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

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