Geek Heresy by Kentaro Toyama - Chapters 5-7

          In these chapters, Kentaro Toyama explored how technology and digitizing the world has changed what people value.  He started chapter five with an anecdote about book stores in Harvard Square while he was in college and by 2013 Amazon held a third of all book sales in the US and about sixty percent of e-books.  Towards the end of chapter five, Kentaro Toyama had a section titled The Tech Commandments, which I found really interesting.  The Tech Commandment categorizes how values have shifted because of technology.  Toyama acknowledges that could be an exaggeration, but they are not an extreme stretch.  The Tech Commandments consists of:

-       Measurement over meaning: value only that which can be counted

-       Quantity over quality: Do only those things that affect millions over people

-       Ultimate goals over root causes: Focus narrowly on the end goal to ensure success

-       Destinationalism over path dependency:  Ignore history and context, take a single hop to the destination

-       External over internal: Do not expect people to change; instead, focus exclusively on their external circumstances

-       Innovation over tried-and-true: never do anything that has been done before, at least not without new branding

-       Intelligence over wisdom: Maximize cleverness and creativity, not mundane effort.  Use intelligence and talent to justify arrogance, selfishness, immaturity and rankism. (Rankism is abuse humiliation, exploitation, or subjugation based on any kind of social rank)

-       Value neutrality over value engagement: Bypass values and ethics by pretending to value neutrality

-       Individualism over collectivism: Let competition lead to efficiency; avoid cooperation, which breeds complacency and corruption.  Any inhibition of individual expression, including compromise to support the common good, is the same as oppression.

-       Freedom over responsibility: Encourage more choices; discourage discernment in choosing.  Any temperance of liberty, including encouragement of responsibility is tantamount to tyranny.

I found these commandments to be pretty close to what I’ve observed around me.  A lot of what he talks about in these chapters is about how people are focused more on making their lives easier and looking for the quick fix or the easiest path rather than the most rewarding or what brings us the most success and fulfillment in the long run.  An example of “quick fixes” that he used that I really liked was “Teaching to the Test.”  Toyama explained that because schools are under so much pressure to have high test scores they “turn to quick fixes: technologies and methodologies that drill students in minor variations of common test questions.  However, rather than fostering curious, productive, well-informed, and well-adjusted citizens, the mindless drilling erodes students’ motivation to learn.”(Toyama 94)  I think that this is completely the case, at least where I’m from, because a large portion of our core classes only focused on the two standardized tests that we had to take and feeding us practice questions so the school would look good compared to surrounding towns.

In chapter 6, Toyama talked about his time at the Technology Access Foundation (TAF).  He talked about how powerful of a tool technology can be, but how teachers have to be very careful with it, using the example of how some classes open a laptop and start their school work, but others open a laptop and instantly start watching YouTube videos.  He talk about how there should be set rules that are explained at the beginning of the school year and stuck to.  Toyama explained how it took him a while being at TAF before figuring out which rules worked for him and his class and took some adjusting to get it right.  In this case they were just using laptops and had figure how to best use them, but there are now people who specialize in technology for education.  Schools higher these specialists to work in the school and figure out what kind of technology, whether it be software or different devices, and work with the teachers to see what will best help their classes learn in a productive, and maybe even fun, way.

No Laptop Left Behind: Conflicting Results in Educational Technology

             In Chapter One of Geek Hersey: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology, Kentaro Toyama explored how having access to computers effects education, even if other factors that contribute to a person’s education are dismal.  A quote that really stuck out to me was “talent is universal; opportunity is not.”  I feel like that quote could apply to so many different areas and still be true. 

