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We can lump this video in with the others that attempt to shed light on issues in society that matter while discreetly hawking their wares in the background. The best form of advertising? I’m not sure, but the commercial makes space for some thinking about how generational experiences are becoming increasingly stratified and foreign to one another.
Are today’s youth doomed to be nothing but cloistered vid-heads who only know nature through what they have seen on the screens of their tablets? Possibly but I’m thinking that much of the fuss we see about losing out youth to technology is a direct result of our societies ruthless quest for economic productivity, seemingly at all costs.
Productivity has ever increased, but at what social cost? Remember when only one bread-winner was required to live a reasonable life and raise children? Successive generations have had to work harder for less money, just to stay in place. Community life has taken a back seat to the lifestyle focused the individual and consumption – social technology directly feeds into our atomization and separation from others.
The leaders of our society have learned the lessons of the past. All that New Deal/Civil Rights/ Second Wave Feminist scared them shitless and having witnessed what an organized community of like minded people can accomplish are doing their best to ensure that it (social change benefiting the masses) does not happen again. People with common interests, common community and commitment to bettering their own interests change society. Isolated lone-wolves mired in consumptive practices do not. Hence witness the trajectory of our society in which the ‘tailored-experience’ is all the rage; the idea that making choices (ones that are carefully circumscribed mind you) is empowering; and sadly the idea that social power resides in competition and being ‘unique’. These are all hallmarks of society geared toward preserving a status-quo that benefits a particular segment of society.
The video is playing up the same fears every generation has about the next. Are some of the concerns valid? I think so, but nothing that cannot be overcome with realization that social media friends are not the same as having friends in real life. Sharing (not the facebook variety) your life with others is a necessary part of healthily existing in society and cannot be replaced by social media. Can social media/technology be used to enhance and facilitate our social interactions? Of course, but it is not a replacement for the attachment and community humans need to be healthy and happy.
Societal analysis aside,I for one am glad that video games have come as far as they have. Video games are an immersive experience for me that allow me to spend some time outside of the real-world. At the same time I do realize that video gaming is just one aspect of life and must be balanced with other pursuits/activities/interests.
Admittedly, one must be careful in allocating time to video gaming as hours seem to disappear, especially when playing with your friends . It is very easy to lose yourself in the experience and come out bleary-eyed on the other-side wondering why the hell it is 2am and why you’re not sleeping. :)
How I (mostly) feel about video games
I grew up playing with Barbies and reading books, and didn’t really use a computer for anything other than basic word processing until around the turn of the century. On top of that, I have really bad hand-eye coordination, and not great depth perception, so simulated 3D environments just break my brain. In other words, video games are not something at which I’m primed for success. I’ve never made it past the first hole you have to jump over in the original Mario game. Ever.
Arb really enjoys video games, and over our years together, he’s tried to get me involved. I end up getting stuck in a door or falling off a cliff repeatedly or getting lost or just getting shot a lot and having no idea where I’m getting shot from. (On one memorable occasion, it was Arb shooting me in the back, running in a circle around me and keeping just ahead of me awkwardly spinning around trying to see what was happening.) And then I get mad and quit.
Now, I’m trying again. Read the rest of this entry »
The idea of having to be responsible 24/7 for the life of another is, frankly, quite repulsive. I’m not sure as to the reasons why our society has a fetish for raising children, but it needs to stop. There are too many of us human types on the planet anyways.
However, Buddy the robot, is a different story. Imagine a house denizen that is reliable and attends to your needs. I’m down with that.
It is kind of amazing how Wikipedia manages to survive given all the anti-reality tendencies of the human race. Religion, extreme right and left politics – wikipedia manages to muddle through most of the time and present a version of truth that is mostly acceptable. More amazing is that the editors are more or less, like you and me.
Listen and watch Zittrain explain how the useful Wikipedia is and how it could be used in the future as a hands on tool for participatory citizenship.
Ask any IT professional about security and you can almost always prepare yourself for a story or three about people using strongly encrypted passwords such as ‘password’ or ‘admin’. Or if it is a particularly good day, helping people understand that encrypted functions exist… Here is story from CBC.ca about how fallible people actually are when it comes to all this new fangled technology.
“Insecam.com, a new website, is broadcasting online private security camera footage from thousands of spots across Canada — all without the knowledge of the people who own and operate the cameras.
Insecam.com has feeds from internet protocol cameras (or IP cameras) all over the world.
“This is one of a series of websites that have been around for a while that basically go through and troll the internet for open ports,” said Tod Maffin, a tech columnist based in Vancouver. “Until fairly recently that information was just kind of held for people’s own curiosity, but now, as we’re seeing, this site and other ones as well are posting their findings.”
It is fairly amazing, you can spy on people across the world. Most are fairly uninteresting; parking garages and the like, but a couple are in residential areas and stuff. Crazy.
“Many of these cameras come with default passwords to access the footage on a website while you’re away — and often people fail to change them.
That’s where Insecam comes in. The site accesses the feeds using default passwords and broadcasts them.
CBC News watched several feeds from various locations in Winnipeg on Friday, including a car insurance sales office, a candy store, a tattoo parlour and others aimed at people’s front doors, backyards and properties.”
A word to the wise when it comes to technology. RTFM. (Read the Flippn’ Manual) Oh, and use a difficult to guess password.
I’ll treasure my special snowflake status as a special needs teacher until the teaching profession succumbs to the efficient robo-teachers of the future. :> I’m guessing that behavioural robot teachers will air-deploy Valium and whatever else is required to maintain the learning environment.
We, as a species have had the capacity to end ourselves quite completely since the late 1940’s. We often have our greatest minds working highly creative ways of ending human life. What bothers me the most about this quick video is the amount of ingenuity necessary to bring these designs from the blackboard to reality and then to mass production. Imagine if we could harness this impulse for technology and innovation that saves peoples lives instead of ending them
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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