Scavenger Hunt Rush

Today in class, we had a scavenger hunt to look for information on many things. A quick glance at the sheet made it seem impossible to find any of the information. However, Andrew Fry says that it will be possible. so we searched for information in groups of three and lo and behold, every little thing that was on the sheet had information for us to find about the subject matter. Even the married sur name of someone's middle sister! However, when we think about this a little bit more... when we forget our passwords, some of the questions are "What is your mother's maiden name?" or "What city were you born in?" how hard is it to look up those information online? Should we be using these questions to retrieve our password? If it's this easy for someone to look up information about anyone, should this system be improved?

EPIC 2014: The World Now

The video EPIC 2014 is a scary guess from 2004 on what the world would be like with technology in 2014. It mentioned that newspapers will be overthrown by e-papers, which are electronic newspapers. The video said that newspapers will slowly die and news and media will slowly but surely be consumed by people online. Thus, leaving newspapers to extinction. Today, in 2014 most people prefer to read their news online because it is quicker. However in class, Andrew mentioned that sometimes even the quickest option is not as reliable. But this does not matter, on the internet, things can be edited and are not exactly permanent. But on paper, once the news comes out, the newspaper company would have to wait for another issue to be able to apologize for giving out the wrong information on paper. I personally would like to have the news first and corrected as soon as possible, rather than having to talk about it and later find out after a week that it was false. The newspaper has truly become just for the "elite and the elderly" as the video predicted, I don't see many young people reading the newspapers. In UWT, there are always newspapers stacked on the racks, but never empty. The news travels fast and they travel through word of mouth and the internet. The newspapers "per se" are now longer than 5 minutes behind on the news because of our access to site such as: Twitter, Google News, CNN.com, etc..

"Welcome to our world the Evolving Personalized Information Construct [EPIC]. Is the system by which our sprawling chaotic mediascape is filtered, ordered, delivered. Everyone contributes now from blog entries, to phone cam images, to video reports, to full investigations. Many people get paid too, a tiny cut of Google's immense advertising revenue." Think about it. This is happening right now. The computers filter, order, and deliver our: e-mails, searches, news, etc.. We contribute through: Twitter, blogs, YouTube. And yes, many people get paid for their sites for having advertisements in their blogs, and the media and information that we provide in our social media is contributing to the information that can be accessed in the web; whether it is private or not, it is accessible in one way or another. We are living through the world of EPIC 2014.

A Visit from Erik Hansberg

Erik Hansberg's visit has me thinking about my identity on the internet. "The person on the internet isn't really them in real life." he said. That is true, when you go on a site that someone actively participates on, you will only see one side of them. However, if we put all the data of a person in different sites together, will we see the whole person?

Nowadays, the majority of internet users have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and/or Tumblr. All these things are all connected to one's personal life. If all the data of each of these sites would merge together for a certain person, we could possible guess what the person is like. During Erik Hansberg's talk, LinkedIn came up in conversation. And I ask, are we willing to give out our professional life out for the world to be accessed as well? If we add LinkedIn to all the social media sites that we already own, aren't we basically giving out all information on who we are on the internet? Will we ever have complete privacy without giving up advantages like security?

User or Used: The Machine is Using Us.

Growing up, already introduced to the www and the internet, I thought it was an amazing thing. A machine is organizing and giving me outputs because it is "smart." I received a smartphone which was capable of almost everything that a desktop computer or a laptop was capable of. In comparison to my first 3310 Nokia phone, it was extremely "smart." , hence I thought it made sense that it was called a "smart"phone. 

However, having a better understanding of computers with a little programming insight, really we are teaching the machine to do things. Professor Monika Sobolevska mentioned at the beginning of this quarter that computers are "really dumb" and through programming, we teach it what to do. It's like a child, we have to teach it the most basic things step by step. I forget this often and this video reminded me that information and the things the machine does is because of the people who teach it what to do. It does not have a mind of its own, the machine was taught to do things by humans from different parts of the globe. The machine is us, connected.