My Relationship with Technology

 

If you were to ask 100 random people in all the world if they think they are addicted to their phones, what do you think their response would be? I would say a good majority of people would say they are addicted to their phone, which in turn is a good overall answer to how the world is set up today. According to an article by Exploding Topics, about 47% of Americans admit that they are addicted to their phones. With that, the average American checks their smartphone 352 times a day, and the average user spends almost 3 hours per day on their smartphone. 

Now, although this does sound bad, there can be some reason as to why these statistics are bad. For one, there are people out there who are constantly working. One good example is my dad, who is a trial and appellate lawyer. He is constantly working, and with that comes the case of being on his phone, going through emails or getting calls to handle business. It makes sense from his perspective. For the average American though, there's no excuse. 

This overall is a good representation of how this world's relationship is with technology. It has become a daily commodity in our society. I would say that I do not have a healthy relationship with technology. Since the first moment when I got my first iPhone 5C back in 6th grade to now, I would say I have used it every single day. Now, I wouldn't say this is necessarily a bad thing. I bet there are millions and millions of people who could say the same for when they got their first phone. I would say it's all about how much time you spend on it. 

I was born in 2003, so I wasn't as exposed to technology as kids are now. These kids now are getting phones at such a young age and are on social media before I even had a phone. Before I was able to get my hands on my first phone, I didn't really use technology all that much apart from playing my Xbox 360. My brother really helped me get introduced into video games at a young age since he was very much into them. I started by playing mostly sports games, specifically Madden 08, FIFA 10, and some racing games like Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Mariokart. I really enjoyed playing video games, and I still do. 

I eventually got more and more into technology, with me downloading different social media apps like Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc... I wouldn't say I've ever had any bad experience with social media, but I do know my limits as to what I post or what I say on these apps. Keeping a good, clean online footprint is something that is very important to me, because I know in the future when I am looking for a job, these employers will look up myself and try to find as much information about me as possible. For example, when I Google myself, lots of different people who are also named Wyatt Williams show up. From a former restaurant critic, to an Appalachian State soccer player, to a cartoon character on a show called 6Teen in Canada, there are lots of different Wyatt Williams's. When I look myself on other social media sites, I make sure that everything people can see is positive and there is nothing negative that could get me in trouble. 

Now though, I would say I am in a large pool of people that are somewhat addicted to their phones. Whenever I am bored, I find myself going in and out of Twitter or TikTok or Instagram, where I just scroll and scroll until I'm bored of that. It's a never-ending cycle really, and I don't think it's very healthy for me to do that. I could very much be enjoying other hobbies of mine that don't require technology, like playing soccer or playing disc golf. I really enjoy playing those sports because I've noticed it gets my mind off of things, and I think I am most happy when I am playing them. Another example is that whenever I am trying to study for an exam or doing some homework, if I ever find myself getting stuck, I go straight to my phone, and then stay on it for 15-20 minutes just scrolling through social media before I tell myself to get off it and start working again. Sometimes, if I am working at my desk in my room, I will through my phone onto the bed, so I don't get distracted by it. Although it works and I get my work done doing it, I shouldn't have to go to those measures to be able to get my work done. 

When we talk about social media, I think the majority of people would agree that it is one of the biggest wastes of time out there. I think social media has affected many people to overthink what they post, along with overthinking about what people will think of them and how it will affect their reputation. According to an article by Help Guide, there have been multiple studies where people who use social media have an increased risk for depression, anxiety, self-harm, or even suicidal thoughts. Social media really promotes things that can make you feel lonely and can make people feel insecure about themselves. 

Overall, I don't have the best relationship with social media. I go on it every day, which I think is a problem, but I think it can be fixed. I think if I try and do more of the hobbies that I enjoy like photography or playing soccer or disc golf, I think I would be a much happier person. I think that can go for everyone as well. Everyone has hobbies and has things that they enjoy that don't involve technology. That could be painting, playing sports, birdwatching I don't know. There are so many different things that people enjoy that if you just go out and do them more instead of staying inside and watching TikTok all day, those people would become happier. 

