The New Education

Your being here suggests that you possess the critical skill of being able to read. I remember being taught to read at 5, and it was a long and gradual process. Word by word I learned how to interpret nonsensical symbols into thoughts and ideas, originally from someone else's mind, but which would then incite new thoughts and ideas in my own. What followed in my childhood memories are many priceless journeys in reading. I read fairy tales and novels, biographies and articles. My understanding, my tastes, and my comprehension all developed and matured, each attainment leading seamlessly into the next. Reading is the foundation of so many things I know today. My perspectives on life, my academic education, my pursuit of personal interests and more are all dependent on this extremely fundamental ability of being able to understand words on a page.

This is by no means a unique experience. The advent of scholasticism and literacy raised the common man's intelligence and capability in ways that fundamentally redefined our cultures. Of course, previous to widespread literacy, there were other forms for attaining information: such as conversation and example. While these methods were not abandoned through being able to read, literacy allowed for additional ways to attain information that were never available before. For one, you could have information repeated to you over and over as many times as you needed by rereading a passage. For another, you could experience phrasing that had been carefully cultivated and  revised for ultimate directness and clarity. For another, you could experience thoughts and opinions that came from miles away in countries that you would never visit in life. Even when writing was used to communicate works of fiction, it still provided new opportunities to access artistic, moral, and inspirational information. In short, it can be concluded that a literate man was generally a superior version over his illiterate self, and was better qualified in all things. The literate man now had the tools by which to better attain all knowledge and skill available in the global consciousness.

To me it is evident that today we are experiencing yet another drastic revolution in communication and information with the advent of computational technology and the internet. Like literacy, this technology is a versatile means to many ends. It is a tool in the belt of those that wish to access information of any sort. Obviously it does not replace literacy, rather it does much to accentuate and expand it. One way in which computers and the internet fundamentally change our approach to the dissemination of knowledge is that it allows the forming of databases that can digitally store information greater than that of any library, but which can be searched faster than is humanly possible. They also now allow for the virtually immediate sharing of information and conditions from opposite ends of the globe. You can experience content in many new forms, including interactive experiences. You can participate in many-to-many interactions, no longer limited to one-to-one or one-to-many communications. And more easily than ever before these tools allow you to be a producer of information, rather than just a consumer. As before, the man that possesses technological literacy will be a superior version of his technologically illiterate self.

Those that ignore this new tool will progressively find themselves moving slower and slower than the rest of the world. Taking more time to learn less, those people will also find themselves attaining a lesser status than others. In the same way that traditional illiteracy has become a trait of the poorer, the uneducated, and the deprived, so it will be with technological illiteracy. Any educational institution and any concerned parent should have as priorities that children learn their alphabet, learn how to read...and then learn how to install an app and conduct a web-search.

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.

Is the Internet Good or Evil?

We have been warned of the dangers in the internet. There are threats that range from merely wasting our time to degrading our very souls. In the most extreme sense, there is a very real issue of the internet destroying lives. All these troubles and concerns can at times consume our perspective, and we might come to see this technology solely as our enemy. When in such quandaries it is important to not forget the good that these resources also make available to us today. By that I do not mean just the trivial matters of convenience we gain; that alone would not justify the cost. Such an amazing transfer of information has a power to save men from ignorance and mistake, to propagate good ideas, and to bring together worthwhile collaborations*. It may be that the internet has been allowed to remain on this earth because its potential to save the lives and souls of mankind outweighs its own threat to destroy them. The burden is on us to ensure that that potential is not being squandered.

