hope

DISCLAIMER: This entry is a little more personal, don't read it if you aren't prepared to read half developed ideas and a little bit of a rant.

Information is easily accessible thanks to the internet. But even with the internet how do you find information on things that don't really exist? Especially abstract things. If you search on Wikipedia for ideas such as freedom, love,wisdom, friendship, faith,hope ect. can you really believe what is said about them? Despite all these technological advancements in the way we receive and process information there are still some concepts that we have to materialize on our own. Lately I have been trying to figure out what hope and strength are. 

My family and friends view me as a strong and independent young woman.  But isn't strength a relative concept?  I am not physically strong, yet I am viewed as strong person.  But I believe my strength only compares to the situation I am put in.   Strong is something people perceive me to be because I show them that side of me.   But what I am seen as on the outside, might be not who I am on the inside.  The inside-- the important part.  Where we find meaning and depth to everyday occurrences.  Where we find meaning to abstract ideas such as hope. 

My mother has always been  one of the strongest women in  my life.  My mom is in the hospital, and maybe that is why she is still alive and fighting- because of her inner strength.  This weekend was a milestone weekend in my eyes, but not to the experts who are taking care of her. As a victim of a stroke that caused a cerebral hemorrhage the doctors know nothing about her mental state or what the future holds for her. She has been taken off her sedation for a few days, and she finally opened her eyes. She looked frightened and scared, but there was a familiarity in her eyes when she looked at me. Although she can not talk I believe she knows who I am, but the experts disagree.   The doctors continue to tell me that although she might know who I am, she probably does not.   Every question we ask we don't receive a complete answer, always a maybe, might be, or a we'll see. The doctors seem to never have anything positive to say. My dad says because they don't want to instill a false sense of hope. False hope?

But isn't all hope in a way false? You are wishing for something to occur but you aren't in any way certain it will. 

The brain is an incredible thing, the way it conceptualizes thoughts and forms them into concepts and ideas. But something abstract like hope is not always on your mind, but I believe it is always in your mind. Around the holidays, especially thanksgiving most people bring forth the idea of thankfulness and happiness from the back of their mind. People begin to reflect, usually only this time of the year, about what they are thankful for. Instead I am going to spend my Thanksgiving hoping for things that I can be thankful for in the future.

I have hope for a lot of things. I have hope that one day my mom will be moved out of the ICU and eventually resume her duty as my loving mother. I have hope that those suffering will one day find a way to leave the suffering behind and move onto a better place with their lives.

And similar to William Powers' view in Hamlet's Blackberry, I have hope that the way society is today will soon change, and we will leave this era of technological obsession, or at least find a happy medium in between it all.  Humanity is becoming less and less self efficient everyday, and less and less self aware in the process. What is really that wrong with society? In MY OPINION the degradation of our society and culture is threefold; the destruction of language, the lack of human interaction, and the diminishing of the expert.

Starting with the obvious, the destruction of language.  The rise of the computer age came coupled with the invention of the cell phone, the main two perpetrators in the slaughtering of the English language. The evolution of instant communication has lead to shortening of words and lessening of technology. One of Postman’s points in Amusing Ourselves to Death is the value of our attention.  People in our society have short attention spans and require simple talk as a result of our television culture.   Our short attention spend is also reflected in our use of language.  People more widely communicate through text in the form of text messages, emails, instant messages and comments, where the laws of grammar are null and void.  It goes beyond the obvious text acronyms such as LOL, OMG,LMFAO to spell check and instant thesauruses. The importance of words goes down with each generation that learns the way of the computer. Learning phonetics has been replaced with spell check, as vocabulary has with digital thesauruses.  I don't claim to have the best vocabulary or spelling in the world (in fact I can't spell at all), but when  I am editing a paper or article I have written, I go much further than spell checking it- I actually hand edit it.  I highly doubt many of my peers go much further than spell check.  To once again cite Orwell's “Politics and the English Language”, our language reflects our culture.   As our culture becomes more decadent, so does our language.  Every decade it seems our culture becomes more and more decadent which is evidently coupled with the destruction of our language.  It is ironic to me, because I would think the more someone writes the better they become in using the language.  But maybe writing and typing are two separate entities.  

