blog 1-15 - 1-21

So to kick off the week in our class we watched a video called "Immersion" from the new york times. This video was a recording, edited, showing reactions children have when playing video games. I found the video to be funny but also slightly disturbing about the reactions kids had when playing video games. I found the video to be slightly biased, because you can take a recording or just about anything and turn it into whatever you want by editing the video in a certain way. An example could be of the movie we watched in class called "Top Gun Recut", The movie had nothing to do with a gay romance between Val Kilmner and Tom Cruise, but just by editing the movie, creating your own preview, you can make it seem like the movie is about a gay love story. So if the New York Times was trying to created a film clip about how video games drain kids of emotions, or make them violent, that clip is not really good evidence. Now I don't believe that was the main purpose of the video, but definitely there were some overtones of it, while not being obvious at all. Also one big thing about the game is it seemed like it only showed first-person shooters, which I thought was a little biased, because those games get pretty bad, and people get into the game a lot.

After that we watched the ExistenZ movie. which is about people who can plug into a Virtual reality machine and play a game that is very popular, in this fantasy world. The movie is very interesting, because that reality may not be too far off. Although I doubt we will actually have to get plugged into anything (Hopefully), I bet the gaming industry in the future will be creating some new virtual reality game that will be the new craze. I really can't wait, but after watching parts of this movie, I'm not too sure lol!

The next day in class we actually watched a really cool video called Ted, and he gave his input on what is wrong with the economy, how it can be fixed, and what we need to be putting more research into. I thought this guy new exactly what he was talking about, and I wondered, maybe the government is looking at slutions to fix the economy that really doesn't fix the underlying problem. That pretty much is, banks were loaning out too much money and giving the money too everyone. this resulted in more bad loans which now has just crippled our economy. Really the Bush administration was encouraging mass amounts of spending of money that people really didn't have. By the time it caught up to the American people, we were screwed, and the banks took the fall. The truth is people should only spend the money they have and not have an entitlement on something. People just went out of control with the low interests and the tax incentives that they overspent, which is going to cripple our economy for the next 2 years at least. Ted was really onto something, to fix the problems we are having banks need to cut who they are loaning to, and the federal government may be the only entity that can do this. We want to spend, but there is not enough money to spend. Also he went on and talked about evolution, and how we as a people may evolve with our machines. We use them everyday, and they are becoming more in tune with us. We may one day become machines, that could be our next step in evolution, if you think about it. Everything we do is done with machines, and they are working more closely to us now then ever before, and its just going to get closer. For instance people are now using machines to help deaf people hear, this is called cochlear implants. Pretty soon, it will get to the point were regular people use those implants to hear better. Same with visual implants, someday people will use those to be able to see, then one day to see better. Pretty soon a "Super Human" Will have implants to be able to have super hearing, and super seeing abilites, and it may end up being a war, people against enhanced people, who knows. It is scary to think about. Just by being in this class I have learned a lot about looking at patterns in technology and trying to see what may come in the future. What will happend when we move on? There is no way to know, but I can imagine that 20 years from now people, and the world may be drastically different from what it is now.