Although many of these things here; http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/doczone/video.html (“Are We Digital Dummies? We'll investigate how our love affair with technology is overloading our ancient brains, leaving us chronically distracted.”) have been discussed in the forum, this was an interesting documentary on multimedia and how it plays out in our human lives for many.
Not too old fashioned but a reluctant latecomer to technology from a time when typing was done on a ribbon and mistakes caused the pages to be ripped out (Grrrr) and a new page inserted. Sending mail require finding the right paper and pen and writing ones thoughts without backspace/delete. It was actually fun to go to the mail box and read from others hand without the avalanche of electronic bills and solicitations. About the only thing to look forward to at the post office now is my copy of the Dot Connector magazine. I have a work mobile phone that if moved, sometimes but a foot, the signal is dropped. The back-light is on all the time now so it dies in about 45 minutes and the employer wants to give me a new Blackberry (BB).
Walking into the airport terminal the other day a whole waiting room of heads were bowed to these screens and you could have heard a pin drop; except for the sound of thumbs clicking away, oblivious to the arthritic skeletal difficulties that might accompany these repetitive actions, not to mention the 42 lb head (massage therapy term) that may also result. There is trepidation also for me of having one of these BB vectors in my hands so the employer can funnel even more things at me when away from the main communication box. I’ve never text more than a few words as generally I just can’t read the darn screen without finding my reading glasses. My work computer has just < 1,000 messages in the inbox and they have been coming in faster now than I can negotiate the contents and file or delete. In the documentary it discusses how working without technology of this sort was generally 40 + hours and now with things like BB, work is in the 70 + hour range and satisfaction of course has plummeted. It talks about kids who are so addicted to gaming that they so do not move and some have even had Thrombosis requiring leg amputation - good grief.
What indeed did we do before all this techno-wizardry came into being – it seems now like some lost memory, yet we did just fine. My first computer other than a commodore 64 with DOS prompts only was a floppy drive system and think the internal memory was about 20 mg/bits and ran on a platform called Valdox, which was just DOS in disguise – glorified typewriter and calculator. This machine was $ 3,400 +/- and obsolete before it came out of the box. As for today’s texting, I’ve been told that sometimes in meeting places people now sit across from each other and text one another rather than exercise their larynx and vocal cords.
Is all this stuff useful, indeed I would not want to replace the word processor and lap top, however, on the other hand if we became unplugged, for me it would be almost a relief, don’t think I’d miss it. However, without connection, a network like this could only exist, in person, by writing or telepathically - which it could and may be in the future, but for now psychic messages seem latent, from another past or future time, not recognizable and focused upon. So today, in terms of being connected, getting quality everyday news in written print seems to be fading into obscurity and thus one needs to be online researching and cross referencing almost everything – this is lots of work, either to find out what is in a product, let alone the geopolitical goings-on; thank goodness for books.
In one regard, I’m grateful for having techno abilities to do this, this has increased awareness in so many things, yet the other side, societal in general, seems to point to a loss of human contact on many levels even though we seem to be in touch and things can be so immediate. The documentary looks at some of these things and how in our immediate connections we perhaps have become disconnected and certainly the evidence of some of how we approach and use technologies might just be rewiring our brains to the exclusion of critical thinking and heaping on e-stressors.
As techno devices evolve AI gets brought up and came across this AI link while searching tonight from SAO which was interesting ;
http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=20110.msg200468#msg200468
And then this from a C’s transcript;
Not too old fashioned but a reluctant latecomer to technology from a time when typing was done on a ribbon and mistakes caused the pages to be ripped out (Grrrr) and a new page inserted. Sending mail require finding the right paper and pen and writing ones thoughts without backspace/delete. It was actually fun to go to the mail box and read from others hand without the avalanche of electronic bills and solicitations. About the only thing to look forward to at the post office now is my copy of the Dot Connector magazine. I have a work mobile phone that if moved, sometimes but a foot, the signal is dropped. The back-light is on all the time now so it dies in about 45 minutes and the employer wants to give me a new Blackberry (BB).
Walking into the airport terminal the other day a whole waiting room of heads were bowed to these screens and you could have heard a pin drop; except for the sound of thumbs clicking away, oblivious to the arthritic skeletal difficulties that might accompany these repetitive actions, not to mention the 42 lb head (massage therapy term) that may also result. There is trepidation also for me of having one of these BB vectors in my hands so the employer can funnel even more things at me when away from the main communication box. I’ve never text more than a few words as generally I just can’t read the darn screen without finding my reading glasses. My work computer has just < 1,000 messages in the inbox and they have been coming in faster now than I can negotiate the contents and file or delete. In the documentary it discusses how working without technology of this sort was generally 40 + hours and now with things like BB, work is in the 70 + hour range and satisfaction of course has plummeted. It talks about kids who are so addicted to gaming that they so do not move and some have even had Thrombosis requiring leg amputation - good grief.
What indeed did we do before all this techno-wizardry came into being – it seems now like some lost memory, yet we did just fine. My first computer other than a commodore 64 with DOS prompts only was a floppy drive system and think the internal memory was about 20 mg/bits and ran on a platform called Valdox, which was just DOS in disguise – glorified typewriter and calculator. This machine was $ 3,400 +/- and obsolete before it came out of the box. As for today’s texting, I’ve been told that sometimes in meeting places people now sit across from each other and text one another rather than exercise their larynx and vocal cords.
Is all this stuff useful, indeed I would not want to replace the word processor and lap top, however, on the other hand if we became unplugged, for me it would be almost a relief, don’t think I’d miss it. However, without connection, a network like this could only exist, in person, by writing or telepathically - which it could and may be in the future, but for now psychic messages seem latent, from another past or future time, not recognizable and focused upon. So today, in terms of being connected, getting quality everyday news in written print seems to be fading into obscurity and thus one needs to be online researching and cross referencing almost everything – this is lots of work, either to find out what is in a product, let alone the geopolitical goings-on; thank goodness for books.
In one regard, I’m grateful for having techno abilities to do this, this has increased awareness in so many things, yet the other side, societal in general, seems to point to a loss of human contact on many levels even though we seem to be in touch and things can be so immediate. The documentary looks at some of these things and how in our immediate connections we perhaps have become disconnected and certainly the evidence of some of how we approach and use technologies might just be rewiring our brains to the exclusion of critical thinking and heaping on e-stressors.
As techno devices evolve AI gets brought up and came across this AI link while searching tonight from SAO which was interesting ;
http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=20110.msg200468#msg200468
And then this from a C’s transcript;
C’s transcript said:
