HW 20: Big Paper Draft Revised

The debate over weather digital media is good or bad is a futile argument and a waste of time. Digital media is just another medium and the true "evil" that comes from digital media is the subjects they represent, not the media itself. Digital media is an easily accessible form of non-digital media or a mixture of non-digital mediums. Digital media is just another way of showing things and doesn't necessarily add to the "evil" of the subject. For example, the hands down most controversial video game "Grand Theft Auto" isn't thought to be overly violent and too inappropriate because it's a video game, it's because the game has you selling drugs, killing people, stealing cars etc. The game itself is only the carrier of the subject, you can't blame someone for giving you a cold because they were just carrying it, they didn't add to the disease.

In the book "Feed" by M.T. Anderson, people of the future use devices that are surgically implanted into the brain and can allow people to communicate and buy things almost instantly. The book clearly blames technology for the cultural decline in the future, however when you look at the way this social decline happens, the Feed Corporation is the one to blame. The Feed corporation would send advertisements directly into people's brains so that they couldn't get away from them, those people then bought the products that were advertised. The corporations advertised other products based on what they bought. The teens in "Feed" were buying things based the corporations which shaped them. This made them buy anything that the corporations old and they all became obsessed with fads and had no idea what was going on in the world. Even though the Feed was able to distribute the message of the corporations, the ultimate evil in the situation was the Feed Corporation.

In "Feed" the main populace, the 73% percent of people who had Feeds, had no idea what was going on in the world even though an invention like the fee would let people know what's going on instantaneously. Most people argue that this is because digital media distracts people from what's really going on through TV shows video games and the Internet. However, entertainment is natural, the thing that distracts us from the world is entertainment, baby lions play with each other not knowing they'll have to defend their territory and struggle to survive. Distraction is a vital tool that people in power use, the Roman colosseums were used to distract Roman citizens from the internal power struggle within Rome. This is known as "Bread and Circuses" using entertainment to distract from the real problem (Andy's Lecture 9/22), this can be done with digital technology and with a gigantic stadium (which we also have anyways).

Steven Johnson's book "Everything Bad is Good for You" brings up the idea that people can learn from digital media. He argued that video games were able to teach reasoning and logic skills, complex TV shows taught us to use our memory to get inside jokes or to get plot twists that referenced other episodes. I believe that humans can learn from anything if they enjoy it. People can learn from books, drawings, comic books, physical interaction etc. The only difference between digital media and non-digital media is the fact that more people prefer digital to non-digital. Digital media only takes what non-digital media does and makes it more entertaining via the use of images and sounds. The same way you can use logical reasoning to think about how you would tackle a reality show situation, you can also use to figure out how to solve a problem occurring in a book you're reading or any story you've been told.

Steven Johnson's theory seemed logical and correct, however he didn't specify how much of that development happened due to the medium its expressed in and how much development came from the subject matter. He stated that following complex plots in TV shows made people think about what was going on, but if the story was causing the development then the same thought process could be applied to any other story telling medium, several of which are non-digital. He stated that video games made people obsessed with them and they tried incredibly hard to solve problems within the game, while he said in the book that there was no counter part to this I disagree. Riddles, physical puzzles, crosswords and sudoku puzzles can be very addicting, they teach people the same logical skills you may get out of a video game but in a non-digital way.

Digital media is just an extension of non-digital media which is an extension of the real world. Any problem that digital media has caused can be caused by non-digital media, even if it's not as drastic. Some problems "caused" by digital media may even stem from underlying phycological problems. Many people argue that the internet makes people "fake", they pretend to be someone else, but naturally there's a difference between who we think we are, what we're viewed as and who we really are, technology didn't create that problem it's always been there because it's a part of human phycology. People complain that TV shows and movies give us a skewed view of reality, for one this problem could be caused by books, but also our view of reality will be skewed anyways because we're all biased in some way or another.

Digital media is a representation, humans can only represent or recreate things. The constant prefix "re" means that people just make something again, which means there's an original. Because there's an original, everything we make or do has been made or done before. Digital media doesn't bring up any new problems, at its base its a representation of sights and sounds that we've seen before, it's impossible that digital media makes new problems in our society when it represents things that have already existed, if digital media will create any problems it will create ones similar to what came before it. For example, people criticize MMORPG's (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) for putting gamers into a false sense of reality and immersing them in a fake world. Books have done that for years, and before that people had their imaginations to take them to new worlds. In short, digital media can't be good or bad because its just an extension of reality, reality is only good or bad depending on the specific subject, therefore the subject can be "bad" or "good" and it's pointless to argue for or against digital media.