In the Age of AI

In the video, the Age of AI, I thought it was really interesting on how much the top 1% of people in the world have a ton of more control over what happens in the world in comparison to the rest of the 99%. People are frankly scared of AI, and what it can become. People sometimes make jokes about a future in which mankind will have to submit to robot rulers when they witness machines that behave like humans or computers that execute feats of strategy and intellect imitating human inventiveness. But as much of a joke as people make it, it could very much turn out to be the future of our world. People are going to start to get lazier and ask for other things such as machines to do things for us. 

I do think though that moving to an age of AI where technology has a more important role has some features that could really help society. One example would be that artificial intelligence, or AI, and machine learning, or ML, can do certain tasks that are too dangerous and tedious for humans to perform. This can increase efficiency and productivity as well as reduce the risk of injury or death in certain industries. For example, self-driving cars powered by AI and ML can reduce the number of traffic accidents caused by human error. A big example is with one of the most popular car brands of the past few years, Tesla. According to Tesla, in the fourth quarter of 2021, they recorded one crash for every 4.31 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology.

Another benefit of complex AI and ML is their ability to analyze and process vast amounts of data quickly and accurately. This can be incredibly useful in fields such as medicine, where doctors and researchers can use AI to analyze medical images or patient data to diagnose diseases more accurately and make more informed treatment decisions. In finance, AI can be used to analyze market trends and make predictions about the performance of stocks and other investments. This can help investors make more informed decisions and potentially generate higher returns.

In general though, I think AI has its pros and cons. The pros being that if we can use AI and ML so that we can get certain tasks done that maybe us humans couldn't do so easily, it would be a step in the right direction. As well, if doctors continue to use it in medicine and finding diseases, it would help them along with hospitals help patients get better much quicker than now. Although, I feel as if we can't take AI and ML too far, because if we do, it could result in robot takeover, which although sounds funny, would be terrible for our world. 

EOTO Reax: Propaganda

Propaganda is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as "information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view". Propaganda is usually thrown around to try and influence someone into changing their views or attitude to something else. Propaganda was first thrown around as a term in the the early 1900s, shortly after World War I began. The government would try and recruit soldiers by printing posters that made the army look like it was exciting. More and more posters would be made with the same topic in mind, that it was these men's duties to join, and that they would feel proud if they did and guilty or embarrassed if they didn't join. 

There are two different kinda of propaganda in the world, positive and negative. Positive propaganda is often used by the government to promote messages and healthy lifestyles. Advertisers make optimistic generalizations and employ uplifting imagery. During wars, propaganda can also be employed to encourage intergroup harmony, cooperation, and unification. Therefore, propaganda has a good side if it is employed to aid others and encourage social change for the better. Some examples of positive propaganda are messages about eating healthy, drunk driving, the effects of smoking, and many others. Below is a great ad from Fiat talking about drunk driving and it's effects if you get behind the wheel while intoxicated.

While positive propaganda promotes healthy living and making the right choices in life, negative propaganda is merely the opposite. It was used a lot in war to dehumanize and create hatred towards the enemy, by creating a false image of the enemy country or nation in the minds of the people. This type of propaganda can be used in many ways. The education system may encourage demeaning falsehoods about the past of a particular nation or group. An example of these techniques include the spreading of false material through the media. A good example of this could be what Hitler did with the Nazi's. The Nazi's were very skilled in making propaganda and using different kinds of advertising techniques to spread their message. Their main theme in their kind of propaganda was Anti-Jewish, and they would advertise in a lots of different ways, including in the theatre, in speeches, or even in art and education. 

Propaganda happens all through our daily lives now. It is all around us, and we really encounter it every day, with whether that's TV ads trying to persuade us to buy a product, a message talking about the effects of smoking, or even a political ad talking why you should vote about a candidate, or why they aren't the right person to be in government. I think it's something that a lot of people don't think about, and they don't think if a certain ad changed their mind about a certain topic or not.

Online Privacy In Our World

 When it comes to keeping our lives private on social media, I would say mostly everyone in our generation does a somewhat bad job at doing it. With all of us using different social media sites and posting on them about our lives and what we're doing and where we're going, this in general gives people a chance to find and look up what our lives are actually like. Like the life that we don't want to post on social media. Whether that is a credit score, criminal records, or different publications that you don't want people to know about. 

