Making New Media Make Sense
As technology advances, our society is expected to adapt and advance with it. Through this adaptation, people must understand that in order to connect digital media to social consequences that follow, people need to understand both the features of technology and the practices that are emerging around it and that are going to influence it.
Attention span is defiantly influencing technology. Attention span is defined as the length of time during which someone is bale to think about or remain interested in something. Technology today, seems to be reducing peoples attention span and that aims specifically towards the internet. The people are able to get instant gratification and are able to fix things quick, peoples desire to research something in depth now is easily diminished because it is so easy to type in a question and get an immediate answer.
For example, Nick Carr posted that Google is “making us stupid” and said that “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory… Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.’
The moral dilemma here is that technology has enable our society to connect with people quicker among other benefits. Baym brings up the notion of a moral dilemma with technology and how fast it is advancing in our world today. Children are being expose to technology too early in their life and are exposed to bad things like pornography and sexual encounters. That without internet they would most likely not be put in that situation at such a young age.
People have attached their lives to technology and can not go a simple day without it, even maybe an hour a day. People are just intrigued with what is happening on the internet. Society’s technology drives the development of its social structure and cultural values.
New media is hard to make sense of but then again, it is really easy. The people just have to adapt and they will be right back to where we were when Facebook first came out, new technology comes out and the people get used to it and it repeats. Technology is always going to keep advancing and as the people we are going to go along with it.