Depalma Week 1

DePalma Readings Unit 1-2

CS300 Technology in a Global Society

De Palma – Overview | |

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Computers have a bind with society. Values and ethics have a direct impact on technological inventions, and those technological inventions in turn have a direct impact on values and ethics. The "revolution" of computers has vastly affected the way society has turned out and how it will fare in the future. The more we invent, the more we tend to invent. |

De Palma – Reading #1 - Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change | |

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The author relays five distinct messages that point to the same conclusion; we cannot save ourselves, from ourselves. That is, we continue to attempt preparedness for the unknown all the while creating more unknowns that we must now somehow prepare for. Among the ideas presented are; what technology will do and undo; that technology is not distributed evenly among the population due to misclassification as a blessing or a curse; that technology is prejudice to some degree; that technology changes everything; and that technology can be viewed as mythic and therefore accepted as is where is.

The overall tone here is to draw attention to technology in a way that we almost never do, as having an ethical price. |

De Palma – Reading #2 – Slouching toward the Ordinary | |

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The author invokes a provocative thought that technology shaping human communication is not a matter of if, rather a matter of how much and to what end. We look at technology of then, such as ICQ and IRC and see that the knowledge of the product had to be much greater than the knowledge required to run programs 10 times more sophisticated. Communication over the World Wide Web has increased exponentially primarily due to the technology that drives it, namely bandwidth. Finally the author interjects the loss of anonymity that was predominant in the early days of the internet. The individual user today not only has a wealth of information readily...