Quality or Convenience

The aspect of “quality” is becoming less and less important today. Just last year 181 million disposable cameras were sold compared to 7 million digital ones, that’s a 25 to 1 ratio. The reason this is happening is because something that is handy, easy to use, and cheap is the top choice for all but professionals. Does this mean that in 10 years there won’t be what we consider quality items, or that things will get so cheap we can only use them one time? Another industry that is getting cheaper is the camcorder one, in 2007 Pure Digital released the Flip Ultra which became a mega hit and over 1 million of them were sold in just the first year. Today the Flip takes up over 17 percent of the camcorder market and the top contenders are scrambling just to catch up. All of these incidents are shocking when you think about them, what if safety loses quality, or worse happens? The question we must learn to ask ourselves is not is it convenient, but is it safe?

The web is (controlled by) us

Think about the Internet, most people don’t realize how big of an impact you can make with every sentence, every word, every click made. When you post anything it becomes a footprint that can’t be erased, no matter how hard you try to get rid of it. When I read Mrs. Thompson’s The New Literacy Article & Mr. Wesch’s The Machine is Us/ing Us these are just a few of the thoughs that rushed through my head.

Today most people presume using computers are bad for literature, thinking that they decrease our writing skills into nothing but bleak,blad, and shorthand. This is not the case according to Mrs. Thompson, who collected 14,672 writing examples including essays, emails, blog sessions, and many more forms of Literature. She discovered that technology isn’t ruining our ablity to write, it’s enhancing it and pushing it in bold new directions! An inportant thing she found is that students write much more than any generation before them as most of todays socializing is done by typing online. Before the Internet came along most Americans never wrote anything that wasn’t school related later in their lifetime. This is stunning when you really ponder about it, as it means that my generation could help construct the future of writing.

The Web has come a long way from when it was first invented. This is 2.0, the second version. Now you don’t just have the ablity to take from it, you can add to it! After I viewed the reknown YouTube video named The Machine is Us/ing Us, one thing that really inpacted me the most was when he pointed out that “we are the web”. This means that without us there would be nothing; no world wide web, no blogs, and no search sites, nothing. Now take a moment to realize what is going on, we control the entire internet, every video uploaded, every I pod application, anything and everything. In the video Micheal Wesch also stated how digital text is far more advanced than ordinary text. It can be moved, delted, color changed, linked, and even downloaded. All of todays information is scrambled and cluttered and the only ones who can organize it are us.