After deciding to read “Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr, I completely agree with what he is saying. Smartphones and social media has made it incredibly difficult to focus on actual print because we have the connectivity to instant news sites and update interactions with our friends and family. I’m a person who’s always on social media, I find myself paying attention for a short amount of time before I attempt to take a glance at my phone. Carr says “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”  This quote sticks out to me because it can relate to society as a whole. Older civilizations had to be more proficient in their words because that was the only possible way to communicate. As society and technology progressed alike, various communications progressed. That progression lead to more advanced ways to communicate, ultimately making us more lazy.

Computer Lib, written by Theodor Nelson, accurately highlights the importance of understanding how important computers truly are to society. Nelson offers his own perspective, acknowledges that we need to become more knowledgeable of how a computer actually works. On page 304, Nelson states  “Knowledge is power and so it tends to be hoarded.” This quote stands out to me because it highlights how knowledge is valuable in society.  People could become marginalized between each other. Those who posses the most knowledge could heavily control what is being displayed on the computers, that would ultimately lead to future generations being born with manipulated computer competency.

For this week I decided to reflect on James Carey’s “Communication as Culture.” Throughout this reading one quote in particular stood out with me, and that quote is ”Models of communication are, then, not merely representations of communication: templates that guide, unavailing or not, concrete processes of human interaction, mass and interpersonal” (Carey, 25). The reason why this quote resonates with me because we need to understand the different channels of communication. These channels could be different relationships between people, as well as art and science.

I chose to reflect on Marie Battiste’s “Print Culture and Decolonizing the University: Indigenizing the page: Part 1”. What stood out to me throughout this reading was how indigenous people of the Americas had already created their own of of communication and language such as symbols that had more than one meaning. Much to my prior knowledge, European settlers came to the Americas and destroyed all the ways Native Americans communicated with each other and implemented their own system.  These Native Americans were forced into a religion and forced into a new way of living. After reading this, this made me take a step back and ask myself, were would society be today if these Native Americans were able to continue their own ways of communication, instead of being conquered  by the Europeans.

For this week’s blog I chose to reflect on Italo Calvino’s Cybernetics and Ghosts. There was one post that truly caught my eye, and that’s when Italo Calvino states, “The immobile world that surrounded tribal man, strewn with signs of the fleeting correspondences between words and things, came to life in the voice of the storyteller, spun out into the flow of a spoken narrative within which each word acquired new values and transmitted them to the ideas and images they defined” (page. 5).  This quote vividly stands out to me because society attributes different meanings to one word. For example, we inner city New Yorkers may have different slang terminology than another region in the country. Words and phrases have multiple meanings and the difference could create a barrier when trying to communicate.

For week 10, I chose Medium is the Massage By Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan thinks that technologies are showing the messages itself but not the abstract of communication. In general, we can say that “the medium is the message” is showing in the creative performance in media. The word “Massage,” shows that audiences should feel relaxable, enjoyable from nowadays media. However, McLuhan thinks that the relationship between society and technology are not equal, it will also maintain the age of anxiety. Media is affecting how audiences feel about this world and their point of view — all these changes brought by movies, television, radio.

During this project, i decided to transcribe  Melba Wilson mainly because she was an African american woman living in my neighborhood of Harlem. the interview was based on Melba’s personal and family life. she was born in Harlem, however her family is mainly in south Carolina. she talks about her upbringing and then owning a restaurant in her own neighborhood of Harlem.  surprisingly i realized that her aunt owns the world renowned Sylvia’s restaurant in Harlem. she talks about the role soul food has had in her life and family life and how it has influenced her to embark in her own business.

overall i found it an easy experience. but at times, i found it difficult  for many reasons. although she spoke clearly it seemed as if the audio would go in and out, which i could see being a problem for full transcription. i had to constantly lower any background or environmental noise, so i can hear it clearly and even then i had to replay the audio. reading the transcription that was already done by the computer, i noticed some mistakes, as it would transcribe words into the wrong but similar words. there were few edits that were done from outside so there were many computer generated mistakes. sometimes it would have the wrong pronunciation points or grammar structure. however through these mistakes i realized the computer has a high rate of understanding and transcribing human voices clear.

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.”

(Carr).

As a millennial it feels like I cannot leave my phone. This doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t but it refers to the idea of FOMO. FEAR OF MISSING OUT.

FOMO applies to the current epidemic in most parts of America that tempts people to post an alternate version of almost every part of their lives on social media. I personally feel like I have to check my phone’s notifications every five minutes to keep up with what’s going on, especially in my group chats. If you miss a notification it feels like you weren’t there when it happened. Social media commentary has become a means for people to make comedic acts such as memes and funny videos online that are out of the norm. These videos serve as news about unimportant things that do not benefit the society and then it becomes shared making things viral. Its the sad truth about how we live our lives constantly glued to our phones. We subconsciously notice it but we ignore it because we are addicted.

“In November 2015, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention noted in their report, “The percentage of U.S. adults who smoke cigarettes declined from 20.9 percent in 2005 to 16.8 percent in 2014. Cigarette smoking was significantly lower in 2014 (16.8 percent) than in 2013 (17.8 percent).”

It feels like were getting dummer because clout has become the drive for most people pursuing temporary recognition as people are proud of it because it feels so good. Maybe this has become our nicotine because we have literally dropped the smoke and picked up our phones. Who knows what we’ll become more addicted to, is virtual reality up next?