Death-Dating

In Giles Slade's book, Made to Break, He goes into much emphasis upon how companies plan the amount of overall usefulness of an item before it breaks which eventually has to be replaced. In all intents and purposes companies plan the "death-date" of their products so they can keep their markets fresh enough to always have a supply of customers needing a new gadget that they sell. Slade quotes from a magazine called Design News that talks about death-dating and states "The product with the longest life period is not automatically the most economical. Value is a product of time and utility. Diminishing returns is an important part of the economic law of supply and demand and applies to product death dates. Is a product that has served a short, useful lifetime at a satisfactory cost necessarily wasteful? I think not....There is not a product on the market today that could not be improved by using...more expensive materials. Every design is a compromise. Is it wrong, therefore, for designers to be cognizant of the results and to make the compromises accordingly? Certainly not." Pardon my french, but that is a load of crap. Just because guys like David Sarnoff, the once mogul of RCA, found it economically superior to make electronics and other items that only lasted for a specific amount of time as a way to make more money does not make it right. In a lot of ways it is crazy how obsolescence has filtered into our lives. Many of us, scratch that, almost all of us within the worldly population have been born into obsolescence (technological, psychological, etc.). We have accepted it and do not even acknowledge that its there. We preach the quality of items but how many times do we read a review of an item we are thinking about buying, do we see anything regarding durability over a certain length of time? You get that through customers reviews on forums by other people but never the companies. Here is food for thought, how many people who just recently bought an Xbox 360 would be very upset to know that the death-date of their brand new $300 console system was about three years (I know I was, and so were 5 of my friends, all Xbox's crapped out after about 3 years of use)? After that 3 year mark it would only be a matter of time before that green circle around the power button that stayed a happy green, going about its business would eventually turn into the "red light of death" that so many faithful microsoft customers would experience. How many people who are enlightened to "death dates" in general would seek for some sort of reform, demanding government to demand something extra of companies? Well Here is a suggestion. If we are to buy our electronics knowing that at any given time after the "warranty" expires that our electronic crap can take a dump and stop working, maybe there should be death-dates printed on that clever little packaging that suckers us into buying said item. Like the way we buy our milk and bread to see how long it will be good for, there should be death dates on our technological items. Maybe in this sense we can partially re-adjust our technological obsolescence and really appreciate items that strive to the best built and stay workable decades after their purchase. Maybe then our landfills would not be experiencing record breaking numbers of technological waste.

The Social Network

I saw this movie the other night with the full intention that I was going to be bored out of my mind because of the subject matter. The fact is I felt it was a pretty good movie with some very interesting points in between. It is pretty crazy that FaceBook started out with a thousand dollars of loaned money. Aside from the weird twins who were ripped off by the kid Mark, his friend Eduardo, and the crazy girls in the movie, it had a feel that this was nothing of a true to the actual story type movie. Things felt a bit too dramatic to actually be a complete truthful interpretation but that is okay. What I found interesting is how they showed how quickly FaceBook caught on though. To think this kid Mark Zuckerberg started off with his FaceMash website to eventually starting a billion dollar website is pretty crazy. Aside from what happened in the movie it was definitely a portrait of how younger society is consumed with technology like a website profile. The girl the kid Eduardo was going out with tries to burn down his room because he did not change his relationship status................ Yep. It took it a step further when Mark decided to send a friend invitation to his ex-girlfriend while he hits the refresh button again and again to see if she has accepted it. A scathing movie of the times of our fledgling young adults and a young man who literally took an idea and the money and ran with it.

Made to break...Made in China?America?Everywhere?

