Elegant Organization

Jarvis's reading touched on the idea of "Elegant Organization," that is that we ought to create things that solve needs. It seems like a simple concept, but I think a lot of people that try to invent the "next big thing" forget this basic idea. Take a look at the television show "American Inventor," it's a reality show based on being a self made inventor and getting the funding for it. It seems like a lot of American's want to get rich quick, without putting in the work to do so. They hear stories about someone who created an app or a tiny invention and think, "hey, I can do that!"

The idea of elegant organization is so important. Why waste time building and creating something that may not be useful, when you can collaborate and build with others? The internet is one of the most distracting and disrupting things we have towards organization and that, Jarvis claims, is where the key lies. Creating a website or an app or social media site...whatever, that will create some sort of organization to the confusing mess that is the internet is what innovators need to focus on.

I think the website Reddit is one of the least elegant social media websites. It's interesting that on websites such as Facebook they get updates to how they look every few months. Reddit stays pretty much the same though. I think if someone created a website similar to Reddit, but took into mind the "elegant organization" concept, it could be very popular. In this day and age where new apps and social media platforms are constantly being created, it's important to create something both visually appealing and also something that fills a void and need that another website/app seems to neglect.

Websites are constantly updating their appearance to be more cutting edge, user friendly, and eye catching. There is a time portal like website called Wayback Machine where you can see how, for example, CNN.com's front webpage looked on a certain date in the past. It's really interesting to see how websites have evolved to become more elegantly organized.

The Deep Web

Over Thanksgiving break as I was sitting in the auto-repair shop, (curse you Jeeps for being so cute yet so prone to issues) I decided to forego my anger of being forced to endure the remaining 3 hours in the shop and read look over the magazines on the table. I decided to go against "O: The Opera Magazine" and the always riveting "People," and instead "Time" caught my eye. I'd been a weekly reader from ages 14-18-- when the subscription wasn't on my dime, but since coming to college 2 years earlier, I hadn't had a chance to read many issues. The cover is what first appealed to me. The cover read "The Secret Web" and the byline said "Where Drugs, Porn, and Murder Hide Online." Due to my unhealthy addiction with Investigation Discovery, this skeezy headline begged me to read on.

As I continued to read, I was captivated. The story unraveled like a $3 mystery novel on sale at Barnes & Noble, and yet it was all true. Ross Ulbricht, the mastermind behind the whole operation looked no different than many of the male students I pass by on campus daily. And yet, he had headed a multi-million dollar operation, The Silk Road. My naivety surprised me. How could there have been an underground website that sold drugs and prostitutes (among other taboos), and the government had such a difficult time finding out who was behind it? How did I never know about this?

Reading this article this past year, and re-reading it really opened my eyes. It's interesting that there really are many dark things going on "underground" on the internet, some things even headed by the "good-guys," that I have no idea about. It's really important to stay current and be progressive about the things going on around you, even if that's just reading the online news every day. Not being informed on issues that will affect you, when you have the resources readily available isn't being naive, it's  being ignorant. 

The Juggler's Brain

In chapter 7, The Juggler's Brain, Carr brings further pushes his idea that the internet has changed the way our minds think. Instead of being able to read an article and think deeply, we are quickly swept away to another link-- another article, and are left no time to ponder what we have just read. It is easy to become consumed and spend hours Googling random information or watching cat videos on YouTube. Hours.

This addiction to the internet has become an epidemic that I believe has spurned some antisocial behavior. Take the popular website Netflix. As of January 2014, Netflix had 44 million subscribers. And yet, Netflix itself is not a social media network. That is a lot of users for a website that is ultimately a very solitary activity. Just as it is easy to spend hours watching YouTube videos, it's even easier to spend more hours binge watching Netflix. Over Spring Break I was sick and spent Friday and Saturday in bed. During that time, I watched 23 episodes of the show Veronica Mars (judge me now). Each episode is about 40 minutes long. I'm average enough at math to know that this certainly meets the criteria of binge watching a television show.

