iRobot

When I go home, I exhale a sigh of relief. The day is over. My locked joints clunk over to the usual spot, and like habit, pick up the computer. I open it, click firefox, and type in the url box “f-a-(down)-(enter)” to find myself on facebook only realizing I was meaning to come on to check my school email. I have become the robot of Nicholas Carr. It’s been months of brutal summer since I could hang out with my friends, my closest friends. The ritual goes that we normally have lunch together or hang out at someone’s place for a night to watch a show or play (usually card games, video games, or board games). However, no matter how social or antisocial someone is, someone always ends up on the computer or his or her phone. And, like the cycle of dominos, one feels the chance to escape the awkward situation and return to something they know and love, the Internet. Another feels social anxiety and turns to that comfort of familiarity as well. The fourth, usually me, gets bored and annoyed and continues with the trend until all of us are on our phones or computers, not saying a word to each other, just as Hawthorne foretold with the coming of the diabolical iron heating stove. Oh no! I’ve seen the effects of the Internet on my friends in a wide spectrum. Some go nowhere without their ipad. Some take their book bag wherever they go just to have their laptop, like an infant with a teddy bear. It’s hard not to sound condescending, but I too am addicted as well. Who wouldn’t love to reach the endless horizons of your curiosity and imagination in seconds? From the internet, I have learned how to cook special meals, the origins of the mythical beast the Kirin, and how to create an efficient rogue for Dungeons and Dragons. All of these things have inspired my intellect. Looking for things to learn and know is not the only way to learn on the internet. Sometimes, we stumble upon images or videos that catalyze our creativity and teach us about ourselves, what we love and who we’re like. On the downside, this exploration can take hours and hours out of someone’s day while hindering our practice of social customs. For example, the more we use social interaction sites such as facebook, dating sites, and applications such as aim, we become more socially illiterate. Most of my friends don’t use their phones except for texting or the internet, even in an emergency. People would rather talk online than in face-to-face, which is faster and more efficient. On the other side, I can see how talking in the form of writing can give us more time to think and articulate those thoughts, but while being on a computing device of some sort, one can get easily distracted and finish a 30-minute conversation in person in 5 hours online. However, the internet is a very efficient and useful tool. Without the internet, my teachers would give us paper copies of all our assignment outlines. With nearly twenty-thousand people on campus and estimating around a 2-page syllabus for at least 4 classes, that would be 160,000 pages of paper minimum on the first day of everyone’s class. Emergency emails are sent out in a flash. Articles and videos relevant for our class can be shown in class and easily shared outside of class. Assignments can even be turned in online. One of the greatest learning resources for writing papers (aside from Wikipedia as many believe…) is the library web page. You can look up books in the card catalog in seconds, browse through the several themed article databases the university has subscribed to, and even reserve books that have been checked out. Rooms can also be reserved for studying and group meetings. Physically writing has been a daunting task though. Finding the motivation to write when I know it will take me so much longer to spill my thoughts is difficult. When I help correct papers for my friends, I keep finding “u” and “&” in their written responses. I don’t keep a journal anymore. I find it hard to keep track of dates because I hate writing in my agenda, and I forget it exists. My attention span has been cut so short that I use “control+f” to scan and find keywords in the article I need research from. I use short reading I learned in grade school by reading the first and/or last sentences from every paragraph to get the basic idea. Even if I’m fully entranced in something I’m reading, I always find distractions or impatience. I want that information then and there, switched on and off like the nodes of a computer chip. Previously I mentioned Nicholas Carr, a writer for the Atlantic. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Carr suggests that the internet is switching the roles of man and machine between us and our screens. One thing I find I can really relate to is learning bots, a program design I have been trying to learn to create. GoogleBot, a controversial robot, is a learning machine with synthetic intellect created to learn and remember what every user inputs within its memory simply by making conversation. As many try to disprove the validity of the ai, we become so focused on that goal that we are like robots while we input more information into the Googlebot, coincidentally becoming more human as we try harder to disprove its humanity. However, the internet is full of useful devices such as hyperlinks. A genius much before his time. Vannevar Bush described a machine he intended to expedite the growth of the scientific community by using the ability to link data and write notes about it. He also devised a way to compress text, search for it easily, and input new text using microfilm. Today, we can create all of those things at any age for any purpose. If I could meet him today, I would gladly welcome him to the wonder of the internet! My group projects are made super-easy with Google docs, search engines for information, and more, all predicted by Vannevar. The Internet is a useful device, but it does come at a cost of some sort of indescribable human element. However, I’ve learned to take more than lose from the internet. I don’t believe I’m less of a human to sacrifice my attention span for more fun and efficiency. We're supposed to post media for this paper... but I'm honestly not sure what to put up. Everything is so "in the mind" it's hard to contemplate what to express it with visually. :/