In Juan Enriquez's Ted Talk, he talks about how us posting on social media about our lives can be similar to "Electronic Tattoos". He goes on to talk about how all these social media sites and different technologies that we are using are going to be tracking us with what we do, when we do them, and they will stay on the internet forever. 

In Catherine Crump's Ted Talk, she talks about how the police forces in the United States are getting more equipment to track people in the town that they work in. She starts with talking about location information, where you can be tracked when going anywhere, from school, to work, to even reveal if you are going to a therapist or attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. One example of the police using advanced technologies is the Automatic License Plate Reader. This device scans and takes pictures of any cars license plates that pass by, and the police keep these pictures in a database in case of wrongdoing.

Christopher Soghoian talks about in his Ted Talk about how the phones that we use every day were first wired for surveillance and to track us. He goes on to state that if someone was to be talking to someone on the phone, someone could be listening from your own government. The good thing though is that these Sillicon Valley companies have made it more increasingly difficult for any kind of surveillance to happen in their technologies. In fact, if you have an iPhone, Apple can't see the text messages you send to other to people or listen in to calls and video chats you have with other users. 

Darieth Chisholm talks about cyber harassment, and her experience with it from an ex-boyfriend of hers. She talks about how it all starts with when a relationship basically goes bad. To where an ex-lover who can't handle rejection uses technologies like their phones and laptops to post horrible things about that person, along with even pictures and videos just to get back at them. 

So, what exactly am I getting from all of this? What I learned from all of these Ted Talks talking about privacy online is that there is nothing any person can do at all to try and stay out of the light when it comes to staying private with their lives. No matter what, there will always be someone tracking what we're doing, where we are going, and when we do them. It infuriates me that we live in a world where us people can't have the simplest form of privacy, and to be honest, there really is nothing that we can do to fully make it stop. 

The Diffusion of Innovation Theory

 The Diffusion of Innovation Theory is a theory that looks and tries to explain why and how new technologies spread. The theory was created by a communication studies professor named Everett Rogers. Rogers made this theory popular is his book called the Diffusion of Innovations. In the book, he talks about how diffusion is the process by which innovation is communication over time among the participants in a social system. According to Rogers, the innovation itself, adopters, communication routes, time, and social structure are the five primary factors that affect how quickly a new concept spreads. Social capital is crucial to this process. To maintain itself, the innovation needs to be extensively used. There is a point where an innovation hits critical mass within the rate of adoption.

Let's now examine innovation using the Diffusion of Innovation Theory as our guide. The innovation I wanted to talk about is the television. The first concept of television was founded in 1927, by Philo Farnsworth. Farnsworth's idea was found when he thought of a program where he could capture moving images in a form that could be coded onto radio waves and then transformed back into a picture on a screen. A couple months, later Farnsworth created the first official image onto a television, which was just a straight white line. He was an "innovator", and other innovators were people who were people who worked with Farnsworth, like John Logie Baird and Charles Francis Jenkins. 

The next people who come along are the "early adopters". These early adopters are most likely the people who could afford them to try out back in the mid 1940s. Most of the televisions were on the eastern coast of the United States, with there being about 350,000 of them in total. By the end of the 1940s though is when the group known as the "early majority" comes in. By then, television in the United States was starting to gain popularity very quickly. You could also argue that the early majority could be when television was in its "Golden Age" back in the 1950s. 

After this would be the people in the "late majority" category. These would be counted as people who maybe didn't trust the television at first, and waited a few years before deciding to buy one. After this are the laggers. The laggers are the people who are the most difficult to convince to adopt new ideas or technologies; they are frequently most resistant to change. These people didn't want to change from for example the radio, and even if they do own a television, they don't use it very frequently.

History of the TIA

 

The Total Information Awareness Program is the definition of what the government is doing now in terms of trying to find and stealing people's information online. 

