Think About It Before You Use It

Carrie McKee
October 27, 2008
Internet Studies

Think About It Before You Use It
The World Wide Web is a cultural artifact dealing with computers. The World Wide Web is also considered to be part of the digital cultural artifacts. “Although the Web is an original new medium for cultural expression, like all new modes of representation of knowledge the first experiment are likely to imitate the forms of past media. It is original because although other communication technologies are global, this one has no central control points. It is new because its cultural expressions will be in multimedia, even though today is guiding metaphors are derived from print publication” (Lyman). This may relate to some relationships with computers because “our cultural conversation with and about intelligent machines is extended and varied. It includes moments of high seriousness and the dramatic confrontation of ideas” (Turkle 77).
We have to step up our computer skills as the technology of the computers upgrade. We know that the Web is not a real library, but we rely on it for our needs and information. “The Web is a medium for publishing; and uses a rhetorical structure based on hypertext; and it is a multimedia text including mostly words and numbers, some fixed and some dynamic, and images equivalent in size to a library of one million volumes; and was written by seven million authors; and most of it is distributed for free around the world” (Lyman). I believe this makes our relationship stronger with the Web. Since it is free more people are likely to get on and surf the Web, rather than if we had to pay for it every time we got on. It leaves us wanting to come back for more. The World Wide Web is an important part of an individual’s life. It seems that more and more people are turning to the Web for their information instead of going to the library for research.
As it says in, Life on the Screen, “Why is it so hard for me to turn away from the screen? There is something else that keeps me at the screen. I feel pressure from a machine that seems itself to be perfect and leaves no one and no other thing but me to blame” (Turkle 29). I do not believe there is an evil spirit or something hiding behind the screen drawing us to stay at the computer, but I do believe it is addictive. “It is striking that the word “user” is associated mainly with computers and drugs” (Turkle 30). With this statement being said I can understand why people are cautious in how they use their computer. I still believe it’s all in the persons mind if you become addictive. You are the one that needs to be in control, you can’t let something take over your life like that.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the computer actually kills people. In fact in 2001 the computer is acting as someone, and as the man steps always for a few minutes the man in the computer kills everyone in the tanks. The relationship between the man and the computer was a little deceiving. The computer acted as then mans friend but once he turned his back the computer murdered everyone that was stable. This may affect the way we think about and how we interact with computers. “With the idea of mind as society,” he says, “Minsky is trying to create a computer complex enough, indeed beautiful enough that a soul might want to live in it,” (Turkle 137). If there was a way for it to happen, people today would probably really take the chance to live inside a computer. For some 2001 may freak them out and they may think their computer is going to harm them in some crazy way. Others may not let it bother them at all. People react to things differently. You have to consider it though; computers are extremely smart and can do so many things. You have to world at your hands when you sit down with the World Wide Web. “We know that today’s computers are not sentient, yet we often treat them in ways that blur the boundary between things and people” (Turkle 102).
When we think about relationships between the World Wide Web and human beings, we see that “society uses it, although global, is not universal. Worldwide, English speakers are about sixty-five percent of the world online population, but hundreds of languages and dialects are used in the Internet” (Lyman). I thought this was an interesting fact because I have no idea that only sixty-five percent of people online spoke English, which seemed like a very small percentage.
Turkle said there was an attendant anxiety that demanded the assertion that these boundaries were sacred. That anxiety had been tied to a sense that people who worked closely with computers were somehow strange (Turkle 110). This statement is possibly very true according to how you look at things. People that have good connections with computers have a special feel for them and understand computers better than people who are computer illiterate. Turkle mentioned in the book that children were drawn into thinking about the computer for two reasons; one, the computer was responsive; two, the machine’s opacity kept children from explaining its behavior by referring to physical mechanisms and their movement (81).
More and more people are learning the World Wide Web better and better each day. We have new software, games, programs, and all sorts of new stuff coming out all the time. These people have a completely different view of the computer and a different respect. I can see how they think of the computer as their home. On page 37 Marvin Minsky had long justified the AI enterprise with the quip. “The mind is a great machine” (Turkle 137). “The mind may be a machine, but it’s not just any old machine; connectionism fits the picture because it’s scientific, but not deterministic” (Turkle 137).
I hope with this I have taught you a little about the World Wide Web and our relationship with computers. As well as learning how Life on the Screen may affect how we think about and use computers.














Work Cited
Lyman, Peter., and Brewster Kahle. Archiving Digital Cultural Artifacts. 25 July 1998. 24 Oct. 2008 .
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster paperbacks, 1995.