"We Haven't any use for old things here."   "Even when they Beautiful"   "Particularly when they're beautiful. Beauty's attractive, and we don't want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like new ones."-----Brave New World                   We live in a society where we want the latest everything. It has to look cooler, be faster at what it does, and it has to do things better then previous models or we won't buy them. But that is precisely why companies make things faster, cooler, and more efficient to get us hooked. Even when the newer products we buy tend not to outlast our older items that still worked in the longevity department. Unfortunately, this is our psychological obsolesence at work as we have become a nation of consumers. All we do is consume. In a sobering look at reality, Giles slade gives us a clear look into how our society has become a bunch consumers that indulge pride to stay up with the next in line in regards to the devices we use because in essence they define our culture status. His book, Made to Break really drives home this point upon American society. Even our government spurs it on, in 2009 everyone can recall the switch from analog to digital TV. Yet, what everyone does not realize is the fact that how many non-high definition televisions will make their way to landfills now. How many CRT televisions with their toxic lead glass tubes will pollute our ecosystems for years to come. No one thinks about these things until their too late unfortunately. Companies have gotten so good at their marketing and packaging of items that they scream "BUY ME!" in our general psyche. We awe at newest, fastest Ipad's, blackberries, and HD Televisions that we do even realize they will eventually fail us because they are not made to last. Why does it have to be a "key feature" on a phone or camera to be "shock-proof" or "water-proof?" Why can't they just be integrated features on all items? Why? Well the answer is easy, companies do not make money off of us when we do not buy new things. Look at Henry Ford, the man was self-made. He worked his ass off to eventually father in the industrial age in America. What is amazing about the guy was that he built a car called the "Model T" and he built it to last. The design stayed the same for a long time even when his main competitor General Motors was going through crap cars and changing cycles over and over to try and keep up with him. His ideals stayed the same, he felt  he was doing everyone a service to have a cheap, durable automobile that almost brought people to a certain level playing field while they were driving around. Giles Slade says in his book, Made to Break "Ford saw his car as a great social leveler, a democratic one-size-fits-all symbol of American Classlessness." Credit goes Henry Ford when he could have just reaped the benefits of making cheap cars and have people buy news ones with regularity but he didn't. That would eventually change though, because General Motors practiced that very ideal he refused. At the time they made cars that were not the most durable and their image suffered for it. It suffered until they realized how to make a crappy car that looked good. There is one thing about obsolesence that everyone should learn and its that psychologically most people will satisfy their egos when they can. So if that means trading in a "tin lizzie" as the Model T was affectionately called, for a car with all the trimmings and modern creature comforts but with less durability people would. In 1923, the first Chevrolet from General Motors came rolling off the line  that would look better then a Model T was mechanically inferior and was the first case of market "packaging" that would never be relinquished by companies the whole over. the motto: make it look good for awhile until it breaks and they will buy another as long as the new ones look good, go fast, and do a lot of things for the time being. Visual packaging of anything enacts within most people that psychological obsolesence. A man Giles Slade mentions in his book, saw this right away when these flagship companies (Ford and GM) in America were  dukeing it out for automotive supremacy with different philosophies. His name was Earnest Elmo Calkins. He stated when people saw that Ford was loosing ground to GM that there was more then meets the eyes here, he states "People buy a new car, not because the old one is worn out, but because it is no longer modern." He also goes on to state, "And so the Ford car was put out, and chugged along faithfully on all our roads./ The public laughed at it and christened it 'lizzie,' but bought and used it in increasing numbers, and Mr. Ford rested secure in his belief that he had solved one of the major problems of human existence and that there was nothing more to be done." Unfortunately, that same good-natured philosophy would bite him and teach him and everyone else who was not too busy staring at brand new shiny chrome that human beings once past the base instinct of survival and are preoccupied with the latest gadgets that do a bunch of nothing are quite superficial at times. Why else do we have millions of usable cellphones that become discarded because our "plans" tell us we are ready for an "upgrade" (not necessarily more efficient or powerful but it has a bigger screen and looks cooler). All those usable cell phones, guess where they go? Nope they do not become recycled like they do in Japan. They're thrown away, they are brought to the very same landfills where those big old lead-glass tube based CRT televisions go. Together they form a nice deadly alliance to mess up our ecosystems down the road. As Glade pointed out in his book, unlike the Egyptians who are marveled for the things they made to last our society will not be looked upon as fondly. Why should it? Why should we be remembered for our Declaration of Independence, our freedom, our democracy when we as a people will be leaving everyone pyramids of toxic trash and a messed up earth.                                                                           

Introducing Wikipedia.......The new Delphic Oracle???

