowledge to more people? Does the knowledge stop becoming "real" when it's printed?

Postman, Neil. Technopoly. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Print.

iPads vs. Mothers

"The Touch-Screen Generation" by Hanna Rosin asks whether or not young children should be spending so much time with iPads in their laps and the television remote in their hand. Rosin, upon relaying her experience at a conference for kids' app creators, comes to the conclusion that apps and television don't substitute for person-to-person interaction, but they aren't as harmful to children as some parents believe. Rosin, at this conference, discovers that many parents limit their kids' time with the family iPad everyday because they don't believe it's best for their child to be completely absorbed into a screen. Rosin does not disagree with the notion that a child who becomes too attached to a screen do suffer in the long run, but for a child who uses an iPad every so often and doesn't watch TV constantly, there isn't a big issue with a kid using technology. Television shows that "interact" with the children watching them such as Blue's Clues actually help children improve their problem solving skills. Some iPad apps, when used in moderation of course, can help a child become more familiar with the alphabet and writing letters. In her conclusion, Rosin notes that when she gave her own child open access to an iPad, after a few days, the child forgot about it as he would any other toy, but picked it back up again a few weeks later, less often, to play a game to help him with his letters. This shows that technology can be helpful to kids, but that they aren't dependent upon it like some parents believe and giving children access to technology won't rot their brains either.

"By their pinched reactions, these parents illuminated for me the neurosis of our age: as technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be doing to their children" (Rosin).

Often times nowadays people commonly think that parents just hand their kids technology to make them rest or be quiet and don't really think much about it. This shows that parents don't really hand their kids iPads mindlessly, in fact, they do it reluctantly.

"Norman Rockwell never painted Boy Swiping Finger on Screen, and our own vision of a perfect childhood has never adjusted to accommodate that now-common tableau" (Rosin).

This idea that the image of childhood is still a kid playing with other kids, or playing outside on the water slide, or splashing in puddles hasn't gone away. In fact, people are constantly trying to protect it because it's tradition and people cling to tradition. They don't like to alter their long-standing vision of something. 

"A more accurate point of comparison for a TV viewer's physiological state would be that of someone deep in a book, says Kirkorian, because during both activities we are still, undistracted, and mentally active" (Rosin).

Most commonly, people say that TV will rot your brain, when, in fact, while certain programs like say, Jersey Shore, might rot your brain because of content, the brain is still active while watching TV. It isn't a completely passive activity like people claim it to be. 

"Parents end up treating tablets like precision surgical instruments, gadgets that might perform miracles for their child's IQ and help him win some nifty robotics competition-but only if they are used just so" (Rosin).

This quote seems to be in contradiction with the previous one that parents are very worried about the possible positive effects iPads can have on their children. If they're so worried about them doing harm to their children why, why not simply cut them out all together in favor of more traditional teaching methods? Why acknowledge that there could even possibly be a positive to tablets in toddlers' hands?

"To us (his parents I mean), American childhood has undergone a somewhat alarming transformation in a very short time. But to him, it has always been possible to do so many things with the swipe of a finger, to have hundreds of games packed into a gadget the same size as Goodnight Moon" (Rosin).

Why not propose teaching the children from other sources as well, such as books? Why not teach kids from the beginning to play with both their puzzle color shape blocks and their iPad.

Rosin, Hanna. "The Touch-Screen Generation." The Atlantic. The Atlantic, 20 March 2013. Web. 3 April 2013. 

Does Google Let Our Stupid Shine Through?

