Illusionary Values

Entertainment can be a means for teaching real-life lessons in a condensed format through analogy and imagery. As an example, many video games tend to offer the player rewards in return for effort, providing a life-lesson of putting the necessary effort into attaining the richest things. If, however, gamers stop viewing the game as merely anecdotal, and the artificial rewards become as real to them as any other, then they end up valuing things of little worth over things of greater. Why put thousands of dollars and years of hard effort into a simple college degree, when you could just put in two hours and save an entire village? This skewed perspective fails to grasp that a village which can be saved in a couple short hours, must not be a village that is much worth the saving. The fact that real-life accomplishments come harder speaks to the far greater value of them. We should let our games encourage us to strive for the best of life, not spend the best of our lives striving in games.

Our New Media-Book Post

We live during a unique period of change in the media. Specifically social media is now prolific, changing the dynamic of how we receive and share ideologies, news, and entertainment. This has brought a massive increase in content and the ability for anyone to be producing it. So, is this new dynamic better or worse? In a word, yes. Simultaneously breadth and depth are being expanded, both for the best and worst of material. Ideally we would only be producing the good and worthy, but there is no authoritative standard that content must meet.
Before this onset, the media was filtered many times before being distributed. It was filtered by the laws of the land, by investors who demanded getting a profitable return, and by the ethics that the creator of the media had been trained to abide by. The system certainly had its flaws, but at least there were checks in place to counter and curb those flaws.
Today none of those checks are in place for our new media-sharing platform, and the only people who could police the content is us, the creators of it. The most empowering thing about social media is that if we don't like what is out there we can really do something about it. We can see the negative and the base and we can drown it out by producing our own positive and uplifting material. If it is quality, if the masses enjoy it, then it will become viral and its influence will make the internet that much better of a place to be. The internet will become what we determine it should become and if we wish to flood the media with goodwill, worthy content, and places of safety there is nothing to stop us.

Which System is the Right One?

The technological world hosts a great deal of variety, both in ideologies and implementations. One specific example is whether operating systems should be closed (Apple), open (Microsoft), or ridiculously open (Linux). The different core beliefs of each system naturally lead to very different implementations, and thus each method is innately more proficient in some tasks than its competitors, and more deficient in others. People tend to become attached to one or the other and then argue over why all the others are woefully inferior. Personally, I think that's silly. Would we really want to eradicate the others so that only one remained? In what way is it a bad thing to have a variety of different solutions for our many different needs? In what way it a bad thing for competition to drive each method to iterate and ever improve? We will never have a "perfect" single system, but we can at least have a powerful conglomeration of these unique ones.

Unwanted Attention

In the past few years the prevalence of women in technical fields like math and physics has increased, while computer science has remained a male-dominated pursuit*. Concerned parties endeavor to change the culture of computer science and encourage more women to consider that branch of study. While well-meaning, I wonder if these efforts might at times have the opposite effect of driving women away. I have heard young women in BYU's computer science program express exasperation over actually being too well received in their courses. They weren't able to just be another student, because they were constantly reminded of how rare a treat it was to have them there. It's nice to be wanted, but very few enjoy always being thrust into the limelight. In some ways, this treatment can even be insulting, as it tends to make one feel like a commodity. A valued commodity to be sure, but still, a commodity. Women are women, not a rare collector's item.

*http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html?_r=0