Well lets put it this way I do not see many people trying to scale a mountainside in Greece, slay some serpents, then ask Wikipedia what happens next. Wikipedia is much easier then that and to that extent we can attest to the fact that even though its not a prophetic oracle it does give us plenty of breaking news even before many authorities even know what is going on. This was the case as Andrew Dalby (author of The World and Wikipedia: How are we Editing Reality) states on the Chris Benoit murder suicide. That a wikipedian correlated the evidence 14 hours before the authorities did. Dalby talks about how wikipedians genuinely love creating pages or editing articles for the sake of making them better aside from the few that try to be malevolent. As stated before he even acknowledges that Wikipedia is a sort of social network for user-generators. The site has its tendencies of having political bias, staying neutral, footnotes have nowhere to hide, and the blurring of fact and fiction but it tends to be a great place for consolidated facts. But to really extend the reasoning we use Wikipedia is that it does let us access almost anything we really want to explore. If one can sift through some of the drama between wikipedians, viral marketing that some companies try an inject into the site under certain pages, or the certain people who try to plant a "leak" to see how far it spreads across the internet the site really is useful for everyone. Wikipedia has its good and its bad but in the end the site is not to blamed for being out there for free access to information, we need to blame ourselves. Dalby reiterates this when he says "Vandalism and spam are not the fault of the servers, or the site itself, or the software. They are our fault as human being. Were given access to the site, we're bored and stupid and we write childish and unpleasant things and leave a mess; were greedy and we add links that we think will bring us money." This is all very true, sure it "could" be considered an "encyclopaedia full of crap" but how many things do most people truly look up everyday just crap in and of itself. When someone sift through that crap and finds a tidbit of information that they are truly seeking to help in their cause of research that is when Wikipedia shines. It was never meant to be the end all research destination for students it was merely a place to consolidate facts and making searching for answers a bit easier.

"An Encyclopaedia full of crap"

I use Wikipedia as most people do but there are discrepancies about this useful yet sometimes fact-phobic website. As stated by Andrew Dalby in The World and Wikipedia: How we are Editing Reality, he says "Wikipedia is an user-based information online website, that can have information changed by anyone." he goes on to describe how the content user generators literally have "awesome power" and that they can write whatever they choose too, to an extent. Yet, when Wikipedia was first introduced one of the co founders of the website stated " You can edit this page right now!' While that may sound like a recipe for authorial anarchy, the quest for communal knowledge seems to have prevailed so far over any attempt to pit individual opinions against one another." Now that was said back in 2001and even though much of Wikipedia can be attested into being that way some of that notion has changed completely. Jimmy Wales (co-founder of Wikipedia) also stated "Its kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work. There's kind of this real pressure to not argue about things." How things have changed Jimmy. Andrew Dalby goes into how often "wikipedians" use pages that they make or when they alter another page they leave questions or other rhetoric's to each other. To this effect you not only loose sight of factual information but your beginning to turn an encyclopedic type website into a rehashed version of Facebook to an extent. Little wars between these people should be kept in chat rooms and forums and not where there is supposed to be valid information for people to look at. When "wikipedians" (those who add new pages to the website) fight each other over what is written because sometimes things that are written are "agenda based," to literally how sometimes people just argue each other because they do not like what is said with "editing wars" (wikipedians literally edit over each other repeatedly till someone stops and the winner keeps his generated content up).These sorts of things can really tarnish the reputation of a fact based website even when it tries to self-evaluate its own pages. but to even further drive home the point that Wikipedia should never be a paramount place to acquire all legitimate information and should only be used as a stepping stone is the fact sometimes user-generators straight up just add false information just for kicks or to make a point. When you have pages that are constantly changing it doesn't take much for anyone to just edit a page as they feel fit. Now not everything with this website is terrible, not at all. The fact is Wikipedia is one of the largest information based websites around and it is very useful as a place as stated before to start your research off. More to the point what has just been said was a way to clarify that when you go to Wikipedia or another dot com website you need to critically think about what was said and take everything with a grain of salt. Verify the facts at different places and just make sure anything you read into at Wikipedia is susceptible to fallibility.