It was created in November of 2002, by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which is a branch of the Department of Defense that works with military research. It was headed by the former National Security Advisor and head of the Department of Defense, John Poindexter.  The program was intended to detect terrorists through analyzing tons and tons of information. The program in reality though was stealing tons of peoples information all around the world, and they were being placed in a "ultra-large-scale database", which was made available to government officials. As you can imagine, when this program was brought to light in the United States, citizens were furious. There were tons of reports calling for this program to be shut down. And to no ones surprise, the whole program was shut down after just ten months on September 30th, 2003.

The thing is though about the TIA, was that it was never actually discontinued.

Since the program was a government program, there were new programs made which simply provided another form of surveillance. One similar program that was made was called CAPS II. CAPS II would collect mass amounts of information about millions of Americans who would fly that year, and would create profiles about them. It is based on the same false assumptions that terrorism can be prevented by gathering massive amounts of data about everyone and then subjecting them to a virtual pursuit, which is why it has much more surface appeal when used in the context of airlines and has been presented in a much less threatening way.

In the last decade, the United States has seen a ginormous explosion in the amount of tracking and information of U.S. citizens, which really can be narrowed down to two deciding factors. The first one being technology. Modern technology has aided us in many revolutions by making our lives simpler, faster, and overall better. Smartwatches and smartphones are examples of multipurpose devices made possible by modern technology. Computers are now more powerful, portable, and faster than ever before. We have electric powered cars, along with even flying cars in some portions of the world. But with all this expanding technology comes other kinds that have made it a lot easier to track, store, and analyze information about us humans. Another reason is the amount of commercialization of data that has happened in recent years. Corporations have figured out that private information about customers are very valuable, and are trying to process how to make as much revenue as possible from this. This is why whenever customers want to buy something for example in a store, whenever they are checking out, they get the option to sign up for a certain loyalty card, or something along those lines. If those customers do in fact sign up, they get discounts or points to spend on other things, although the company is getting something much bigger than just that. They are getting tons of information about who you are and what you are like.

It's scary stuff what companies are doing nowadays with trying to figure out people's personal information just for more revenue. It overall has killed privacy in America, with basically every aspect of our lives being written down and catalogued for government officials. These government officials are ultimately going to abuse this power that they have against us, and us as citizens have nothing to do about it, apart from doing these simple things. Clear your search history, don't give any sketchy websites any personal information, and keep your passwords and other valuable information to yourself.

EOTO Technology

 The development of the smartphone can be traced back all the way to the 1990s. IBM engineer Frank Canova realized that with the pace that technology was advancing, chip-and-wireless technology was going to become possible in small handheld devices. Canova created a prototype called "Angler" while working at IBM, and showed it off at some of his computer industry trade shows, where he labeled it as "the phone of the future". Some of the features included a touchscreen, multiple apps like a calculator and an address book, and the battery life would last about one hour. The device was an immediate success, with Canova being shown on the front of the money section of USA Today, where he was pictured holding the phone. 

Although the phone Canova made was a great success, it would not be the most popular out of all the smartphones ever released. In 2007, Apple founder Steve Jobs came out with the first ever iPhone. Jobs would show off the first ever iPhone at the Macworld convention in San Francisco, California on January 9th. He had made two different models of the phone. One being a 4GB model priced at $499, and an 8GB model priced at $599. They would officially go on sale on June 27th of 2007, and they would be an instant hit. Jobs had tons of customers nationally all waiting outside of the store wanting to get their hands on an iPhone. By November of the same year, 1.4 million phones had been sold. Some features of the iPhone were pretty similar to the phone made by Canova, but just more advanced and modern. It was smaller, had the touchscreen ability, and had multiple different apps to call your friends or family, check the weather, and take pictures. With its outstanding success, Apple would go and and continue designing different models of iPhones and are now on their 35th version with the recent news and release of the new iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus. 

The cultural impact that smartphones have had on this generation is something I don't think many people could have predicted in the past years. They have become a necessity in today's world, and no one can go anywhere without them. They have shaped communication in both good and bad ways. The smartphone really does give you the ability to connect with anyone at any time anywhere around the globe. Although some people might say that they are "addicted" to their phones, it is without a doubt the most influential cultural tool of our past generation, and will continue to be for the next few years.