We are constantly juggling so much information, it is difficult to process. During the time I was watching all these episodes, of course I was on my phone playing Scramble with friends, on twitter, and scrolling through tumblr. I'd look back at the screen 20 minutes later, thinking I would have some idea of what was going on in that episode since I had been listening to it in the background, and yet, I was completely lost and would have to rewind (or whatever you would call that on Netflix...) back to the spot I was at before I became transfixed on my phone. Was I able to process or deeply think about the television show as I was jumping from one app on my phone to the other? Obviously not since I had to start the episode over. The internet has created a society great in multitasking, but how great at that multitasking exactly are we? Is the multitasking strictly surface level? The chart below shows just how much our age group (16-24) "multitasks" with all our different media activities.

Nicholas Carr p. 1-57

Carr writes about his ideas on how the internet is effecting us-- yet he does so in a more creative way then we've seen in previous readings. He weaves funny anecdotes into his chapters and the reading seems very much engaging. He feels that the internet is changing the brain--reprograming the memory. The internet has caused a shift in the attention span of all who so normally use it. The internet has changed the way we pay attention to things; research that was previously lengthy and time consuming can be resolved with a quick Google search. I think also that the invention of the smart phone has greatly changed the way people think and interact. It's so easy to look something up on my phone that I don't even really have to think about it much. The internet doesn't just give us things to think about, it changes the way we think. I think that since I've always grown up using the internet and the computer, it is much different than with older generations. I think my brain has been wired differently from the start, while people like Carr are more able to see the shift since he went many decades without having used the internet.

I completely agree with what Carr and his peers are saying about how the internet has changed specifically how we read. The internet is so fast paced and there is so much information out there, yet we quickly click out of an article if it's too long. We skim internet articles, and we then skim readings for school. It's hard to comprehend this new information. There's an email subscription that is actually called TheSkimm.com. Every day they will email you just the basic more important things that happened in the news that day. Nothing is longer than a paragraph; it's just enough information to the the point across. This service epitomizes what Carr is talking about with skimming. Below is an image of one of an example of an email The Skimm sent out before. I'm not sure if it's necessarily a bad thing...it's kind of like Twitter. Things are being condensed so more information can be sent out and processed. Since the internet is changing our brains..the internet must change in order to conform to it.

Baron, Chatper 11: The Dark Side of the Web

The web really can be a dark place. Baron's chapter 11 discusses at length how dark cyberspace can be. Almost like a black hole. Children can easily be subjected to unwanted pornographic images at an unwanted age just from a simple Google search of a seemingly innocent term. I would say that over the years since I have grown up on the internet, Goggle has put in place many different types of blocking tools to stop this subjection-- but it still happens.

The internet is full of online predators, bullies, hackers, and other evil do-ers. I'm a member of the popular website Tumblr (and it's the website I did my social media project on), and while I've never received a hatefully bullying message, I've seen plenty of members receive them without really any incentive except to be mean. I've read anonymous messages commenting about people's weight, looks, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and so much more. What truly baffles me is why do they do it? Why hide behind a computer screen and torment someone you don't even know-- or someone you do know? In lieu of recent cyberbullying cases, young teenagers have committed suicide due to the bullying they have received over the internet. It is deeply saddening and I truly feel laws should be put in place for it to stop. I think anonymous feature on Tumblr messaging should be removed and Facebook should be stricter about online bullying or more serious about their "report" feature. Below I found a report about cyberbullying and it was extremely disturbing just how high the students reported they had been bullied online.

Another dark side of the internet is called "the deep web." I was never even aware that it was a thing until a recent Time magazine article I read. I was shocked. Especially by a website called "The Silk Road" where users can buy and sell drugs, prostitutes, and murder using their own form of money called bitcoins. It is so hard to police these types of things because people are so intelligent with the internet now. A seemingly normal young man ran this whole operation, when he could have been using his intelligence with technology for good. 

The internet can be a dark place, but you have to avoid it. I think in any situation this remains true. Don't feed into negativity-- unfriend, block, or even if you have to remove yourself from the website, you need to do it. 