Current Event: The Semantic Computer System

This current event revolves around how A.I is starting to evolve with getting over one of its biggest barriers, understanding language. Semantics is the understanding of what language actually means, to understand the back round knowledge behind the context of words. A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, headed by Tom M. Mitchell, a computer scientist, have been working on getting a computer system to understand semantics to be more “human.” They have a computer in Pittsburg, running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, surfing the web to teach itself how to understand words rather then just regurgitate them. The computer system they are working on is called N.E.L.L, which stands for (Never-Ending-Language-Learning System). How N.E.L.L does is by scanning millions of web pages for text patterns to understand facts, its accuracy in realizing semantics so far is 87%, the way it understands semantics is by grouping them into different categories, 280 to be exact. These categories by example are things like animals, car types, states, companies, etc. N.E.L.L figures out facts by understanding how to different categories would be related like the Mustang is a car (one category), and Ford is a company (The other category). By scanning text patterns N.E.L.L understands by the key word probability, that the Mustang is a car built by Ford. The “built by” is the relationship between the two categories, upon which there 280 different types of relations. It understands the relationship between things by looking for patterns, correlations, and by using programs that understand rules (like when Microsoft is a unique name of a company and not a general word like bus). It is interesting to note that both categories and relationships between categories are expanding as N.E.L.L searches the web for more facts and information. As N.E.L.L learns a new fact it is then stored into its “knowledge base” a word coined by the researchers working on N.E.L.L. As its database grows larger N.E.L.L actually becomes more efficient at learning new facts because each new fact helps refine its learning algorithms. Because the Web is a rich source of material for a computer to learn in it helps making computers become more “human” faster. This would directly help people in general when semantics become part of the daily software on computers and search engines, where people can interface with computers in a more general atmosphere because computers will be able to understand what the user is trying to get out. For example if one were to go on a search engine to find out what is wrong with ones television for instance, instead typing in keywords, one could ask a question like “What is wrong with my Bravia LCD TV it has a big red spot in the middle of the screen?” It could help refine the results more. Or even down the road having software that can act like a personal assistant which can help one in their day to day routines. The N.E.L.L program is not the only, nor is it the first try at getting semantics right with computers, many other companies like IBM and Google are trying to do the same but what makes N.E.L.L different is that it is almost completely automated while other programs are more passive and require more user interface and programming which takes more time. Its learning systems go by a hierarchy of rules to help resolve vagueness of words that generally stump other semantic programs. Also N.E.L.L learns hundreds of things at once which is how it was designed because the more things it takes in the easier it is for itself to self correct a mistake.(the more differentiating two things are the easier it is for the program to understand them so that’s why it takes in more information at once). This idea though of teaching computers semantics takes time and even N.E.L.L needs the occasional assistance because it’s the background information of words that tie up computers systems like N.E.L.L an example given by the NY Times articles states “When Dr. Mitchell scanned the “baked goods” category recently, he noticed a clear pattern. N.E.L.L was at first quite accurate, easily identifying all kinds of pies, breads, cakes, and cookies as baked goods. But things went awry after N.E.L.L’s noun-phrase classifier decided “Internet cookies” was a baked good. (it’s a database related to baked goods or the internet apparently lacked the knowledge to correct the mistake.) What is interesting about this program is that it really trying to get artificial intelligence over a major hurdle which is trying to A.I understand what language does and means. All this information was taken from the NY Times technology website with the title named Aiming to Learn as We do, a Machine Teaches Itself with the author being Steve Lohr. I felt this current event was interesting because it really had me wondering about how close we are to have A.I really being a consistent part of society. All I can say is with the way we are so dependent on technology already I wonder how dependent we will be when artificial intelligence is more of a expert on specific topics then the experts are. I do not know but as cool as search engine that understands whole questions rather then keywords would be I do not think I would be thrilled with robots running around in the near future doing ones house chores wondering to itself " Why if I am smarting then this organism am I cleaning up after it? I think this should be the other way around." Obviously a bit extreme but you never know, what if we do end up making terminators with skynet going all crazy?

