black friday shopping!

dear world wide web,

Every year, my older cousin Kaitlin and I go shopping the day after Thanksgiving (although not necessarily at 3 a.m.). This tradition is part of what keeps the two of us close. We don't get to see each other very often and this is one of the times that we are guaranteed to be able to talk and catch up. This year, I had a very different experience than my other years.

A week before Thanksgiving, I began reading William Powers' Hamlet's Blackberry. In the first chapter, Powers talks about the life of the American being "busy". He talks about how even when we aren't busy, we make ourselves become busy by either taking up a hobby we enjoy, or simply carrying out empty actions. We seem to have lost the ability to live "deeply". Powers compares two different interactions: 1) with a stop sign, 2) with your dog. When we perceive the sign, we react automatically without much thought. When we perceive our dog, we think on a much deeper level and spend more time with the dog. These two experiences are completely different.

While walking around the mall, I noticed this same difference. Here I am, walking with my cousin, talking about what she is going to get her fiance for Christmas. We go into Things Remembered and start looking at money clips. She decides that is what she wants to get and then we spend a good 30 minutes looking at the different ones, imagining which one we could see coming out of his pocket. After laughing about different scenarios in which this would happen, we began thinking of what to get engraved on the item. This took another 15 minutes.

This entire time, I didn't even realize that I had left my phone in the car. I think it's because I was having real interactions with my cousin that I didn't realize I wasn't connected to my phone and 100 other people. I was connected to a person. On the way out of the store a teenage girl walked straight into me. She was on her iPhone, with her friend, who looked the same age, also on her iPhone. This is when Powers' words starting springing up in my head.

As I continued to walk around, I was looking at the people walking next to me, in front of me, behind me. I was awestruck. Almost everybody was either talking or texting on a phone. There was one family (outside the Disney store) that was talking and laughing with each other. This actually began to worry me a little bit.

All of these people were having the experience they have with a stop sign. They would look up occasionally, perceive the store they wanted to go into, look back down at their phones, and walk into the store. Then they would check out some of the prices on the signs, pick up some clothes, and quickly pay for it. I began to ponder what was going on in their brains, what were they thinking about.

For a large majority of the people I was passing, technology, mainly cell phones in this case had them connected to a bunch of other people to whom they were communicating instead of the people standing next to them. All of these people were having very shallow experiences, rather than being in the present.

An hour later, I was rushing my cousin out of the mall because I felt like I was going crazy. I got back into the car, grabbed my cell phone, turned it on silent, threw it in my bag, and did not look at it again until I got home that night.

I know that I do this also, but I am glad that I am beginning to see how extreme it can become and now I purposely lower my connectivity to the rest of my phone book.

I want to live deeply.

Kiersten

relevence.

dear world wide web,

I know that we don't have to post on our personal blogs anymore, but I really wanted to write about an encounter I had last night at work, where this class was never more relevant to real life.

I work at a restaurant/bar in town and I was getting off of work last night when a couple having drinks at the bar started a conversation with me. They asked me typical questions: where are you from? do you go to the college? what year are you? whats your major?

As I began to tell them my major, and some more detail about my academic career, they started telling me a little about themselves. The man went to college and ended up moving to California to work on movies. The woman lived in New York City her whole live and was an expert in Film Editing. She was telling me about how sad it was that print media was dying. She started saying how much of a generational gap there is because of technology and how many things she grew up with are disappearing.

We then started talking about her husbands old 35 mm camera with a thousand and one lens' and how much training it took to be able to work a camera like that, to create art in the form of photography. She then started complaining about how kids today have digital cameras and put their pictures on facebook and call it art.

I found myself involved in such an interesting conversation with this women, and somehow ended up quoting Andrew Keen. I told her all about the classes I am taking and what we say about the future of the media. I told her all about Andrew Keens theories and ideas and she found it incredibly interesting.

I ended up writing Andrew Keen's name and the name of his book on a piece of paper so that she could read it. It made me realize how relevant the conversations we have in class are to the real world. It was really rewarding to be able to have a conversation with this woman who along with her colleagues agree with a lot of what we say in class.

I hope to find some more people to whom I can speak with about issues such as these. Maybe there are enough people who feel the same way about media; and if we spread the message and discuss matters like this more regularly, maybe media can slow down on becoming old technology fast.

Kiersten

windows 7 phone to the rescue

Dear World Wide Web,

The video of the commercial for the new windows 7 phone that we watched in class amazed me. It is attractive to viewers because of the music and because it is funny and makes you realize how absurd society has gotten. It almost reminded me of Idiocracy, it almost seemed like some viewers are infantilizied by commercials. People watching this commercial, all happy because of the songs, laughing because its funny, yet at the same time it just seems stupid because that is what the majority of those viewers do on a daily basis. And then the fact that the phone is being advertised as "the phone to get you in, out, and back to life". Yet it is still a phone, the same technology that is the problem is the solution. It makes NO sense. I showed the video to another one of my teachers in the Communication and Media and I thought he was going to analyze it and say how crazy it was, but instead the professor talked about how funny it was.

I don't know what we have come to but it seems that nothing makes sense anymore.

Kiersten

death of the computer

dear world wide web,

Last week i made the fatal mistake of dropping my computer on the floor. I haven't had a big laptop in a long time. For the past two years I have had the baby computer that is known as a net book. So for some reason, when I dropped it, I thought it would be okay because it was so small, how could it break? However, now I do not have a computer. And to make matters worse, only two of my housemates were home this weekend and their computers do not leave their rooms.

I have become detached from the computer. I have become the outcast. Not only is not having a computer royally screwing up my role as a student, because I have not been able to get to the library between work and class this week, but now it is ruining my role as a member in this college society.

Of course while people were out getting wasted all weekend, I was working from open until eleven o'clock at night. When I got off of work I went home to a house full of bunnies, cats, and a shark. Everyone was dressed up and knew what was going on at what bar at what time. Facebook let them all in on the times of costume contests, the specials, etc.

Then, I overheard a group talking about a bunch of girls and what they were being for Halloween because pictures had already been posted to Facebook. Some people actually changed their costume so that there were not too many people dressed up as the same thing.

I began to realize, what is going on here? Is it normal to know all of these things, to want to know them? Is what we find on Facebook considered news? I, without a computer, was a stranger to the topics these girls were talking about because I did not have the opportunity to find out what everyone was being for Halloween 2 hours before everyone went out.

Does this become news? I realize now, how much useless information I retain when I do have a computer and end up being on Facebook for hours. Do I really need to know what my best friends brothers friend's cousin did last weekend? No, but somehow with a computer, I do.

I realize how much I actually enjoy not having a computer. It allows me to do things that are a bit more important. I am more willing to go for a walk, go meet up with friends I have not seen in a while, rather than Facebook "IM"ing them. Instead of doing my homework on my computer while in front of the TV with 4 other people having conversations around me, I am forced to go to the library in between my classes and before work.

I am getting a Mac for Christmas, because although I enjoy not having a computer because I am less distracted, ultimately it is convenient to have one at your fingertips. I am simply going to have to use it for basic needs and let Facebook fade away from my habits.

Kiersten