*https://www.lds.org/ensign/1984/06/the-church-and-computers-using-tools-the-lord-has-provided?lang=eng

Not All Play by the Same Rules-Book Report

People have interesting ideas about digital networks. They want their personal profiles to be protected. They don't want their credit card numbers sold, their personal files hacked, or their identities stolen. When exchanging personal information online, they expect the website to meet certain standards of encryption to prevent the data from being stolen. When information does get stolen, they expect the vendor to have resources and obligations to compensate and restore them back to their original state. Now the only way for these things to be secured is through structure. There have to be rules, there have to be ways of monitoring whether those rules are being followed, and there have to be ways to respond to infringements of them. These rules and the enforcement of them designate an implied government.
At the same time, though, people often want the internet to be an anarchy. They want the internet to be where they say what they want to say, show what they want to show, and do what they want to do...even if those things are not always legal in the physical environment. The idea of some authoritative police moderating that self-freedom is repulsive. When legislation like SOPA or PIPA is proposed some legitimately express concern over unintended consequences, however I have noticed a great amount of hostility simply at the idea of government involvement of any sort.
Perhaps there is a logical explanation to these two very real desires that seem to be at odds with one another. It might just be preservation of self-interest. It appears that people are fiercely in support of the measures that protect them, and fiercely opposed to the measures that protect others from them. People don't want their credit cards stolen, but they also don't want to stop their illegal torrenting.

Proper Abstraction

For a society to continually progress, it seems necessary that there be an abstraction that allows lower-level knowledge to be dismissed, otherwise we will eventually spend our entire lifetimes learning all that was previously learned by past generations with no time for new discoveries. Herein is a conundrum, though, as times may arise where that lower-level knowledge was critical but is now lost, a concern explored by Nicholas Carr's recently released book The Glass Cage*. Are we to run the risk of building on a foundation that all of us have forgotten the structure of, or are we to live without ever progressing as doing so would require losing something else? It seems obvious that society has chosen to progress and abstract, and can only be expected to continue to do so. Perhaps that doesn't have to be a doomed journey, though. By knowing what the danger is, we have the opportunity now to assess it and accommodate for it. We may yet learn how to forget safely.

*http://www.kansascity.com/ entertainment/books/article2436204.html

The Future is Divined from Our Needs

In 1947 Archibald Bennett, an LDS Church Genealogist, predicted that "A universal system of intelligent cooperation will bring together on one record sheet every fact in existence regarding a particular family."* One might say that he "saw our day". I don't feel his predicting the future, though, means that he had to have a specific vision of our smart phones, computers, and internet. In fact his language suggests that he spoke not of the technology of mankind, but of very human nature. To know the future of mankind it is enough to be intimately aware of what mankind's needs are. Just understanding that there was an innate need for man to seek out his progenitors and seal his ties to them is sufficient to know that some way will arise to accomplish this. As we understand our nature, we will know what the future will be because we will know what it needs to be.

*https://www.lds. org/ensign/2010/12/future-of-familysearchorg-explained-at-seminar?lang=eng

The Thrill of Being Ignorant Again

The announcement of the iPhone 6 showcased a phenomenon in our culture today. Millions of people paid in advance so that they could leave what they already knew and instead struggle to learn unfamiliar features and software*. Trying to learn new software can be frustrating, but it also reminds us that we are not idly remaining stagnant as the rest of the world flows by us. That's why we describe these periods of ignorance optimistically as "being on the cutting edge of technology". The "cutting edge" is whatever is new, innovative, different...the things we don't yet understand. Apparently that thrill of being a pioneer outweighs the ignorance that inevitably comes with it, as evidenced by the iPhone 6's immediate success. No wonder the technology industry has flourished, given how constantly it is able to evolve and make us all be ignorant again.

*http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2468504,00.asp

Technology = Humanity?

Advances in technology are often seen as implying that all other aspects of humanity and civilization will improve as a result. But this idea is unfounded, as technology could have the unintended and opposite effect of diminishing our quality of life. Many powers in life have to be earned or trained for, be they political position, wealth, devoted followers, or command of a nuclear power plant. Modern technology is also a power, but one which we rabble are given access to without having had any preparations to wield it. There are few things as destructive as power in the hands of the unready. How would things have been different if before nuclear physics was discovered we had already learned as a people to not try to destroy human life? Power is a force for good only when in good hands. And in regards to technology, unspeakable power is already in the hands of a rising generation before they have education, experience, or wisdom. Time will show how that arrangement pans out.