Rutgers Suicide

With what has happened at Rutgers a few weeks ago it is still fresh in my mind. What really draws my attention is the fact that technology played such a large part in the way the events led a young man to take his own life. Aside from his roommate viewing him with a web cam and the fact that government in the state of NJ is pushing for new privacy laws with harsher penalties, it is the reasoning this young man decided to let everyone know he was about to kill himself on facebook right before he jumped. Honestly, is that what it is all coming down to? Yes, the correlation between writing a suicide note and leaving a quick response on facebook may seem similar but their not. Emoting your suicide right before you do it is a lot different then the police finding you somewhere and then they break the news. In this day and age it is almost insane how much our culture has changed in the last decade. Everyone is so wrapped up in Facebook, Twitter, and even Myspace still to a degree. It is literally taking human interaction and turning it on its head. In our last class we just watched how on Youtube an Anthropological professor at KSU has stated as we stray from human interaction yet we appreciate it more, really? I really can not say one way or another but here is some "food for thought." With the way divorces have been going up is it fair to say that this can be linked to the way people have been finding relationships from dating websites to even Facebook once again? Going back to this young man from Rutgers all I can truly have is pity for him. I am in no way trying to be mean when I say I pity him but I do feel that his generation which has revolved around this new way people interact had deceived him. When he found out everyone in his personal world was beginning to realize he was gay and because he was not emotionally stable enough to tell anyone yet, when this happened it must have been like his whole world came crashing down around him. The despair this kid must have felt must have been surreal because like I have said a lot of time and energy in the younger generations today go into keeping their profile in shape. This event to me has let me realize one thing very important and that is that a lot people really have come to label their profile as a completely new extension of their physical being. Culture certainly does move fast towards change.

Back to the Basics with Technology

   That title does not mean reinventing the wheel. I merely am stating that it is time to realize that there does need to be a line drawn in the sand with technology. Why should we just sit back completely exposed as technology changes every last part of American culture through our generation, to the next, and the following generation? We need to realize that there needs to be a median where we accept technology but not let it run our lives. As Postman puts it in his book Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology, he states "A resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, that every technology-------from IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer----- is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control." 
    This seemingly may be mundane to some but it has resonance to my ears. Why should we sit idly by and let new forms of technology that have not been used ever in the scope of humanity dictate the way we perceive life? How come to many Americans believe newer is always better? I for one see a 1968 Dodge Charger as a way sweeter mode of transportation then a brand new 2010 Honda civic. But to get back on a more serious mode of discussion, how come Native Americans and Ancient Greeks found that perseverance through the human condition more appealing then figuring out a new shortcut through inventing a tool for ease of use? Why was it that discovering more through philosophy went wayside then figuring out how to download illegal songs?
   How could a man like Francis Galton take statistics past just numbering students papers like William Farish did at Cambridge in the eighteenth century and use numbers to describe which cities in Britain had prettier ladies? How was he able to get people to jump his bandwagon on judging the skulls of men throughout history and decipher their IQ (Copernicus had a lower IQ supposedly by this way of measurement then Galton himself by almost a hundred points! Please!) by the size and shape of their skulls. How can people be more dependent on the findings a machine will give through statistical readouts then the experience a doctor may garner from years of practice? Doesn't one realize that machines designed to figure out medical problems do not come some far away magical place? That instead they are contrived and designed by ideas from other doctors from years worth of the very experience needed from tending to sick patients.
    The Human condition is being replaced by the mechanical condition unless we stop it and take the reigns back from our mechanical "brethren". I say brethren because we literally say when a computer has a problem it has a "virus," or is "infected," and needs to "quarantined." Is this seriously what is happening? Have we gotten so lax in our differentiation  between what is organic and what is inorganic that we need to label computers "sick?"
    For America we need to realign ourselves and get a few things straight. Number 1, "Scientism" isn't completely an end all be all to figuring out the human condition as well as it 3 ideas (1, natural science can be applied to study human behavior, 2, social sciences can be used to organize society on a rational and humane basis, 3, faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life). Number 2, As Postman states as he did with numero uno, we should not be so dependent on computers to believe that everything after computers could not have happened without them. Number 3, we need to realize that technology will not always save our butts and that we as a society need to accept this (what were to happen if a solar flare brought with it a massive EMP pulse and fried everything electrical? Would we just throw ourselves into a mass hysteria and kill ourselves?).
   We Americans need to realize The Neil Postman is on to something. We cannot just allow ourselves to be subjective servants to Technology because when ever in American culture did we depend on another power to bail our asses out of anything? I am not trying to use the symbol drain with Uncle Sam telling you you have what it takes to be independent. But, as a whole we really need to realize that we should not be so dependent on technology. We need to take a step back and re-orient ourselves into forming all the technology we are so dependent on into being just tools for us to get by. Not things we are dependent on for survival.
   For our own sake we should not accept the metaphorical message about computers as stated by Postman "The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines----thinking machines to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomplete, near perfect machine for technopoly. It subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it "thinks" better then we can." 
    The hell it can, as for right now, just like everyone else, I can still pull the damn plug from its ass.