Baron, Chapter 4: Handwriting

I found this chapter extremely interesting, probably one of the most interesting readings I have been assigned to this semester. I think this is probably because it is something I identify with. I always notice people's handwriting and feel happy when a page of my notes has uniform handwriting. It's pretty obvious that handwriting has taken a downslide since computers and typewriters were introduced. When calligraphy was the norm, beautiful handwriting was stressed and praised, but now it seems like a rarity.

This chapter talks about how computers are replacing handwriting. Even to the extreme of taking children straight to a keyboard after they understand the alphabet and skip the penmanship lessons. I remember weeks and weeks in elementary school taking penmanship lessons, and while it was extremely annoying, I'm glad I did. If elementary schools start doing this, we will have generations of people completely reliant on technology-- although some may argue that we all already are. Like the book says, handwriting is "creative, artistic, and personal" (49). If you take handwriting out of children's curriculum, will art suffer? Will the brain actually change? Baron makes the argument that handwriting creates a personal connection to the writing. I completely agree with him. During class, I have to write my notes with a pen on paper. If I type my notes out, it becomes completely mindless and I don't remember anything that was said. I'm sure not all people are like this, but handwriting my notes in class is crucial to me comprehending what happened in class. Even while studying, I will write my study guide over and over while re-reading it and that's the best way for me to retain my notes in preparation for a test.

The section in this chapter about graphology was extremely interesting too. It does seem a little fishy and kind of like astrology (but even more weird) to say that handwriting plays a part in your personality, but it would be cool to look into. I've heard about the Jon Bonet Ramsey case with the handwriting analysis on the ransom letter, and while it does seem intriguing it's sad that the letter didn't hold any further clues towards finding her killer.

Below is a graph I found of how to analyze your own handwriting! It seems like a lot of work for nothing, but it does look like an interesting hobby.

Baron, Chapter 1: Writing it Down

This chapter focused in on the shift in ideas of writing being unreliable and ambiguous to writing being the standard for reliability and trustworthiness. The chapter opened up with Plato's Phaedrus, a text we've read earlier in the semester quoting a section where Socrates warns that writing will make human memory weaker. It's an interesting point and I do think there's a lot of truth in this statement when you take technology into account as well. The internet has made it so easy for humans to find out the most pointless facts in the click of a button. Can't remember what movie you've seen that actress in before? Google it. The age Einstein was when he first began to talk fluently is on the tip of your tongue? Google it. I think humans greatly rely on the internet for finding pointless facts or even useful facts. However, I don't necessarily think this is bad. It definitely has affected human memory and attention span, there are multiple studies based on this, but in other ways I think it has helped immensely in opening up people's minds to many different areas of interests they may not have had before.

Elaborating off of Plato's ideas that writing is untrustworthy, the chapter touched on the ordinary items we see everyday that are covered in writing. It said the dollar bill contains 81 words. 81 words! That is crazy. Right now, as I'm writing this in the Starbucks on campus, I'm looking at my drink cup. There are many more words than I imagined to be on it before I looked. "Decaf, shorts, milk, syrup, custom, drink-- not to mention the tiny font that explains the cup uses 15% less plastic than a cup made from PET. It's just a simple drink cup and yet the writing on it does make it seem more reliable. If I picked up a can of soup and all it said on it was "Campbell's Tomato Soup" a la Warhol (except not because that actually has a few more words on it) I would be too sketched out to buy it. We've gotten used to the ingredient lists, the nutritional information, the descriptive definition of the flavors that it never quite seems to recreate, and if a soup can contained none of this-- we wouldn't buy it.

I've heard from so many adults, on the top of the list are my grandparent's at Christmas dinner, that texting will ruin our generation's writing capabilities. I would have to say, this is not necessarily true. I generally find that my friends text with better grammar and spelling than my mom does. The iPhone's autocorrect aids in this, but still I find it's much easier to have a conversation with my mom on the phone rather than over text message because sometimes it's hard to understand what she is trying to say. There are multiple websites dedicated to funny text conversations with parents. Texting will most definitely change the way writing is an evolve it into something else, but this is the case with all new technologies. People are afraid of what they don't know or quite understand, as Plato's Phaedrus proves in his distrust of the written word.