What does it all mean?
Online social networks are egocentric mediums which enrich and play with our real life social networks. This is what I feel I have gained the most insight on in this course. I am ‘old school’ and I have had to adjust to the internet coming into my life in direct contrast to my children being born into the world with the internet as the hub of their existance. They seem better equipped to deal with life in the future than I do simply because of the ways in which digital text has changed the outlook on family, love and friendships. 100 billion times a day a website is clicked on, this is almost beyond comprehension. “The machine is an actor in our social lives” and makes life much more fast paced and dramatic. My kids can’t imagine life any other way and I long for the days when life was filled with simple pleasures. Obviously things will only advance to higher degrees and become more complex and I will adapt, yet I seriously worry about the state of human beings in terms of being able to express compassion and genuine feelings of warmth to one another. With the computer acting as a human agent, where does that leave us? It leaves us propelling into a world where we are all numbers and names on a screen with no substance and no real control over who we are and our place in REAL LIFE. Depressing?…maybe. True?…absolutely! I take the ‘good old days’ any day. I wouldn’t be suprised if I throw away my cell phone and close out my profiles on facebook and move to a cabin in the mountains, I’m sure that this is not what most people got out of this class but I found it made me look at the big picture and the big picture scares me. I am not crazy and what I have said is most likely just ramblings of the moment, however I do truely believe that without all the technology, status symbols and class divides we would be better people to one another, where is Karl Marx when you need him?
