Safeek's Paper
From Internet: Knowledge and Community
Safeek Ohab Stephen Beck and Doug Schuler The Internet: Knowledge and Community December/08/2010
Future of Technology Since the dawn of man we have looked for more efficient ways to manipulate our environment. We have developed new technologies that help us work, record information and communications. With every new innovation the world is forever changed. New technologies affect economics in nearly every field. Technology affect what we do in our leisure time, technology affect how information is shared, technology can improve our lives, technology can light our way to a better future, however if we don’t adopt or adjust to new innovations, we can get left behind. Technology is changing fast; new technological innovations are occurring every day; therefore it is important our children learn how to use these new tools. We need to invest in the tools, training, and infrastructure to engage our children’s in learning tasks that emphasize creation, manipulation, innovation and knowledge construction. Digital tools improve motivation and are appropriate tools for active engagement in authentic learning tasks. They want to learn, they want to learn with the tools that will shape their future. We need to be there to help them learn how to critically analyze information, we need to be there to make their experience with these tools safe, and we need the tools to make this happen. You can only create what you can imagine, and we have created the computer, internet, mobile phones and more. Can we keep our children’s safe from technology? Will technology change them for the worst? How will they use this new found technology? The telephone for example is a technology that kept us connected in the past. Now today we have what is a mobile phone, this is so convenience or is it? Will this technology help our children or will it hurt them? Mobile phones have gone from science fiction to everyday fashion accessory. Today’s phone plays music, shows maps, cater to the kids and are in fashion. Pretty soon the entire planet will be using this technology. I believe that these phones are getting smarter and smarter everyday with technology, maybe in the future your phone will know more about your world and yourself than you do. Tomorrow other than telling you where all the restaurants are nearby, this device can tell you your average wait time at these restaurants. The device may even remember what your daily activity pattern looks like and can use that information to speculate what you might be doing and what type of information you might need. I don’t think that we will have phones the way that we have them today, they will either be worn as ornaments like jewelry, or it might even be paired, I might have a necklace and someone else might have a necklace and were always in communication. But voice communication is the least part of it, what will happen when our communication device becomes part of our body? Basically this will mean that maybe any emotions or any thoughts will be instantly transmit to one or more people in real time and they will be able to basically feel your emotions or thoughts in real time. The mobile phone is just one example of the future of technology. Imagine if we create that ultimate program language, the one that will give intelligence to machine. What if something went wrong? What if the machine wants to rule over man? Can it be reverse? Or will man go into extinction. Or maybe we can create an electronic brain, one that we can integrate in our brain. Why would we want to go to school? When we could just download whatever we need. Which one will be the dumb brain?
Technology, Changes in our Lives, and the Environment Safeek Ohab
The Internet: Knowledge and Community Stephen Beck December 1, 2010 Technology, Changes in our Lives, and the Environment – 2
This paper is about in what ways does the internet shape, for good or bad, our ideas of what counts as knowledge and what knowledge is valuable for? Some people think the internet is a bad thing, in some way your identity can be stolen, your home invaded, and your savings robbed without anyone setting foot inside your door. It is one of the most dangerous weapons created, a wave of no restrictions to spread evil free of supervision or censorship, a place for mankind to exercise its darkest desires. An open market where you can purchase anything you want. The internet has taken us to a place where everything we do is watched, monitored, and processed without us ever realizing it. Some people think the internet is a bad thing, what do you think? A brief history on the internet, in 1969 the U.S department embarked on a grand experiment in long distance networking computing. They called it “ARPANET” (What is the Internet? Oct-2-2010), networking allowed defense researchers to share expensive super computers, and during the height of the cold war it also meant that in the event of a nuclear attack, we wouldn’t lose all our data. Years past and the idea caught on, other networks were created, sprawling into a gigantic network of connectivity. There was something for everyone on the internet; it was widely used by scientists, business people, students, dairy farmers, and of course researchers. It was an information super highway; “beginning in 1991” (What is the Internet? Oct-2-2010), the World Wide Web was a whole new way to navigate our planet. Suddenly the whole world was like one great giant data base, some visionary began to see the web as a perfect medium for business.
Google is one of those visionary; today Google is the most powerful search engine on earth, millions of users Google for any kind of information. “Google puts previously unimaginable resources at our fingertips-huge libraries, vast archives, warehouses of government records, troves of goods, the comings and goings of whole swaths of humanity”(Google P.10). In 1997 Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a so called page rank, a complex mathematical algorithm that ranks web sites by their relevant. This ground breaking invention changed access to information. Google rapidly became first choice for internet search, and this was just the beginning. Today Google makes huge profits by dominating online advertising, and well on their way to becoming one of the most valuable company on the global market. A perfect blend of software and hardware gives the company more computing power than anyone else. Google stores the whole entire known web in it’s customize giant database, and that’s not all, G-mail offers several gigabytes of free storage; it’s no secret that all your mail including received mail from your friends gets scanned. Google is always collecting your personal data, and in many more ways using cookies, and account information merely to offer relevant text ads. Google can create an incredible detail profile on any one of us. “We get web search, e-mail, blogger platforms, and YouTube videos; Google gets our habits and predilections so it can more efficiently target advertisements to us. Google’s core business is consumer profiling. It generates dossiers on many of us. It stores “cookies” in our web browsers to track our clicks and curiosities. Yet we have no idea how substantial or accurate these digital portraits are” (Google, P.19)
Internet, a project that started as a means of keeping communication channels open and sharing information has come a long way since its inception. Businesses soon realize that if they want to succeed they must evolve with the technology bandwagon. Farming, oil, steel, and auto-productions are a big business today, just like it was in the past. Today these businesses realize that they just can’t keep doing business as usual. To be more profitable they continue to incorporate modern technology, techniques and innovations to help keep their operations successful. Technology and the internet helps to keep these businesses up to date with changes. “The industrial age is not fully over. In fact, classic Second Wave sectors (oil, steel, and auto-production) have learned how to benefit from Third Wave technological breakthroughs – just as the First Wave’s agricultural productivity benefited exponentially from the Second Wave’s farm- mechanization” (Alamut, P. 1). One can see that through knowledge and new age technology we can lean toward a wise balance between economic prosperity, social equity, and future integrity that can assure changes to come. As we explore our new frontier, we must be open to changes and progress thru our evolution technology. “As humankind explores this new “electronic frontier” of knowledge, it must confront again the most profound questions of how to organize itself for the common good. The meaning of freedom, structures of self-government, definition of property, nature of competition, conditions for cooperation, sense of community and nature of progress will each be redefined for the Knowledge Age- just as they were redefined for a new age of industry some 250 years ago” (Alamut, P.2). Technology, Changes in our Lives, and the Environment – 5
Future of the internet: The internet changes so quickly, the future is wide open, it’s amazing to see how things have changed over the last few years. I believe that more and more devices will be built for internet access. This is kind of scary, really, will the rate of change become too fast for humans to deal with? Would we have the knowledge to understand these changes? And how will these changes affect our environment.
Cited References
1. What is the Internet? Hand out, 10-2-2010 2. Google, articles, 3. Dyson E, Gilder G, Keyworth G, Toffler A. A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age. 1994: 1-19.