Bush VS Hawthorne

I believe Dr. Vannevar Bush related his theory better to the internet in general, and my blog, rather than Nathaniel Hawthorne. To me it seemed that Bush’s reading made more sense, and was easier to follow than Hawthorne’s. Also it seemed that Bush was more creative, opened minded, and his memex was closely related to the computer. For me Hawthorne’s Fire-Worship was a piece of writing that related things to nature.
Bush and Hawthorne have two very different ways of looking at the situation. I do not believe that in either case it is a threat to anyone’s life. Hawthorne talks about the sunshine, nature, people’s bright face, and about domestic life. In Fire-Worship he basically relates most everything to nature in some way. In section two in Bush’s “As We May Think,” he talks about the camera and how they have been used just like our blog, to keep records of things going on in our life. “Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop” (Bush). Photography is just like the internet, it not going to stop. It is only going to expand more and more into the future. It shows us that it is not a threat to society, but that it has helped the demand of the fast growing population we are in today. People want to have to world at there hands and they love that the internet gives them just that. I’m sure it has hurt use in some ways you mostly hear more of the good news than bad.
“A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory” (Bush). Before the memex, “when data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature” (Bush). Bush’s dream of the memex is a good understanding of the internet. The memex had many features as well as the Internet does. There is such a growing mountain of research, and it’s getting bigger and bigger by the years. The memex was a device much like our internet today. It’s your own personal library, like we talked about in class. People don’t go to the library as much as they did years ago. Most all people have a computer and can do there research from home. Computers today are more efficient than say a type writer was. You have spell check and all this neat stuff on computers and when people were using type writers, which was not that long ago, I’m sure it was hard to catch all your mistakes and type it over who knows how many times.
My blogs relationship to Bush’s memex is how it links relates text and it can show illustrations. Just like the memex, my information that I put on the blog is stored on my page and is there for later reference or use. You can do things on the blog such as post photographs links or anything that you would like. With Hawthorne’s Fire-Worship it was harder for me to find the relationship between the wood stove and my blog. At the end of the Fire-Worship he clams to fight for you stove and I related that to my blog. On a blog you are free to write whatever is on your mind, and you have a right to fight for your freedom on there. It’s a way to express your feelings and some may say it’s a way of reaching out to others. Therefore I believe that the internet and blogging seem to be a realization of Bush's dream of the memex. It is not a threat to social and domestic life like Hawthorne sees in his new-fangled wood stove.



Bush, Vannever, “As We May Think” The Atlantic Monthly. July 1945. http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier/pub/vbush/vbush-all.shtml. Simon Fraser University, August 1995

1st Computer Experiences

My first experience with any type of computer was from my brother. We got a computer when I was around nine years old. He taught me how to play Wheel of Fortune, Oregon Trail, Pinball, Solitaire, Hearts, and all his boyish games. We always had fun competing with each other on Oregon Trial to see who could get the longest along in the game. Also I used the note pad and paint art. Paint art was my favorite because you could use all kinds of different tools to paint different shape, sizes, and figures. I loved listening to CD’s too. When we didn’t have iTunes to listen to, we just put in a CD.
We used computers all though out school but, I would have to say I had experience with the Internet around the time I was entering fifth grade and that was probably my first real experiences with the Internet. Since we live out in the country the Internet wouldn’t run out our road so we never had it until recently. We had to make do with what we had. When entering middle school I always went to the county library to do all my work. I believe the computer they had at the library was Gateway, but I wouldn’t quote me on that. When I made new friends in middle school I would go over to there house, we would play on the computer for hours and get on chats and talk to everyone we could. It was almost like, let us see how many people we can talk to on here. AOL instant messaging was hot stuff back in the day. Instead of calling people we would talk to them online and we thought that was amazing. For a while we only had dial-up so we knew better than to call one another, we would just get on line and talk. We always wondered how that actually worked; we were so amazed that you could talk to someone like that.
Instead of using USB drive we all had that really big floppy disk before internet was even invented. It wasn’t until maybe ninth grade or even high school years when they came out with “CD ROM”. It’s amazing how they keep making things smaller and smaller. When they came out with the colored smaller floppy disk I thought I had to have some, that they were the coolest. Now that make disk any way you want them, just about.
It was so upsetting and nerve racking when your computer would crash right before you were about to save your work or during any moment, and it still is. Sometimes I remember getting so frustrated that I wanted to throw the computer through the window, it still happens. I’m pretty sure that happens to everyone at some point. I never really got into downloading music, until recently I’ll download a song every now and again to put on my ipod. That about my entire computer experience that I have so far. I hope to expand and grow in my computer knowledge and skills