What is our world coming to?

What is our world coming to? It is really hard to keep up to pace with the ever speeding rate the technology has taken. I would say that this change is the beginning of a new era where it is affecting our interactions and the technology that we use today is an extension of ourselves but is this a good thing or a bad thing? Turkle points out that what matters now is the ability to adapt and change whether it be new jobs, directions, or technology. I’d say that Turkle is saying that there is no real control over the change whether it be bad or good and brings out several points.
This technology is allowing us to recreate ourselves in a virtual world and several examples in the article describe how it allows people a chance to wear a “mask” that they can’t wear in society so it’s a form of escape and self expression. There is a positive side to this notion but Turkle also throws out a red flag saying that through virtual communities you can become saturated in isolation. This is where I see the problem with these communities. Although many people will be shy and more of an indoor hobbit, it really makes me question if this technology and these virtual communities would increase this community of people indoors.
There is a notion that people who use this technology is related in a sense to having multiple personality disorder. I would say this was a bad use of this disorder when related to how we seem to change persona when we are in the virtual communities. The different personalities usually occur spontaneously and involuntarily, and function more or less independently of each other which is not the same as to a person in front of a screen but I can see how that can be debatable. So we are all flexible and permeable and this is supposedly allowing us to have a greater capacity for acknowledging diversity through this new technology. Is that really true? The article points out that the Hindu culture,” is rooted in the “many” as the root of spiritual experience.” I think in many ways this technology if anything isolates and tries to find people who are more like us. In this country we stay pretty monotone as far as our education of other cultures and other languages, when, if you go to Europe it is not rare to find someone who knows more than two languages and know political figures in our country and we can’t say that we would know the same about theirs. We could just be making our social and patriotic bubble stronger. This is not a technology that gives us a simple escape or serves as a meaningless diversion.
Clark would say that we are a type of cyborg already and uses the extension of the cell phone as an extension of ourselves and text messaging. Text messaging takes away from the interaction that you are having with the people around you. He does make a valid point though saying that, “ It is our natural proclivity for tool-based extensions, and profound and repeated self-transformation, that explains how we humans can be so very special .” I completely agree with him and since our human existence the extremes will always exist and especially with technology and the only thing that we can do is to keep educating and informing ourselves to the best of our ability and getting it out to the general public.
Stelarc I would say is on the extreme and I’m not sure if he would be on the positive or negative side. I think a lot of the things he is doing is really genius yet ridiculous like growing an ear on your forearm. He sees the body as obsolete and takes this cyborg notion that Clark has into a new direction saying,” If the body can be redesigned in a modular fashion to facilitate the replacement of malfunctioning parts, then TECHNICALLY THERE WOULD BE NO REASON FOR DEATH - given the accessibility of replacements.” I’m not sure if I’m completely at his level yet and it might be a little too extreme for me but thinking about all the genetic manipulation and being able to clone now-a-days doesn’t make it too out of the ordinary. We really are going to need a new practical philosophy of the self knowledge we are obtaining and what morals we will hold as we are struggling to keep pace with today’s world.

Sampling

The topic of sampling is something that can build some controversy and Steven Shaviro explains in his article on how sampling works. It is true that we are surrounded by the electronic media and that it is now a huge source as far as referencing. It becomes hard to tell what line to draw and especially now with copyright protection, plagiarism, law suits, etc., plays a role in today’s society on what kind of sampling is “legal”. He points out that Shakespeare would not have been able to create his plays if the copyright protection was in effect.
It’s easy to argue that when you create an “original” piece of work that you would not want someone else to claim it as their own. What if they only use a sample of your work and recreate another piece of work? Would that work? If it didn’t work then replication icons would be the “very fabric of our lives”. Shaviro states that when these pieces of work are put into private hands that “creativity dries up altogether”. People would have to worry about law suits and fines and all because they only have one thing in mind which is to maximize their economic incentive.
Now, it really depends too who is the one sampling. I feel that Beck and Missy Elliot who are part of large markets and use a lot samples. (More justified for Beck because he buys his samples) With the right person behind them and describing their work as, “mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse.” Good sophisticated wording can get many out of trouble for a good price I guess. I’ve seen paintings where there are two orange lines on a black canvass and it’s considered art. So it comes to who can word their defense the best and I think bigger markets have more opportunities to defend their work then others.
Grandmaster Flash also uses sampling but his innovation and creation of double vinyl turn tables was a tool that he used to alter the sounds that couldn’t be done in that day. His technique, although sampling, had to be unique to be one of the first to break out of the local and into a successful international scene. I find it also easier to support him with the fact that created a lot of the terminology like “needle drops”, “scratching/cutting”, and his infamous “Clock Theory”. Do perfect these things seamlessly while he is playing music is a very hard skill. Like any innovator, only through lots of trial and error and finding the right needles, mixers, and mechanical parts that would make the sound he wanted did he get his end result.

Barabasi+Gladwell

"Viruses and Fads" was an article that was pretty similar to another article we've read. I can see the validity at analyizing the validity of the network of how a virus like AIDS would spread throughout a given population and it's staggering to acknowledge the spread rate. One of the thigns that stood out on this topic as well was the number of sexual partners that some of these people had. To think of someone having 20,000 partners is a little too much for me to imagine. Even if this number was half, or even less, it still amounts to a crazy amount. One of the things that many sociogists do in analyzing certain trends is trying to draw a map of the network but according to the article, there is so much ambiguity and trying to have a sex map would basically be impossible. This little fact to me is frightening, especially where there are so many other suxually transmitted diseases that are not as fatal as aids and most just produce unwanted discomfort but not to be able to map the network would be a good example of a chaotic network where there really is no order.
The fad system had a pretty basic structure called the "threshhold model". This model explains how you have an innovator and that the idea or product has a certain "spreading rate" and until it surpasses the "critical threshold" the fad won't really be successful. There are the stragglers on the end that finally jump in on the fad but they're not really the ones that set the whole fad in motion. This basic structure is given a more complex light with the "The Coolhunt" article.
I couldn't help but get an image of a person who was not too inept with what is "cool" when I read this article. http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&sa=N&resnum=0&q=malcolm%20gladwell&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&tab=wi Try this link and check out the amazing Malcolm Gladwell. This man deserves regognition though because he has had several best sellers and sociological topics are only a fraction of the ones that he researches. Baysie and Dee Dee are the two main figures that he follows around to see what it is that they do to research on what is "cool" and what is in style. One of the main things that they do is they observe the younger teenage crowd and even go as far as asking theor opinions on new products and that's how they make their decision. The intuition on observing the crowd and determiining what is independant taste and what is a fad that could possibly be sold by the thousands is something that he gives credit to. I'm not sure if this system has much order if it lies on some intuition on the consumer network. There have been other similar systems where they do surveys and they have the system where they hire you to take a machine and type in everything you buy so that companies get a good idea on what is being purchased. I'm sure Baysie and Dee Dee make good money at what they do and there is definately a demand for innovation and I think this hunger for innovation could lie on the borderline of a chaotic and orderly network, which allows for progress and innovation.