HW 9- Blog post comment responses

To Marco's Comment:

Marco,
Thanks for taking the time to read my blog, I thought you really saw the main point that I was getting at in my blog. Your comment gave me a thought provoking answer to that main question I asked and made me consider the connection between that point which came up in class about being in control of your life when your online, and the question I raised about why we are captivated by the computer screen and "addicted to the Internet".

I realize that you did take the time to make a really well thought out comment, but I feel like your focus was on the positive parts of the Internet, which are pretty self evident, not the real deeper negative side of the Internet.

That is not to say, you didn't discuss the downside, because you did. I feel like their was one particular flaw that was mutual in both your comment, and my post. The flaw was that we both touched on this idea that we don't get exercise, and are pretty much motionless, but neither of us seemed to propose alternatives. I think the discussion about mental stimulation vs. physical is important, meaning that their is a time to be physically stimulated and a time to just be mentally stimulated.

An example of my mental vs. physical idea, would be playing ping-pong, and playing Halo 3. Ping-pong, which is about just hitting the ball onto the other side of the table, not so much strategy, is a time for physical activity, not mental growth. Halo 3 is about killing aliens, sitting in-front of a screen and coming up with a strategy where you can kill the most possible aliens, without being killed.

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To Beatrice's Comment:

Beatrice,
I appreciate the time you took to read my blog, and comment thoughtfully on it. The main thing I noticed about your comment was how you used a very conversational tone which really made it seem personal, something which I don't think we see enough of in the digital world.

I definitely like that you didn't think that I needed to work on anything or expand on anything in my post, but I'm sure that there are plenty of things that I could have done better. In a way you do address things I could have expanded on, because you talk about certain point that I made which you agreed with, but in my post I only talk very briefly about them.

At the same time, I think that my point about my lack of an attention span was in a way reflected by the fact that I do just jump from statement to statement in my post without much transition or elaboration on each one. Your comment really made me recognize that and until pretty much now, I hadn't thought much about that.

One way that I think you sort of missed my point is, that you felt I'm more focused on the fact that I knew my attention span was screwed up, but really I was trying to discuss the larger question of "how does technology screw up your attention span?". I didn't actually say that in my post, so given what I literally wrote, I can see how this would seem to be the obvious point that I was intending to get at.

Your question about whether or not technology can keep you satisfied, is really something that I would like to expand on in a future post. I wonder if we are actually fulfilled by technology or it just pumps more needless communication and entertainment into a void which we cannot fill, simply because we don't have any reason to fill that void.