The iPhone is very useful, but they also are incredibly addictive. I spend most of the time on Youtube Instagram, iMessage, and FaceTime. I enjoy watching basketball highlights and watching any type of videos that are recommended for me. When it comes to iMessage I’m in a group chat with my friends where we send random pictures and videos we see on social media. For Instagram, I’m a frequent user I spent most of the time on entertainment on pages like The ShadeRoom and Akademics page finding out news and new music. The app I enjoy the most is FaceTime because I like to see who I’m taking to face reaction. Also, I used this app called Bleacherreport that focuses on sports and sports culture. I used that app every day. It gives me any alerts of my favorite teams in sports. it keeps aware of what’s going on in sports. I think my phone keeps on track of everything I like easily. But still makes me lazy because I depend on my phone so much. Overall, I wouldn’t last a day without my phone because I like to be informed of news and it helps me interact with my family and friends in a faster way.
Brieya Walker 9/18/2018 WEEK 4 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man
This week’s journal is about Marshall McLuhan’s, Understanding the Media. In Chapter 1 of his book he discusses how the medium is the message. This phrase defined to mean that ” the personal and social consequences of any medium–that is, of any extension of ourselves–result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any technology.” (McLuhan, 23) Honestly speaking this definition alone was hard for me to analyze and figure it out as he used analogies I’ve grasped more of an understanding. For example, the first one he mention was the creation of automation. Automation being a form of technology and replacing the job of a human unfortunately eliminate jobs and this can be considered a negative effect of the creation. But on a positive note automation can create new roles for people. In result, many people will argue that it wasn’t the machine that was the issue but what they did with the automation machine that was the message. To summarize, the impact of the medium itself is more significant than the content it carries. He also showed a concern in how society focuses more on the things that are obvious and how we sometimes miss the structural changes that occurs over long periods of time. We focus on the obvious of what it does and what it’s intended to do but we do become unaware of what it’s actually doing to us.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. The MIT Press, 2013.
Brieya Walker 9/11/2018 WEEK 3 Marie Battiste, Print Culture and Decolonizing the University
For this weekly response I’m reflecting on Print Culture and Decolonizing the University, written by Marie Battiste. This reading shares the history between Euro-Christian travelers/missionaries and the indigenous peoples. These travelers and missionaries completely transformed and tried to erase the history of their aboriginal literacy and claimed the Indians to be illiterate because they didn’t agree with or understand their ideographic and symbolic literacy. Aboriginal literacy relates to the spiritual, practical, public functions of symbolic literacy which includes their pictographs petroglyphs, notched sticks, ideographs, and wampum. I believe this reading successfully showed that any literacy process can work as long as people have a use for it because it shows how critical it was to many Indigenous societies. In addition, it mentions that many of the history taught regarding the indigenous people and the Europeans is very one sided and I one hundred percent agree with that. Reading this automatically made me think about a passage I read in an English class called American Identities. The passage basically spoke about how Indians were portrayed as savages, how they were always killing each other, and their excessive alcohol use, which all were true but we’re not taught why this occurred. This week’s reading made me think of this because this is another example of how the Europeans portrayed the Indigenous to be illiterate but in fact their culture influenced their own creations in several ways.
Marie Battiste. “Print Culture and Decolonizing the University: Indigenizing the Page: Part 1.” The Future of the Page . University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Week 6: Technology and War and Cybernetics, oh my!
For this weeks post I chose to read “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush. Bush addresses problems that he believes scientists should be paying close attention to. Almost seeing the future in technology he raised the question of how machines can help our thinking process.
For example, “it is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic.” Beyond the logic of the mathematician, lies the application of logic in everyday affairs, ”we may someday click off arguments on a machine with the same assurance that we now enter sales on a cash register.”
