Week 5 Blog 1

Today’s assignment really touched on something as a parent I feel I struggle with everyday; is technology making our children weak, more vulnerable, and in plain terms stupid.  Mark Bauerlein refers to the under 30 generation as being “the dumbest generation”, and in many ways I wonder if he isn’t correct.  I know I struggle to pry my child from the IPod, or the computer to get her outside and enjoy the fresh air.  Their relationships are on the computer, they network and text instead of study and imagine.  And who is really to be held responsible, if the technology is there it is going to be wanted and used, but doesn’t it fall on the parents to help find the balance and find control?

Something that I thought of today was a term that was brought to my attention when I was looking into ADD and ADHD, this is NDD or Nature Deficit Disorder, where people are so disassociated with the world around them that they don’t know what their natural surroundings are.  It blew me away to think of a world that was so technology based that they forgot the sunset or that the trees are the reason we breathe.  But it is the truth, you look around at all the faces stuck to their cell phones, I pads and all the other little gadgets we all feel we need to leave the house and it is really no surprise that NDD is something that really exists.

Week 5 Blog 2

I have at many points really thought about how lucky we are in America to have the several technologies that we take for granted, so this topic was something I had spent a lot of time thinking about in the past.  We are very fortunate for the many technologies that we have from lights to the IPod that my child believes she cannot live without.  But what about other countries?  We have seen throughout this course that poverty, where you live, and who you live with is 3 prime factors that go into what kind of life you will have and how you will develop as a child; technology is no different. 

Something that kept playing through my mind while doing today’s assignment was the commercial you see for laptops, ‘buy a laptop and provide one to a child in Africa’.  I think in some ways we move through life without truly evaluating the position of other countries, or the fact that the simple conveniences that we have are what keep so many other countries in levels of higher poverty and lower access.   

A reference to the digital divide which refers to the “gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographic area at different socioeconomic levels with regard both to their opportunities to access information and communications technologies and to their use of the Interned for a wide variety of activities (Bergh, 2004)”.  This is a broad statement that pretty much lays is out clearly if you do not have the means to access modern technologies you will not leave the life that has been handed to you.