Group Presentations in our Virtual World Class

Yesterday was the first day of presentations and we had two groups that presented. The first group presented on a book written by Lee Siegel, titled “Against the Machine, Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.” The basic message of this book is that the internet is separating us from the “real” world and it is promoting self enclosure. The first chapter is titled “Bait and Switch”. This chapter talks about profit and idealism, how the internet is being sold as a form for consumerism. The message that the presenters got out of this book is that Siegel believe that the internet contributes to the destruction of culture and knowledge. Web 2.0 is creating homogenization. In other chapters Siegel talks about the culture that participates in the internet use. He states that the internet contributes to the intermingling of different cliques and to him this is a negative thing. For Siegel cliques that were found in high school are the best way of doing things. Siegel also believes that artists and professionals are sliding into a gray area because of their internet use. He believes that the corporate world is going to take over the “pure form of art”. I’m not going to go into more detail about this book because I believe that you get the point. This author is a critic and he wrote this book to be critical of other people. The presenters stated that they were very frustrated with the book. This can be a good or a bad thing.

The other group of presenters consisted of 5 guys… that was interesting. They were presenting on a book written by Howard Rheingold. The book is called “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.” The author starts out by talking about texting and the changes that it brought to Tokyo and the rest of the world. Tokyo- is the place of the world most advanced texters. He also talks about I-mode and how it revolutionized the internet on phones. In the next few years we will see a new phenomenon 3-G generations that will be able to used their phones for a life style remote control. Rheingold also talks about the fact that technology is driven by cooperation without cooperation technology is not truly possible. Community Computation is talked about in chapter 3. Examples are Peer to Peer (P2P) sharing, Sharing Central Processing Unit (CPU). Chapter 4 talks about the “era of sentient things” which includes virtual reality research. Virtual Reality Research includes: smart rooms, digital cities, sentient objects, tangible bits, wearable computers. What sentient Technology is: Sense, Receive, Store, and transmit info. Sentient technologies open up a new media sphere. New technologies are making microchips cheaper, more easily accessible. These chips can be embedded into money. UPS is one of the users of the few technologies, it can track trucks when they pass certain points and they can know to the dot when your package will arrive.

Technology is a very interesting thing and different people have different perspectives of it. On Monday we will see in what directions the rest of our presentations go in.