flapyshek has 15 post(s)

In chapter 6 “Drawing a Line”, Astra Taylor talks about advertising in our digital time. Advertising is everywhere no matter what you do or where you go. Now our days all advertising posts online, when before most of it was in newspapers, magazines and TV. I don’t know if it is still exist, but few years ago it used to be a newspaper, which was only for advertising.

Now, if you go online to do something, it is always advertising popping out. Crazy part is that it remembers what sites you visited and what you checked. Later advertising just comes up in a random time and usually it is something similar what you have been interesting in or saw before. It is like someone watching you behind the screen. Here comes the term “reputation silos”. This is sort of a profile made by our personal information like gender, race, religion, age and etc. “We are been sorted into “reputation silos” that can be surprisingly difficult to get of”. The bad part about it that it is illegal for the companies, for example, has all this information.

Of course we can go anywhere without our gadgets. Here is another term comes as “e-waste”. Our time is moving very fast, that’s why it always something new coming out. Every year comes lots of different gadgets. For example as soon as Apple iPhone comes out, everyone trying to get it as soon as possible. But the question is where goes all this gadgets that we don’t use any more or the one we don’t buy. This is all “garbage”, but the problem is that all this hundreds of million gadgets not recycling by people. “And so our mountains of e-waste grow three times faster than the piles of the regular garbage accumulating all around us”.

Complex creative labor is the human touch placed upon a project or work. Most of our labor in modern times is done in rapid fashion due to our advancements in technology. Take for example the assembly line, a way of mass producing product for the masses but at the same time cutting much of the middle men from the equation. Technology has dipped it’s fingers in every aspect of our work place. Though, in many cases it has helped us for the greater good, it has also replaced the unique and one of a kind admiration we once had for products and goods we purchased. Everything becomes the same and robotic when all and everything mimics the next thing to its left and to its right. Beautiful words on a page are now translated into meaningless text without emotion through an app on our cellular phones or through a quick search on the web. Being creative in our labor allows for new ideas  and inventions and prevents us from quickly getting to a point of stagnation. Creative labor brings with it culture and history within the completed end result rather it be a product or a work place. Much can be learned from this then simply putting workers on a line collecting parts or placing a piece of code through a computers software program

          In chapter 5 “The Double Anchor” we talk about digital media and copyright and how they are related. Copyright is a right made by the law that allows the maker of the unique work have an exclusive rights for sharing and using. This right usually has a limited time. “Copyright, from day one, was designed to be both, an impediment and an incentive, a mechanism of enclosure and catalyst of sorts, a structure to stimulate the production of literary goods by rewarding writers and publishers for their labor”.

          In our digital time people have their own vision of this situations. Many of them think that stuff like movies, music and etc. have to be free. For example, in Taylor’s book we talk about the documentary “Examined Life” which after the premiere was found online right away. Person who made this movie needs copyright because he spent a lot of money, energy and time to make that movie. Of course in return he wanted to have some profit. At the end he doesn’t get any of it or just a little bit because his work was sharing online for free. After something got posted in the Internet, you can’t control it anymore. At the same time it doesn’t belong to that person and it become free: “Free can mean something that no one can own, that belongs to all”. The information goes from one computer to the Internet, than from network into another computer and this process keeps repeating and people don’t stop sharing information. “When creative work is available without limit, freely accessible, it tends also to become free of charge. This tendency leads us straight to what” long been called the “paradox of value”, or the diamond-water paradox. Diamonds are valuable for being scarce, but water, which we need to live, is comparatively worthless”.

In Taylor’s chapter “Love or Money” she talks about creativity. It says that in our economy time we are losing our creativity, I completely agree with her. I grow up in a different country, in Russia and when I was a teenager the artists was singing an amazing songs. All songs had a deep meaning that time. When you would hear it you would have a goose bumps. Now our days in my country or even here in America the songs lost their meaning. I was in the club not long time ago and I spent there only 20 minutes, I don’t know may be I am getting old but I was not able to dance. No offends but songs and artist not creative our time. I think everything has standards, so everyone worries about money and not creativity. Artists don’t show creativity any more; they just do what they have been told to do. May be creativity don’t get pay as long as you are already famous. We have lots of talented and creative people, but no one needs it, first what you have to have to be an artist is a look.

What about teachers, they not all super creative also. But I met and saw teachers whose classes were lots of fun and they were doing theirs classes in a creative and unusual way. There are not a lot of them, but they exist. Otherwise the rest of the teachers also do everything by the standards as well. I think people who are teachers must love their jobs. Otherwise why would you work as a teacher and make low money if you can do some finance and work in a big company on a Wall Street.

“The nation that a passionate amateur artist can succeed on the Internet is a myth that stifles real artists and enriches corporations”. So at the end of the day you pick for yourself, do you want to work for money or love?

My name is Yauheniya Chuyashova and I am responding to the excerpt from Fred Turner’s “From Counterculture to Cyberculture”.

In this piece Turner talks about people’s views of technology in 1960s and 1990s. People’s opinions of technology got into a big changes. I think one of the reasons is different time. 60s still was the new time for technology, people didn’t really know how to use it and what to do with it. All that was kind of new for everyone. Time goes and technology was developing. That gives people the opportunity to lean and see more about technology.

Another reason can be the way people leaved. People that time did stuff differently and they were scared towards any new things. With time people became more flexible and they were open toward changes. In 90s people knew enough about technology like computers, phones and ect. They figured pluses of having it.

Now we cannot emotion our lives without technology. Everything we do and everywhere we go we surrounded ourselves with technology. Technology makes our life easier. It helps us in all kind of ways.