            The part of this chapter about bringing laptops to parts of India reminded me of the One Laptop Per Child program, that developed special laptops bring to schools in developing countries.  There was also a program, which I can’t remember the name of, that put couple of computers in rural areas of developing countries and made it so only children could use them, by adding low overhangs and other barriers that mad it difficult for adults to use.  The idea behind this was to have kids learn and learn about technology, so in theory they could be more competitive globally.  Though these programs may have been helpful in some ways, as Toyama pointed out, just because a child has access to technology, that technology isn’t necessarily going to help them process information any quicker or more effectively.  Toyama explained how education needs to be a “two-way interaction” rather than having kids just learn by looking at a screen.  Even though people can communicate through technology, I think is important for kids to learn from a present person for two reasons.  One is that a person being in front of them teaching will give them more of a personalized education where they can ask specific questions and have special needs met if necessary.  The other is that not only are kids learning academic material in schools, but they are also learning socials skills. In class, we have talked so much about how social media changes how we communicate.  I can’t help but thing what a luxury we had growing up with face-to-face conversations and are now able to recognize these differences.  I think if kids grew up with such a high percentage of their communication through a computer, they would lack basic social skills when they became adults.

Black Mirror Season 1 Episode 2

In class we watched the second episode of the first season of Black Mirror titled “Fifteen Million Merits.”  The dystopia that is created in this episode would be terrifying to live in.  The first scene literally shows the main character, Bing, waking up in what I consider a box.  What stuck out most to me about this small room is that there were no windows, and no sign of a world outside of it.  Ironically a country sunrise scene with an animated rooster is what Bing woke up to everyday.  This rural scene, and Bing’s “rolling road” selection on his bike indicated early on that Bing was going to be a character that desired a “simpler life” or someone who valued the outdoors. One the show, people live their lives between the little boxes that are essentially their homes, and stationary bikes that they peddle day in and day out to earn “merits” which is what they use as currency.  They use these merits to buy food, apps for their room, entertainment, and to pay penalties on skipping ads or content that they do not want to experience.  The show also has its own talent show, Hot Shot (similar our America’s Got Talent), for fifteen million merits a person can audition for the show.  Success from the show promises a better life, one where you can pick out your own clothes and look outside every day (what a concept!).  Bing spends his inheritance to get his friend on the show for her singing ability.  When she is degraded and taken advantage of, he works tirelessly to get himself on the show to make a statement, threatening to take his own life in the process.  In the end, he becomes part of exactly what he hated and has his own show.  When we see his life then, we see how much of a façade it really is, because seeing outdoors means seeing screens with images of trees on them.

Liza Smith-Vedder Presentation: The History of Advertising

I really enjoyed Liza Smith-Vedder’s presentation on The History of Advertising and how advertising works into the newspaper business.  Even though I am an MJD (media studies, journalism, and digital arts) major, I have never learned a whole lot about advertising, so it was cool to be able to get an overview of the history of advertising during this presentation.  A thread that went throughout her presentation was that as long as advertising has existed, people have hated it.  We learned that people are more likely go survive a plane crash rather than click on a banner ad on website.  We also learned about how intrusive people find it to be and how they’ve always seen that way, since way back when malls and stores were created and began to replace corner markets.  Not only do people have a disdain for advertisements, but also people have not trusted advertisements they see for a very long time.  People don’t trust ads, because historically advertisements have been extremely deceiving, which have earned them their reputation as being untrustworthy reputation.  Another theme throughout this presentation is how advertisers are always one step ahead, one step ahead of consumers and one step ahead of government regulations.  They are always finding ways to persuade consumers in not necessarily the most ethical ways to buy their products or services.  An example that we saw many times with cigarette ads.  First they claimed those cigarettes are good for you then when it was outlawed to blatantly lie about your products effects, so the companies started saying that more doctors smoke their cigarettes than any other ones.  Ads are also always one step ahead of the consumer in how they capture the public’s attention.  The advertisements that we see online are so tailored to us, that we don’t even necessarily notice that they are interfering with our online experience.  The example we discussed most was Facebook and how personalized the ads we see are.  This reminded me of in our Global Communications class when we learned about filter bubbles.  While learning about filter bubbles we talked about several different examples and facets of them, but while discussing Facebook, I think we leaned that they use 57 sensors to determine what content (including ads) shows up on your news feed.

Another part of the presentation that I found fascinating was how script has changed over time.  It was just a very small detail of the presentation, but when we were looking at pictures of old newspapers, particularly one from Pennsylvania (which looked like Pennfilvania), it was amazing to see how much lettering in our own language has evolved over time.