Digital Addiction

After watching Tamima’s presentation on the week when she completely abstained from any internet activity, I started thinking about how addicted we really are to our virtual networks. The first thing I do when i wake up is check Facebook, and I check my email every half hour or so. What if someone sent me something important? What if someone sent me a message on Facebook? If I go to the kitchen, i check my phone when i come back because maybe someone called me or i got a text. My name is Dalia and I am an digitaloholic.

Is being addicted to our digital technologies in this way necessarily a bad thing? Maybe it’s good to stay in touch. It’s definitely beneficial as to know what’s going on at the moment. Twitter keeps you up to date with recent events and news. Facebook keeps you in touch with your friends. Email is very important for dealings with your university professors. So is this addiction we have something that we need to cure? Is it something that needs treatment? Or is it merely something that we need to learn to live with without having it impede our lifestyle and distract us from more important tasks?

I know this guy, a friend, that refuses to make a Facebook account in the first place. He says it’s going to distract him from his studies, and he’s going to get attached. He says he doesn’t like to get too attached to things in such a way. He says it’s just for fun any way so there’s no real need for it. I tell him he’s being ridiculous. Facebook is important. You get to keep in touch with friends that you haven’t seen in years. You remember all your friends’ birthdays. You can send anyone a message on Facebook and be sure that they’ll read it on the exact same day. If you’re not too close with someone and you want to ask them about something, it won’t be embarrassing to ask them on Facebook like it would be to give them a call, and of course you’ll be sure you’ll get a reply within a few hours, if not within a few minutes. Our collective digital addiction definitely has some benefits to us as a group that wants answers, a cohort that needs information, and needs it now.

Maadians in Action Revisited

I wanted to use this blog posting to talk about Maadians in Action again. Just as a reminder, I created this website for two main reasons: to help Maadians come together in building a better Egypt, and to track the development of the website. As far as building a better Egypt is going, it’s not going very well. I think the main reason is that the website itself is not very interactive. On Facebook and Youtube for example, you go on the website and you can make a quick comment on anything you like. But on Maadians in Action, members can only post comments on the discussion forum, and there is a separate link for that. On the forum itself, you have to create an account in order to view and post comments on the discussion. Of course, people get bored along these steps and they just close the website. Or as our collaborative project discusses, people get easily impatient. It is easier to shift their focus away from something that is irritating and taking a long time than to actually pursue it. Especially considering that they know very little about it.

I had many friends come up to me and say: “I think that Maadians in Action thing that you did is very cool” So I was like well why didn’t you post anything on the discussion forum. (Only nine people posted). They almost never had an aswer. They’d just be like “I will I will”, and they they don’t.

Have we really become like this? For our first topic titled “Getting Started”, 36 people viewed it, and only 7 replied. It would be interesting to investigate further why more people didn’t reply and interact on the discussion board. If the discussion board was actually on the website, and people didn’t have to create an account for it, would participation have increased? I honestly like to think so.

Maybe more advertising about the website itself would help as well. Just spread awareness through Facebook or something about the website itself, what it aims to do, what people should do to take part. I plane to actually continue with the website through the summer. I’m putting it on hold for final and final projects and everything but I plan to continue with it later. Hopefully Maadians in Action will one day become “a thing”.

Multitasking and our Attention Spans

I read this article that we had for our collaborative project titled “What the heck happened to our attention spans?”. It was very interesting how I could relate to this article completely even though it was written 3 years ago by a 30 year old male American. People all around experience the exact same thing when it comes to integrating the internet in our daily lives. We all experience trying to juggle Facebook, Youtube, email, readings for classes, projects, finals, and watching our favorite TV shows. It’s hard, it really is.

I honestly thought it was just me, I thought MY attention span was getting worse. I thought I couldn’t focus because I was bad it. But apparently,  I was wrong. This is happening to everyone. The internet IS shortening our attention span. Or as Carr says, it is merely exposing our weak human attention spans. We’re not good at multitasking, but we’re not strong enough to resist it either. The temptations are too strong. We have proved ourselves failures at not opening Facebook when it’s just a click of a mouse away. Focusing on reading a book away from your computer or laptop is one thing, but focusing on reading a tab right next to Facebook ON your computer or laptop is a whole different issue.