"Is Stupid Making Us Google?" by James Bowman has a fairly self-explanatory title. Are people really so clueless that they have to rely on Google for everything? Bowman argues that, because of a variety of reasons, yes, people's stupidity makes them rely upon Google. Bowman says that children of today never learned the proper deep reading skills, which is why they simply skim articles to look for key points and simply copy them down and site them properly. It's not because they choose not to use their deep reading skills; they lack them. In this article, Bowman quotes an author named Mark Bauerlein who says in his novel, "the model is information retrieval, not knowledge formation, and the material passes from Web to homework paper without lodging in the minds of the students". Teachers, rather than attempting to right this problem, are simply dumbing the work down even further, making it more surface, and prompting the problem rather than stopping it. Modern kids simply rely on Google for all the answers, copy and paste them down, and remember none of them. Most school information given to kids now follows the old saying: in one ear and out the other. Bowman also notes that professors of literature aren't fighting for books or culture to be learned anymore. They're simply letting the past culture slip away rather than truly trying to get their students to learn it for more than ten minutes. The new generation has stopped reading for pleasure and for the sake of learning and is now missing the past from their memory, so it's no wonder they must rely on Google to find the right answers for their homework.

"Is Stupid Making Us Google?" obviously connects to the work it was written in response to, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr. Carr argues that the current generation knows how to read deeply, but chooses to Google instead because it's simpler and therefore because they are unable to read deeply following prolonged advertisement bombardment from the Internet and developing short attention spans. This is the direct opposite of Bowman's work. Like "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", "Is Stupid Making Us Google?" connects with "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" by Marc Prensky. Prensky's work focuses on the impact of technology on education, specifically that the technological generation is being taught by the previous non-technological generation who cannot seem to teach in a way that grasps the natives' attentions. This is exactly what Bowman is talking about, the disconnect between the current generations' learning and the teaching they're receiving and its inadequacies. However, Prensky argues that the digital immigrants could learn to teach in a way that the digital natives could understand and that this wouldn't harm the students unlike Bowman. Bowman sees that an attempt to please the digital natives' overactive minds while learning would make their education even more surface-skating than it already is.

What is Google's proper place and use in modern education of digital natives?

Where We Would Be Without Google? Maybe Smarter

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr discusses exactly what the title would imply: is Google making its users stupid or is it something else? In short, Carr's answer is yes, Google is making its users stupid. Carr argues that not just Google, but all of the Internet, is making people less and less capable of deeply engaging with print articles or books of any substantial length because a modern, computer reader cannot focus on the text long enough to truly engage with it. This is because the modern reader is used to the fast-paced, ever-changing, pop-up-containing internet medium rather than a simple printed text or article. There are no adds popping up in a book. There are no hyperlinks to click. A book doesn't hold a modern reader's attention anymore because of the internet (and therefore Google). However, the Internet goes beyond taking over books and print articles. Carr says, "The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV." The Internet takes over other all other mediums too. Google is the perfect facilitator for this because without a good search engine, finding a desired article on the vast Internet would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Carr brings up that one of the creators of Google, Page, said that, "For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence," which is terrifying to Carr. Carr fears the idea that people would be better off relying on artificial intelligence rather than their own brains, which is exactly what he believes Google, and the Internet as a whole, is moving people toward while dragging all-too-willing people away from books and articles and deep reading and thought.

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" connects, or contrasts, most readily with "Is Stupid Making Us Google?" by James Bowman, written in direct response to Carr's work, and "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" by Marc Prensky. James Bowman argues the exact opposite of Carr. He claims that the culture was already degrading along with education (because of teachers trying to make it fun) before. This caused a rise in the use of Google. Bowman claims that children are no longer expected to read and truly understand things because culture is currently failing to be transmitted from the previous generation to the next in favor of "fun" learning. Children learning things on a surface level temporarily is the result and therefore, culture isn't transmitted to the new generation that doesn't really value things of the past such as literature. Marc Prensky also throws his two cents into the conversation about the Internet's affect on the youth of today. Prensky differs slightly from Carr and Bowman with his argument while still discussing a similar topic. Prensky argues that there is a disconnect between today's students (natives) and today's teachers (immigrants) and this disconnect causes information not to be facilitated from teacher to student in a way the student fully comprehends. This is because the Internet users from the modern generation, like Carr and Bowman say, are distinctly different from the generations before them in a negative way.

While the Internet contains many advertisements when you read articles or books online, an e-reader does not. Would an e-reader be considered as harmful as the Internet to people's ability to comprehend complex articles or books?