Human contact because less important with each new technology advancement.   Connections to people have always been a positive perk to have in life, but now it seems that life IS ABOUT connections.  Social networking sites such as Facebook allow friends to "catch up" with each other, without actually having personal face to face conversation.  It even goes beyond that- we now have the ability to learn about what someone is doing in their lives, without even letting them know.  Friends have become a delusion.  I have 585 friends on Facebook.  Out of the 585 I consider about 30-40 my actual friends, talk to about 10-15 on a regular basis, see 5-8 in person on a day-to-day basis and probably only like about half of them. Then why am I connected to so many other people?  The same reason everyone else is- to avoid face-to-face contact with them.  I can see how acquaintances are doing, without ever having to have a face-to-face conversation with them.  The importance of human interaction is also diminished with texting and instant messaging.  Basically a text or an IM is just emotionless  words instantly sent to another person.   The fact that the person receiving the messages cannot  hear the senders tone of voice, or see their facial expression changes these "conversations" to just words and sentences.  It is IMPOSSIBLE to have a conversation without a person.  That is why I believe IMs and texts are not conversations, but just statements.  How can you have a conversation with someone if you can't hear their tone of their voice(are they yelling, laughing, whispering?) or see their facial expressions (are they smiling, frowning, excited?).   Although all three topics are connected, I feel that human interaction  and language are the most connected.  The way we interact with each other is a reflection of our culture, and our language is suffering because of that. 

The rise of the internet lead to the downfall of the expert. People who are trained for a certain field have no use anymore, since the internet allows less qualified people share their knowledge on topics they may know little to nothing about. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that knows all- all you should know about a topic, not necessarily all there is to know.  To test this idea I search University of Georgia on Wikipedia.  As I predicted the page said nothing about the brutality  the first two black students, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, integrated into the college.  This could be because the person(s) who wrote the article on the university had no knowledge of the event (because they are not an expert), or because the person(s) who wrote the article had ulterior motives in hiding that event from the public.  Wikis, and many basic websites, make it easy to disguise what the reader needs to know, and replace it with what the create wants the reader to know.   Google displays a similar problem.   I am learning in one of my PR courses how to manipulate a Google algorithm to get your website to appear towards the top of a search.  Even if your website is not the most relevant page to the topic the user is searching about, you can make them think it is.  People tend to click the first few searches they find, regardless of who the site is created by.  This makes it so easy to manipulate people into believing what ever you are saying is fact when it may not be.  Why is this?  Society has begun to put both the amateur and expert on the same pedestal.    The internet seems to display a Communist ideal- no  matter what you do you get the same pay.  In  this case, pay becomes peoples attention.    People trust too much information from the internet, regardless of where it is coming from.  Perhaps this is because people are so hungry for the answers to their problems, that they don't care who is telling them the answer, as long as they can BELIEVE it is the answer. 

Maybe hope is one of those ideas that can lead to action, to change.  I hope so.

A phone to replace phones

Before I criticize the advertisement and the phone itself, I have to admit this is a great advertisement. Maybe because it's funny, maybe because it's so short, or perhaps it is the familiarity of the music but regardless of I can watch the ad over and over again. And that's kind of scary- because that's what they want.
The advertisement itself is a viral success, being viewed as often as amateur videos.

The slogan for the phone is an interesting one, "It's time for a phone to save us from our phones."
This is saying this phone is the solution to societies obsessions with "smart" phones. So this is technology to replace technology, but aren't all new devices and technologies created to improve past technology? Every new model of a technological device is created to improve the problems that past ones had. Our society is obsessed with the idea of creating new technology to better our current technology. Why? to make our lives easier, but what our we sacrificing for that?

Human interaction. This advertisement clearly shows that physical human contact has been replaced with digital interaction. People are attached to technology, putting it before social interaction. The commercial displays this in a dramatic way by trivializes the most important celebrations in our culture, such as a wedding, and puts it behind technology. By showing all these different people in different situations where they are focusing on their phones rather than their lives around them.

Although this commerical does focus on a major issue in our society, and makes a promise that this phone with solve it, it seems that the phone will probably only add to the problem.
This phone may be quicker, but it still allows people to focus on their digital lives instead of their real lives. Windows claims it will get you "in and out" but with all the new features the phone has, Microsoft office, xBox live ect, people will spend just as much time obsessing over their phones as they have in the past.


Nice try Microsoft, but I highly doubt your phone is going to solve the problem our society is so deeply emerged in. Your probably only going to make it worse.