Blog for the first week of march!

So this week was a very crappy for me! I have been sick all week and have not been sleeping well so my sleep has been in my classes including this class, and my other classes, so I haven’t been able to take many notes in class, but I do have some. We talked about Post-Singular, and how technology is so integrated in their everyday lives, even more so then us. We rely on technology a lot for everything and its becoming more integrated in our lives. In this book though technology is part of people, people use technology to get high, to learn, and to live. Which is a where our society may be heading if you ask me, but it may be a little closer than we like to believe. We also looked at Shelly’s book, were she had the a word of her book tattooed on people, and it can only be put together if the people got together and pieced the puzzle together. Really her book could never be put together back to its originally format and parts will always remain a mystery, only known to Shelly, because she has the copy. We also looked at how technology affects the body, and had a discussion about that. I thought about it later after class and technology affects the body drastically. Let’s say someone got their arm bitten off by a shark, the surgeon would try and reconstruct the limb to fit into a prosthetic, that prosthetic was created using modern technology. Also we could look at factory emissions and people’s allergies. I am a big allergy sufferer and have to take 2 medicines a day to combat allergies, and even after those medicines I am not allergy free, but they do help. When there is low air quality in the area, or poor air quality I always take a double dose of allergy medicine because I know my allergies will get bad that day, our modern technology like cars and factories has affected my body by amplifying my bad allergies causing me to have bad headaches, red eyes, and affecting my ability to sleep, that in my opinion is one way technology affects our bodies. Also technology affects our bodies in a positive way, I was born with bad astigmatism and I am almost legally blind, to fix this problem I am going to get laser eye surgery this summer, which will remove my dependency on contacts and glasses, which will be amazing! Technology has come a long way, and can actually improve our bodies too. The next day in class we talked about the capitalism model and how companies give things away for free and then charge. This got me thinking about the two big and successful companies that spurted up in my time, Comcast and Verizon. Verizon Wireless I remember came out with the free phone, if you buy a plan and sign a 2 year contract, what they forgot to mention is that phone would become obsolete in 6 months, then you would have to buy a new phone for full retail price with new features, and they neglected to tell you that these new features would cost money to use, great! I believe Verizon has a very smart marketing campaign. Also they provide good customer service and eliminate their competition, then have crappy customer service to cut costs, horrible. Now lets shift our view to Comcast. They get you on this teaser rate for digital cable for only 19.99 a month for 6 months, which is almost free. Then I get a bill in the mail after 6 months for 80 bucks for basic digital cable and I’m like wow, they really got me! This model works very well I’m glad we learned about this in class. Then we also got into the topic of corporate advertisement, and asked would you pay 7-12% less in tuition to see ads everywhere? My answer is yes, I see them everywhere all the time on TV, on the internet, and just ignore them and don’t worry too much about them, it wouldn’t matter too much to me if I saw them all around campus, it would just be another thing for me to ignore, as I already do, and I would pay 7-12% less in tuition, that would be awesome for me I would not car at all. Where I would draw the line though is when a teacher’s curriculum is based on advertisements, and if a teacher assigns a book to read because the book company paid them money too and not because it is a great and meaningful literary novel. Or a curriculum chooses a textbook over another textbook that is written way better because the company paid them to use their textbook, when advertising starts to interfere with the curriculum is where I would draw the line that it is too much.