The websites that already exist are enough of a distraction, but new entertaining websites are being created everyday. For example, the website http://dearblankpleaseblank.com/ is gaining increasing popularity. The website FML (f*** my life) is also becoming more and more popular. Some of my friends let a friend change their Facebook passwords at the time of finals so that they CAN’T open Facebook. Are we really that weak?

On Growing Up Digital

Since my group is working on the theme “Growing Up Digital”, I thought I’d use this blog posting to talk a little about that. A couple of the ideas we came up with were impatience and losing focus, and I experience this first hand right now as I write this very post. I have facebook open in a tab, Youtube in another, and my email in a third one. I shift back and forth between writing this and browsing my home page on facebook, and it’s so hard to stop. I want to know what’s happening on facebook right now, and I know that it has changed from a minute before. I try to close the tab, but when I do, I just open it again a few minutes later. A few minutes is all I can take focused on one action. Maybe if I was doing something offline like reading a book it would’ve been easier to focus, but with facebook two millimeters and two seconds away, it’s almost impossible to stay on the same page. The second I don’t know what to write I click on the facebook tab. The second facebook doesn’t have anything new to display on my homepage I leave the laptop all together and go get something to drink. I’m impatient, and I can’t stay focused. We’re all impatient. Growing up in the digital age and getting used to the speed and ease with which we can shift from something to something else much more attractive made us this way.

I was watching the royal wedding (William and Kate), and when the choir kept singing for more than 5 minutes, I got bored. I wanted to go do something else, and I deemed their wedding a bit boring. When i thought about it afterwards, I decided that no, it wasn’t boring. It’s normal for a choir to sing in a wedding, especially a royal wedding, for ten minutes. It’s just that I have become impatient. I want entertainment, and I want it now. And since it is available for me on my phone and my laptop at any given point in time, anything else that I am doing is simply trying to approach that. Everything else is in competition with what the digital has to offer, and everything else is up for a hard competitor.

Maadians in Action

I started seriously designing my Maadians in Action website and I realized that I was not just doing this for the class at all. I found myself being meticulous about details and constantly asking friends (Maadians who are to be members of the site) about every single thing I wrote on the website. I want it to be perfect. I keep trying to look at the website as an outsider and see if I actually see a virtual community in it. I try to look at it and decide whether it has potential to attract hopefully hundreds of users. At the same time, I strongly believe that it does. I believe that one neighborhood can build a website that can affect strong change. I believe that this neighborhood website can create a virtual community tied together by  culture, upbringing,  real community, and a common goal: developing their country. And I believe that this website will make a change.

I decided to use this faith that I have in this website’s potential to “build a better Egypt” and try to send it across to my fellow users. I ended the paragraph on the home page of the website with this sentence: “I honestly believe we can change the world, but for our first project let’s just focus on Egypt”. I feel like transmitting positive energy is very important in trying to create this kind of social/online movement.

I will start posting the link to the website on friends’ profiles on Facebook probably today or tomorrow and ask my first users for feedback. I will keep making constant revisions to the website so that it satisfies its users 100% and so that more people feel compelled to participate.

I was actually thinking of even having an announcement on the website that says “Open Positions” and have people sign up for treasurer, event organizer, fund raising campaign organizer, and media consultant. But then I thought that for the first few weeks the website probably won’t be so much on a roll that there would be a need for such positions.

I’m very excited to see how the development of Maadians in Action slowly unfolds.

 

 

My Virtual Identity Project

While I was brainstorming ideas for my virtual identity project, I was finding it very difficult to land on a topic I found interesting. I jumped from a family website to an Egyptian news website to a virtual community for women and finally landed on the perfect topic. I decided to integrate elements of gender, patriotism, interaction, society, community, and virtual community in one website…my Maadi-ans in Action website.