Are We Tools to the Tools we use?

   In the book, Technopoly, The Surrender of Culture to Technology, the author, Neil Postman cites Karl Marx and says "Among the famous aphorisms from the troublesome pen of Karl Marx is his remark in The Poverty of Philosophy that the 'hand-loom gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.' As far as I know, Marx did not say which technology gives us the technocrat, and I am certain his vision did not include the emergence of the technopolist. Nonetheless, the remark was useful. Marx understood well that, apart from their economic implications, technologies create ways in which people perceive reality." 
   It is interesting to note this quote in Postman's book because it explains how much technology influences each individuals life but also specific cultures as a whole. Postman goes on to explain the different types of culture that inhibit the earth in regards to technology. You have the "tool-using societies" upon which many ancient civilizations are categorized by Postman. This did not mean that they were completely inferior (ancient civilizations made many remarkably wonders of the old world like, the pyramids), it just meant that they did not let tools (technology) rule their lives or let it change the very foundations that created their societies. They just had tools to help in survival. Of course this could not stay the same as eventually certain tools would lead about change and would inevitably change the whole platform upon which people perceived their worlds and how they went about their day-to-day lives. Though technology played a significant role in how people lived, they still held onto important aspects of their society like religion, family hierarchies, etc. These cultures and civilizations now became "technocracies." What would then take place was another huge leap in technology that would engulf said society completely where as put by Postman "Technopoly- the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology." Technopolies are the last step of the chain upon which technology completely changes or eradicates all known culture and replaces it with a new style of culture dependent upon technology itself. Technology creates a whole new social order as stated by Postman.
   This is a large process to understand and really makes for some interesting discussion. Postman really drives home the concept of technological dependency and I believe him. everywhere one looks, one is bombarded with new forms of technology. The printing press altered society completely it gave people better access to information and let people become more aware. The clock drastically altered the way one utilized their day. Stirrups on a horse altered the social classes of feudal Europe to add knights into the mix. The computer has completely changed the way people of current society go about communicating with one another. There are also backlashes to these new forms of technology though. Luddites have extreme prejudice towards any form of technology because they realize that they replace people with machines.
   You see, the Evolution of technology spurs on the revolution of society, for better and worse. Also, food for thought, how might we be when a new form of technology replaces our ability to feel and be empathetic to others? When family structures are seemingly being changed along with metaphysical beliefs what will be next on the horizon? Will emotions be next on the chopping block? Will humanity be completely altered one day to just resemble organic machines, completely autonomous and detached of life? As stated by a quote from Freud delivered to us by Postman "What good to us is long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?" We should not let technology make things so mundane with shortcuts that we virtually sap all inspiration out of life.