Insights and More Tie-Ins

I think the ideas we've been discussing in class recently are really interesting. It's helping me understand how we use technology in all new ways, which I suppose is the point.  It's likely that most people our age, because we grew up with all this rapidly developing technology, have gone through our lives as passive receivers of technological information, without really taking the time to figure out hows and whys of it.  How it works and why it works and how and why we should or shouldn't use it.  The idea is to be informed, and this point is often missed on people our age--or maybe even people in general.

Another tie-in with one of my other classes is that we recently read a short story that takes place in a futuristic virtual world.  This world is much like the "real" world, but things like graphic violence and sex are not possible...yet.  As the story unfolds, the main character and others discover that new developments are being made, and that these things are increasingly more possible.  Someone stabs the main character, and he actually begins to virtually die--all the progress he's made in this virtual world will be erased if he dies completely.  The persons stabbing him thinks it's funny. Then he learns that his virtual girlfriend is actually a man in real life, and has a wife and kids. When the main character learns this, he goes from wanting to find some way to stay alive in this world, to telling his attacker to stab him more.

I believe the point the author is trying to make with this story is that technology can often cause us to detach from things emotionally, and to adopt the mindset that because something his happening in virtual space, it is irrelevant to or cannot affect people in the "real" world. But if one thinks about it, things that occur through technology are as real as anything else, but in a different way.  The things one does on the internet can affect real people in the physical world. I thought all that was relevant to this class.