Technology and Culture Reflection

While writing this essay I thought a lot about how technology benefits us. I've always been of the opinion that technology and progress are always good, but the criticisms of technology really made me think. Technology almost always makes things more convenient but does it improve our lives? I remember talking once about how food now days has become all about convenience and the slow food movement wants to combat that. Now we can make our meals really fast but maybe it just makes us feel busier, because we don't take that time to unwind and slow down while making a meal.

In the future I need to keep an open mind before forming my thesis for my essay. If you start an essay with a thesis in mind you might lose complexity and creativity. For an in class essay you need to write quickly but if I had more time for this essay I would have liked to start out just with a reflection on various examples from real life and the reading and slowly build my way towards a thesis.

Technology and Culture

Shaping Technology

    Kalle Lasn, Neil Postman and Robert Samuels all write about the effects of technology on our society and the possible dangers they present. While it is important to recognize the dangers of technology, we should instead focus on how to use technology effectively and in a beneficial way, which many critics fail to do.

    Critics of technology tend to not acknowledge that people are able to control their use of technology. In Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn, the chapter titled Posthuman tells the stories of a few people whose personalities are severely affected by the use of the internet, and ultimately their addiction to the internet. Lasn suggests that these stories, “mark the end of authentic experience” (Lasn 45). However, these stories are extreme examples which Lasn should not generalize from. Not everyone who uses the internet becomes addicted and goes crazy. For example, more people have been able to get education because of the internet. Courses at MIT which used to be only offered to the very smartest people for expensive tuition, can now be done by anyone throughout the world who has access to internet It’s important to acknowledge the danger of some uses of the internet, but I don’t think it affects the fact that people can use the internet to create communities, find information or do many other useful things like getting an education. If someone starts using the internet, it won’t automatically lead to a personality disorder. They as an individual have the power to decide how technology will affect their life.  

    The way people use technology is important. Lasn cites a statistic which says that “Internet use itself appeared to cause a decline in psychological well-being” (Lasn 46). While this statistic is worrisome, it’s important to examine how the internet is being used. For example, a study was done that showed that people who used facebook passively, “lurking” anonymously and not posting or commenting, were less happy, while people who were actively commenting and posting on facebook were more happy. This shows that if we learn how to use technology in a healthy and beneficial way we can extract its benefits rather than its dangers. In the debate about and study of technology we should focus more energy on how we can use technology so that it doesn’t damage us, rather than only point out the negative aspects of it.  

    Individuals have control of their use of technology, but it’s up to the creators of modern technology to ensure that their products are beneficial and can be used in a healthy way. Neil Postman writes about the winners and losers of technology, saying that “those who cultivate competence in the use of a new technology become an elite group that are granted undeserved authority and prestige by those who have no such competence” (Postman 367).  It is true that some will become more powerful if they control modern technology, but they will not necessarily use this power for evil. Producers of computer programs and internet sites should create things that will benefit us and bring us happiness rather than creating useless or damaging products. However, we live in a capitalist society and the consumers have the power to decide what achieves dominance. It is up to us to decide what products are beneficial and which are time wasters that alter us negatively.

    The critic who seems to understand the situation the best is Robert Samuels. Samuels has the right approach when he says that society is evolving to accommodate technology, but more than that we can evolve to get the full potential out of technology and minimize harm caused by it.  In his article titled “Breaking Down Borders: How Technology Transforms the Private and Public Realms”, Samuels talks about some of the negative effects of technology on community and the private and public realm, however he ends by saying, “We adapt to our new technologies and to the new spaces these technologies create;” (Samuels 4). Our society is capable of evolving, and just because the internet has changed some aspects of community, this doesn’t mean that people will stop interacting. Humans are social animals. If we have a need, we will fulfill it despite obstacles such as technology. In fact we’ll evolve so that we can exploit the new technology and environment created by that technology to meet the need. For example, while maybe the internet has hindered people from making friends that live in close proximity to them, people have to learned to form communities online. In Digital Nation  a documentary about the effects of the internet, the story of online gamers is told. World of Warcraft players who have never seen each other spend up to 40 hours a week together, playing in a virtual world and develop intense friendships and even romances. While this might not be the traditional method of social interaction it still fulfills the need for connection with another human being. This shows how society can evolve because of a new technology into something different, but not necessarily better or worse. This doesn’t mean that we don’t need to worry about the dangers of technology or that we shouldn’t still talk and debate about them. What it means is that people are capable of adapting and changing, and that the discourse about technology should attempt to guide the use of technology to an optimal state.

