For this blog post I decided to reflect on Aja Monet’s spoken word “Mobilizing a Movement of the Mind”. I believe that the main idea of  this poem was to reflect on how far we’ve come in society and realize how much times have changed. She mentions how presently we rely on gadgets and devices and everything is mobilized. The line that stuck out to me most is when she said “we photograph moments best kept in photo albums of our memory and upload them into society.” I recently had this discussion with one of my friends about how our generation don’t invest in photo albums. Our parents, grandparents, and all of the other previous generations made sure to have photo albums filled with pictures of important milestones, family gatherings, and just images of us just growing up.  I feel like since smartphones came around nobody feels the need to anymore because they can store every image in their phone. The only issue is what if you lose your phone? all of those memories are gone. After that conversation I made the decision that I’m going to start printing out the pictures that I have in my phone and buy a little photo album to put them in. I don’t want to miss out on being able to look back on special moments I had.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxDiS0GWv2s

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.”

For this blog post I chose to write about to “Missed Connections” by Safiya Umoja Noble. This article talks about important things in life such as the Internet. The Internet is great but it is also making people lazy and sometimes even stupid. With the Internet at our disposal we can find out anything we want without having to do much work, which makes us lazy. This in a way is taking away the value of education because everything you need to learn can be found on the Internet. Noble talks about how the search engine of a computer can exploit women. She says that you could be looking up something about the history or culture of women and pornography will be the first thing that comes up. You weren’t looking for this but it is what your search engine gave you. That is not okay and needs to change.

For this blog post, I chose to write about “Database as a Symbolic Form” by Lev Manovich. In the article Lev talks about the term database and its symbolic meaning. He says that computer science defines database as “a structured collection of data” (Manovich 1). This is basically where everything that is done on the Internet is stored. He says that all of this data is stored in a specific order according to a hierarchy. This is something (like everything else on the Internet and media) that is overlooked. We never think about where and how everything that we put on a computer goes and is stored.

“When I conducted my classroom exercise this semester, Black Girls Rock!, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering young women of color, was ranked high on the first page results, showing that there are, indeed , alternatives to the usual search results.” (Noble, page 6)

After reading Noble’s piece, I came across this statement about how she started a nonprofit dedicated to empowering young women of color for her classroom exercise and she found that it ranked highly in search results as opposed to anything vulgar that might rank similar to the search. I think that by this statement she is stating how google tends to rank vulgar URLs high rather than other URLs. By seeing that her page was ranked high, she is stating how it is possible for Google to rank URLs that don’t necessarily have vulgar content and how she was able to see that Google can choose what they want to rank due to our digital democracy. Based off our our clicks, she also goes on to say how sexism and pornography are the most popular values on the internet when it comes to women and it is all due to us voting. This goes to show that it seems as if society are the culprits for vulgarity being so popular on the internet.

While reading Lisa Nakamuras Race In/For Cyberspace it brought up a lot of thoughts. this article reminded me of movies such as the matrix and surrogates. in both these movies people are taken to another world, which they control their appearance and identity in that world. similar to  the internet, where people can make a social media account and identify themselves as anyone or anything. a man can make a profile claiming to be a woman, while another person can claim to be a rich exciting person. although none of it is reality, its still the presentation that would lead naive users to believe this perception. we constantly see people presenting their lives as more than what it is. however, its hard to believe otherwise when a person does their best to maintain that image. through lies and deception, social media has become a fantasy world, for people to live the life they want but dont live. when people unplug from their imaginary lives, we expect them to be the same as online. but, we are disappointed when its not.