I noticed that while I was thinking of topics, my main concern was having a useful project, one that one positively impact someone other than myself. So keeping in mind the recent events in Egypt, I decided to make a website that would have “building a better Egypt” as its main goal.  I will examine gender differences in participation and interaction. I will also attempt to examine the development of this virtual community and whether it is able to successfully reflect on actual community.  People that live in Maadi will have this shared virtual community where they can interact and share ideas about possible events and fund raising campaigns all under the common goal of building a better Egypt.

I think the main issue I will face is the time constraint. I certainly will not terminate the website with the end of the semester, but I doubt that I’ll be able to see any real effects of the website on actual community in just a couple of months. A thorough examination of gender differences and the development of this virtual community is probably as far as I’ll be able to get.

I’ve been thinking over the past couple of days whether a simple website made by me can actually have potential to affect change. I guess you can say that anything starts small right? But how small? Is it more the community that is involved that affects the change? Or is it the source itself?

Facebook and the Egyptian Referendum

For the first time in Egypt in a really long time, every Egyptian had a choice to make about a vote that would actually count. Every Egyptian was worried about whether they would say “yes” or “no” to the constitutional amendments.  Since the beginning of the revolution, people have had specific mindsets about everything that’s going on, and their opinions have been relatively resistant to change. However, over the course of the few days preceding the referendum, something very different was going on. Everyone was hesitant as to what they were to vote for. Mubarak supporters and anti-Mubarak people were all on the same side: hesitancy. I believe that what caused this to happen was as follows. Constitutional amendments are not something you already have ideas about, you have to listen in order to decide. What happened was that all over the internet, people were spreading information about the pros and cons of the constitutional amendments, and everyone was reading both sides. On Facebook, you’d find people one day posting why it’s best to say yes and the next day posting why it’s best to say no. Information about both sides was enough to have a well rounded idea of the situation, but not too much that you’d feel overwhelmed. It was well written and easy to understand; for example, pictures with bullet points, a slogan for each side, etc…

Facebook educated us about the referendum. Facebook showed us both sides intelligently so that it was even harder to decide. Making an informed decision is always harder than making an uninformed one. When you’ve equally been subjected to two sides of an issue, it becomes harder and harder to settle on one of them. And with the digital media being so easily accessible by everyone, it was easy to be properly informed. Especially considering that political participation and activism has greatly increased since the revolution specifically online, it is only natural that information spreads easily and conveniently so. During these last few days, Facebook gave everyone the opportunity to have a proper voice.

Blogs, Facebook, and YouTube

As we’ve been discussing in our classes digital rhetoric and its importance and significance in our lives, I noticed that we’ve been focusing mainly on blogs. In all of my classes, I always like to think back and relate what we’ve been discussing (which is most of the time from a Western perspective) and relate it to our middle eastern culture here in Egypt. Do blogs have the same standing here in Egypt that they do in the U.S for example? Have they acquired the same popularity? Have Facebook and YouTube become popular as well? Have blogs become as important as Facbeook and YouTube in disseminating information? Why so?

To consider these different forms of digital rhetoric in egypt, I decided to just think about higher socioeconomic status people, people that are generally active online and are parallel to those people whose work we look at when examining Western digital activism. I noticed that YouTube and Facebook gained popularity very quickly and grew exponentially over just a few years. In fact, since about 2006, Facebook and YouTube have been growing more and more and reaching larger audiences. In fact, Facebook and YouTube are becoming almost one thing given that you can post YouTube videos on Facebook and facebook gives you the option of either directly going to YouTube from there or viewing the video on Facebook itself. Right now in Egypt among the internet users, there isn’t anyone that does not have a Facebook account or someone that has never used YouTube before. They have become integrated as part of society.

But what about blogs? Have they become as popular? My answer is no. I think that to this day, Egypt’s internet users are not really familiar with blogs. Having a blog is not important, and is in fact sometimes seen as weird.  I would estimate that less than half of Facebook and YouTube users have blogs. Even at the beginning of this course when Dr. Gironda asked if anyone had a blog,just a couple of people responded.