    Instead of only talking about the downsides to technology we should focus on how to improve the use of technology and minimizes the harm caused by it. It’s not feasible that people stop taking advantage of modern technology. Instead we just have to learn how to best harness it’s power. I would like to leave off with a hopeful anecdote. As I was riding the train today, I was observing preteens also on the train who were coming home from school chatting and having fun. At the Palo Alto stop, all but one boy got off the train. After saying bye the young boy pulled out his touch screen laptop and started checking his email. This surprised me greatly because until then I hadn’t understood that this was the generation that everyone was so worried about losing touch with their peers because they were so immersed in their computers. This boy however, skillfully maneuvered face to face social interaction and the computer world, and he did it with more social grace than many of my peers who are often checking their text messages while talking to me. This shows that the generation growing up with computers and the internet are more immersed in technology, but because of that they also know computer etiquette. better. As we discover more about the appropriate use of technology, we will pass it on through the generations until our society has fully adapted to the new technology.

Sub-culture Essay Reflection

For this essay I thought a lot about the motives behind dumpster diving, and heard stories about the personalities of dumpster divers. I didn't realize the in some ways dumpster divers were "posers". I also learned about waste and why it is a problem.

I learned that as a writer I need time to edit. If I have to edit a lot at one time I get overwhelmed. For this essay I spent two days editing, and each day gave myself to a goal to accomplish. Having a concrete goal to accomplish for each day made the process feel a lot more controlled and less scary. The first day I added a quote because that was lacking. The second day I copy edited. I think it's always good to have a day reserved for copy editing because after you finish writing you are tired and don't feel like reading your essay looking for grammmar mistakes.

Analyzing a Sub-culture: Dumpster Divers

One might think that someone who digs through dumpsters to find their dinner for the night has fallen on hard luck. But in fact, there exists a sub-culture which chooses to live off the waste of others even though they can afford to buy food. These people are called dumpster divers. They choose to buck the societal norm of buying food because of their disgust with the abundance of waste it causes. Despite their annoyance with the current system, instead of trying to effect a change, they reject the system completely. The essence of this subculture is the contradiction between their political activism and their anarchistic approach.

This subculture can be represented by a stale loaf of bread. At one point soft and flaky, it now sits hard and crusty, still wrapped in bright plastic packaging at the bottom of the bin. Many people who can’t afford food, dream about getting their hands on this bread, but in our culture it sits unwanted, waiting for the dumpster truck. This bread represents the waste that dumpster divers are disgusted by.

However, it’s ironic that the dumpster divers are living off of something that they’re disgusted by. Without other people wasting food, dumpster divers wouldn’t have food to survive. The bread as an artifact represents this. Even a food as simple as bread has gone through many levels of production to become waste for them to eat. The grain is grown on a farm, and then ground into flour at a mill, and baked into bread and then wrapped in plastic that was processed from oil into plastic. The point being that a lot of work from many different parts of society has gone into producing this bread. So despite rejecting societal norms dumpster divers live off the production of society. And perhaps, this is exactly their point. Because without dumpster divers, a loaf of bread which has taken so many resources and so much labor to produce would go to waste.

But the fact that they’re living off of society’s excess despite rejecting societal norm indicates a contradiction. The reason they choose to dumpster dive is because our current modes of production, and love of commercialism produce an extreme amount of waste. This isn’t sustainable. The dumpster divers protest this unsustainable way of living but what their lifestyles are not sustainable either. Perhaps if we achieved the perfect ratio of dumpster divers to regular people we could eliminate waste. But that would only be within our country. There are many countries that don’t waste food and desperately need more food. Dumpster diving has a very narrow view. Maybe the problem should be approached from a global standpoint. What if the people who were concerned with waste, tried to effect a change that would make food distribution more even throughout the world?

In some ways the exclusive nature of dumpster diving is a characteristic of many subcultures. It wouldn’t feel special to be a part of the subculture if everyone could do it. If everyone dumpster dived there would be no waste to consume. Additionally it takes a certain type of person to eat food from a trash. Dumpster divers are usually brave and not at all squeamish. These could be unifying characteristics of the subculture, but theres more to it than that.

Joining a subculture is a way to differentiate yourself from the masses, but when it becomes more about just being different than the actual subculture, it can lose the original values that unified the subculture in the first place. My friend Claire used to be part of the dumpster diving subculture, but she eventually grew tired of their pretentious and contradictory philosophy. When she was working on a farm, many of the other people there were dumpster divers and she became one as well. But she realized that the people there were dumpster divers more as a way to be different and rebellious, rather than because they actually cared about waste. This particular segment of the subculture had separated from the values that started dumpster diving.

