Week 2 Exercise

in this image: iPod nano, computer monitor, cell phone with which the picture was taken (reflected)


Pictured to the left are the three digital communications technologies which I use almost every day. The computer is a school computer located in the STTC lab.

The iPod is a digital audio device which stores representations of audio recordings in a compressed bit format. It has an 8-gigabyte capacity and currently stores digital information for 1358 songs, as well as 4 games (which I never play), and various digital tools such as a clock, a stopwatch, and a calendar; however, I rarely utilize the latter functions, as they are more readily accessible on my cell phone. I use this iPod to listen to music on a more-or-less daily basis.

The cell phone is another type of compact portable auditory and visual device, the main function of which is to send and receive digitized audio signals when making a phone call - i.e. the device acts as an intermediary between two people having a conversation when they are not near enough each other to send and receive such signals by natural means. Many people these days possess cell phones which perform an incredible number of functions, and these I hesitate to call auxiliary - while, at one point, there were phones which did other things, it now seems more appropriate to label them multipurpose handheld digital devices of which the capacity as a phone is only one among a great variety of capacities. My phone is fairly old. It was cheap. It does connect to the internet and has the capacity to browse a very limited amount of the material therein. I also use the alarm setting to wake me up in the morning, and I tell time by the phone's clock. Sometimes I use the notepad, the calendar, or the calculator. The phone beeps loudly in the middle of the night for no apparent reason and is thereby a frequent source of annoyance.

The desktop computer I use mainly for its function as a connection to the internet, and for its word-processing program. Like most people today, I would be quite lost without the use of a computer. I use it to send and receive messages via email, and to access assignments through the iLearn website. Since paper is quickly becoming obsolete in most quarters, school is basically a matter of attending lectures in the flesh and doing everything else on the computer, printing finished papers when necessary. I am using the computer's keyboard to type this assignment, which will be posted on the internet through the services of this web-hosting site. I also frequently utilize the word processor to compose documents.

The extent to which a person from a previous generation is "analog" varies somewhat from case to case. For example, my grandmother uses the internet frequently, has an email address which she checks regularly, and is, all things considered, more technologically literate than my mother. My grandfather, on the other hand, does not own a computer or any other digital devices except for a DVD player, which he can basically operate even though he is mostly blind. There is some degree to which people of a former generation must assimilate themselves into the world as it exists currently...yet there is still a very marked difference between the mindset of our current generation and that of 40 or 50 years ago. Because of the internet, we have grown up in a world in which the rapid exchange of information is standard and the cultural exchange rate is similarly rapid...globalization is an ever-accelerating process. Our grandparents are accustomed to much slower methods and were raised in the 20th-century literate tradition which the current generation is the first to observe in the process of becoming obsolete...Knowledge on a global scale is increasingly ubiquitous, nonlinear, accelerated to the speed of light...it remains to see how we deal with it.