Now the question is: is it simply that blogs have not gained popularity over time because people have not ‘discovered’ them yet? Or is it that there is no need for blog interaction? I’ve found that many people use the “Notes” option on Facebook as a form of blog. Is it possible that blogs may one day become extinct as other forms of digital media incorporate its functions into themselves? It would be interesting to track the development of blogs and see whether it’s just that they haven’t gained popularity in Egypt yet, or whether they’ve reached their maximum potential in this climate.

The Facebook Effect

People sometimes make a distinction within political activism between home activists and activists activists. Allow me to explain. Over the past month, there were Tahrir goers (people who actually went to Tahrir), there were people who were active online, and there were people who weren’t active at all. The question is, are the first two groups politically active? Or is the second group under just what I like to call the Facebook effect?

The Facebook effect is when you think you’re making a difference through Facebook. This revolution has been called the revolution of Facebook, so the effect facebook has can not be overlooked. There definitely exists some sort of digital power that people can exert through their virtual identities online. But there is a difference between being active on facebook through making pages, commenting on them, sending constant messages to e everyone, organizing events, etc…and simply looking at all of these things happening. Witnessing activism does not make you an activist. The Facebook effect is when you think you’re “active on Facebook” because of all the revolution-related information you’ve passed by.

I took this in a mass communication class actually. An effect called “narcoticizing dysfunction” that says that people deceive themselves into believing they’re involved when actually they’re only informed. If people watch an episode on starvation in Somalia, they feel sympathetic to the Somalians. If they keep on watching episode after episode day after day about the Somalians, and track what is going on, their sympathy interacts with their awareness of the situation, and they feel like they have done their part for the Somalians.

The Facebook effect works the same way, and as I’m sure we’ve all seen over the past few weeks, played a huge role in the revolution and how people saw their part in it. Intellectual involvement became a substitute for active involvement.

Response to “Mind vs. Machine”

I found it very interesting in the first article how he starts it off by saying that this whole new feat in technology, with its remarkable advancements, is raising questions about what it means to be human. What is it that makes us special? Is it really our brain? Or is our brain something that other man made objects (like the computer) can possibly approach in its remarkability? The author then goes on to describe the Turing test and explain how it came to be and what it aims to prove. I found it very strange however that he considered himself to be defending the human race against such a ridiculous notion that a computer would possibly fool someone that it was a human being and that people wouldn’t be able to differentiate between both. He thought “not on my watch”. My thoughts while reading the description of the Turing test was that it would be a great achievement for the human race if people couldn’t differentiate. It would be a plus for us as human beings for having created a machine so magnificent and so amazing, not shameful for us for not being able to prove to another human beings that we were human and that the other “contestant” was the computer. I get the sense from the article that the author did appreciate our advancements, but I still got the feeling that he considered the possible success of the Turing test a fail for the “human race”. I really like how he thought of what would show the judges that he was actually human, like timing and haphazard random sentences, and decided to use those during the test. I felt like the points he raised regarding this issue were very clever.

The second article I looked at called “Computer vs. The Brain” which you can find under this URL http://library.thinkquest.org/C001501/the_saga/compare.htm took a completely different approach to the whole issue of artificial intelligence. Of course both articles weren’t starting from the same position to begin with since the first article was discussing the Turing test mainly and then bringing up issues of man vs machine under that theme. The second article was actually directly examining the issue of the computer vs. the human brain. The author of that article actually ran calculations of a computer’s capacity and compared that to the capacity of the human brain. He proves that it is very obvious that our brain is far more superior to any computer. However, he raises an interesting counterargument and argues it back. He says that many people would say that any computer would beat the smartest human being at speed in calculations for example. He argues by saying that what is expected from a computer while making a calculation is just that. The human brain on the other hand has so many other tasks it has to handle simultaneously, so you can’t possibly compare the two. The author then goes on to talk about different ways that the brain is superior to the computer. I thought both articles were very interesting actually and both authors had clever ways of looking at the issues at hand.