Dumpster divers reject consumer culture, but do they challenge it? Column writer Amelia Taylor-Hochberg writes: “Known as the willful reclaiming of disposed objects, dumpster diving is a conservationist and creative practice of reuse — a direct challenge to consumer material culture”. Some might disagree. Dumpster diver’s radical actions emphasize the amount of waste our society produces, but dumpster divers are on the fringes of society. Many people probably aren’t even aware that they exist. Additionally, their actions don’t do anything to change the current consumer culture. Dumpster divers reduce waste, but they don’t challenge the system. Instead they feed off of it.

Perhaps dumpster divers will become a necessary part of our world? Maybe they are like the decomposers from the food chain, but of the human world. Every system, whether natural or man made will produce waste and different mechanisms develop to deal with the waste. Using the natural world as a metaphor again, the dumpster divers have evolved because of the current environment. After mass production was invented in the 20th century, the US has become a society of rampant commercialism. This has increased waste greatly, and created an environment where dumpster divers evolved because they are disgusted by the waste. One could choose to see dumpster divers as necessary, now that we produce so much waste, and as a solution to the problem of waste.

Or waste could be addressed on a global level. Dumpster divers have identified a problem, but it’s not clear that dumpster diving is the solution. Its more of an act of protest and an extreme way to voice an opinion. It brings attention to an issue within our society, but is it a sustainable lifestyle? The essence of the dumpster diving subculture is being outspoken about the problem of waste in our society, but dumpster diving has started to lose that essence.

An American Artifact Reflection

From writing this essay I really started to think about how American culture is different from other cultures. It's hard for me to define American culture because I've been so immersed in it my entire life, I don't know what's normal. In my essay I talked about the values of individualism, and freedom of choice and expression which are prevalant in America. But I'm not sure how much that's an American thing or just a human thing. I know that the US was founded on these values but are those foundations still embedded into our culture or have we become melded with the rest of the Western world? I did think about the difference between our culture and eastern cultures like China which are more focused on cooperation and where there isn't as much freedom, but still I'm not sure if thats a sign of America's culture being unusually free or China's culture being unusually strict.
After receiving feedback on this essay, I learned that I need to work on focusing my thoughts. I tend to spew out a lot of ideas as I'm writing, but then I need to spend the rest of my time reviewing what I've written and whittling down the different ideas to create a focused essay. I tend to get frustrated and tired once I've finished an essay so I don't spend much time proof reading or editing, but if I just spend a bit more time I can greatly improve my writing,

An American Artifact

To discover what a culture values, we can look at the best-selling products of the time.  From the start of the 21^st century, the iPod has been extremely popular.  What appeals so much about the iPod that earns it a permanent place in our pockets and backpacks. The iPod is a living American artifact, because it exemplifies freedom of choice, freedom of expression, convenience and creating our own identity which we value in America.
                The iPod represents a shift in the way we listened to music. Before people listened to records or CDs. People created mix CD’s but for the most part you would listen to a whole album at a time. But the iPod gave you the freedom to mix and match which ever songs you liked. The value of choice is prevalent throughout our culture. The popular restaurant chain The Cheesecake Factory shows this with its novel length menu, with everything from Chinese food to hamburgers. Our higher education system also demonstrates this. Many university students in the US don’t choose their major until their junior years, while in other countries such as the UK students have to decide well before they enter university what they will study. In America we want the option to always change our minds and choose something different. The iPod gave us more choice in music.
                The iPod also helps us shape our identities. Looking through someone’s iPod not only informs you of their music taste but it also shapes the impression we have of them. The music we listen to has become a common way to shape our identities and connect us to others. In the US we value uniqueness. A common piece of advice given is “Be yourself”. Most people don’t just listen to top 40 hits. They find a way to differentiate themselves from the masses through the different musical niches they explore. Every song someone adds to their iPod adds complexity to their music identity. When people get in the car, instead of listening to the radio to what’s broadcasted to everyone, people can create their own mood.
                Lastly, the iPod is a simple matter of convenience. In our busy lives today we might not have time to sit down, relax and listen to music. Instead we have the music attached to us everywhere we go.  So while we’re working out, or buying groceries, in the car, or walking to class we might be listening to music. As people get busier, convenience has become very important in the American lifestyle. Microwaveable meals and fast food eliminate the need to spend time cooking. The internet offers many options in the comfort of our own home such as online shopping, directions, Facebook which is a quick way to stay in touch with friends, a huge amount of knowledge and more. The iPod is a great example of this easy convenience which we value today.
                Overall, the iPod indicates a growing self-involvement and emphasis on the individual in American culture.  We want complete control of our music – to decide what we listen to , what order it will play in and when we’ll listen to it. Compared to other cultures like China where people think in terms of group and family, we think in terms of ourselves. We’re looking to create identities for ourselves, or “find ourselves”. And the iPod while it only controls a small part of our lives it represents a larger culture of self-entitlement and individualism which dominates American culture.