Response to Ryan's Post

Post #2 - A response to Ryan's Blog. His blog can be found here.


His post on "The Machine is Us/ing Us:"
"This was a very mind boggling video. Everything it said was very true though. Anyone that tries to live with out a computer will very soon not be able to perform basic things like doing taxes or paying bills. As far as the computer using us goes, I don't believe we will be facing Skynet on the battle field anytime soon. It is true though, in a sense, the machine really is using us. Think about how much humans now rely on computers. Major companies, banks, stores, vehicles, toys, colleges,and  all branches of the military are lost with out computers. It is almost as if just living a life on earth was not good enough.

 We now have the opportunity to have another form of life on the web. We can make our voice heard without ever even speaking. We can join social circles and be outgoing; even when in reality one is a very shy and quiet person. They used to say, people always write things they cant say out loud. That sure seems to be the case these days with all of the tweets, blogs, and personal pages. Even now, I am on a computer writing everything I'm thinking, for school of all things. The irony is, no one can say anything bad about them because they make everyones life a lot easier.  People do not like to admit it, but in reality we are very dependent on our computers, and with out them we would be unconnected to each other, and unconnected to the world."


My Response:
I have a problem with your statement; "We can make our own voice heard without ever even speaking. We can join social circles and be outgoing; even when in reality one is a very shy and quiet person." I believe that that is one of the problems we will face with technology advancing that far, even if it has already done so. By someone depending on his or her computer to socialize with people, they lose out on actually socializing with people. When you 'speak' with someone over the computer, you're really only socializing with yourself. You never speak a word to that person rather you just type text at them. There is no real socializing going on, which I think is something that we need to watch over carefully. Lets not allow ourselves to depend on socializing through a computer, its so much better to actually speak to someone rather than type at someone.