Final Post: My Relationship with Technology

 I grew up rather disconnected from technology and I struggled with social skills due to my inability to chose between languages to speak. I grew up to adore books and rely on them more than the growing technology around me. Fast-forward to my current use of technology in my first year of college and things may look a little different to an outsider in passing.

In passing, you may see me staring at my laptop screen with AirPods stuck in my ears. Possible, I'm even sending a quick text to work or my mom off my phone. To an outsider, it looks like I'm just like every other college student between classes: possibly working on homework or watching a show, listening through AirPods, and wasting more energy through added use of my phone. 

Unknown to you, I would rather not be on the computer. There isn't a perfect space on campus or one that offers what I seek for no-computer time. In my book bag, I always carry a thick book to read, a notebook I converted into a sketchbook with half-attempted sketches, and a notebook I converted to the Chinese vocabulary book I add to a little in every session I teach myself. As my first year at college comes to a close, I'm more eager to sit outside and try to finish the book. The blue light from technology irritates and strains my eyes, sometimes even affecting my already-bad eyesight despite the corrections of contacts or glasses. 

My relationship with technology is pretty much next to "only when necessary" for 90% of the time, like school or work. The remaining 10% is either outside research for personal reasons or boredom where I scroll through my phone or streaming services, partially uninterested, in order to pass the time or wind down at the end of a long day. My eyes can't take intense light and is struggling to handle long periods of blue light at any level of brightness settings.

While I need to take breaks from technology and media, my sister does not need as much. It's not that she's vain, but its what a two-year difference does in this world and how we grew up. I grew up more aware of certain issues where she was not able to or just not interested. She was also exposed to consistent English earlier than I was, bolstering her social personality and helping her create more connections and friends.

I learned to use technology predominately for school or work reasons. I take long gaps, which last a minimum of at least months, in posts on social media. Most of my personal technology time is listening to music or watching a show on a streaming service. My relationship with modern technology is probably as basic as it can get. I prefer books so much more that I have a mini-library of sorts in my room, with shelves to shield my collection from dogs and damage.

The time I spend using technology is enough for me. I can manage using it for classes and note-taking, but even I take breaks and want to throw it out a window. (Yes. I have had the occasional concerning a computer and the act of throwing it. Sanity and not having the time or money to buy a replacement keeps me from acting on it.)

I want less time on technology and less interaction with blue light but that simply is not possible. The world, especially American society, is so heavily integrated with various forms of technology that if you have low to no experience or knowledge of how to work the technology that you have, you will have little to no income and job opportunities. I like learning but it's difficult to find a credible way to teach myself.

Technology is evolving in all sorts of ways: capitalistically, academically, and even agriculturally. It's up to the individual to understand how you use technology and how you should use it for your own personal benefit and health. Maybe how you should use technology is to only use it at work or maybe just for an hour after you've arrived home.

The technology I appreciate is a little more old school and simple. Give me four hours with a 400 page book and I'm happy. Sit me in front of a computer for 4 hours against my will and we may have an issue. Technology is constantly evolving in a world that is quickly growing and expanding in knowledge, inventions and population. I am, however, limiting my personal online presence. The first result when my name is searched is my Goodreads account. (Goodreads is a book catalog... I frequently use it.) Most of the page is simply connected to my family name: Krajisnik. However, at the very bottom of the first page, one can find my name on my high school's 2021 graduation list and HPU's Dean's List from last semester. 

All one could find about me is simple: books, academically successful, and doesn't frequently on social media. I'm rather detached from online technology. I'm very dependent on books and creative methods. It saves my eyesight and mental health. How many young college students can you say are as unattached from technology as me?

KEY: Each One Teach One on DEEP FAKES

Deep fakes took the world by storm because of how realistic an A.I developed fake face could appear while still and in action. What is a "deep fake" and why is it such an issue? A "deep fake" or "deepfake," by definition, is "a video that has been edited using an algorithm to replace the person in the original video with someone else." It's a digitally altered face on a person in a video. Scandals and movie productions have been produced by deep fakes. 

See an example below:

In the above deep fake, the eyes, mouth, nose and even hair and light on the left of the face are all edited. The forehead and cheeks even has edited wrinkles, be that they were added or removed. A similar base facial structure make programming a deep fake over the face of the subject in a video much easier and believable. 

What are the Implications?

There are some good and some bad implications. The good implications are that a movie or TV series can continue on or close the role of a specific actor if there is an unforeseen event that renders the actor in question unable or incapable of participating further in the movie or TV series. Privacy may also be protected depending on the power behind the deep fake's facial and vocal alterations and distortions and alignment in the original video.

However, there are more bad implications. It doesn't matter who you are for a deep fake to affect you negatively. You could be old or young, rich or poor, a majority or minority population, a man or woman, and deep fakes will still have an effect. It's up to the older generations in power to regulate this risky technology.

Starting from the simplest of risks, deep fakes can lead to severe crimes such as blackmail, intimidation, incitement of violence, and heavy influence of ideologies. Deep fakes can also influence your memory due to the repetition of misinformation being spread by a subject with a fake face of someone who is credible. In extreme cases, this severe misinformation and false faces may lead to a compromise in national security and safety, possibly having a butterfly effect on regular society.

Consequences of deep fakes can be defamation of character, reputations being damaged, and real journalism and the journalists themselves could be undermined and lose credibility. 

The question is, could you be next?

Privacy in the Digital Age

The Digital Age was born of revolutionary evolutions in technology and communications. However, the Digital Age also brought about new policies and legal complications, many of which are not read in their entirety by the masses. Everything posted on the Internet is like a tattoo, permanently etched into electronic stone even if hidden by layers of other websites or a "remove" button. What does information that never goes away mean for you? 

It means less digital privacy.

Digital privacy should be what protects you online but algorithms, online usage tracking software, and even analysis of your online activity take away that privacy. For you, it may affect your job or college search if someone does a digital background check. The flimsy "privacy" of online life may even lead to jail time or a court case depending on what you may have posted online or what someone else may have posted with you. Perhaps you may be scammed or had your information stolen through sites selling your information to each other across platforms. 

Friends and family are also subject to these sort of personal issues. A legal proceeding that the internet has kept going is the January 6th incident. Depending on how you may view it, it may also be the January 6th riot, protest, or even a coup d'etat. While this lack of privacy may have lead to the protection of American democracy as well as Congress and politicians.

Protecting ourselves from breaches of privacy online is a complicated series of trial and error, and hoping the site you've browsed through or registered on doesn't sell or breach your privacy. While some information may lead to personally helpful possibilities (like targeted ads or marketing), a majority of privacy breaches may lead to malware, identity theft through weak privacy protections, or contracts you may not be able to understand or escape, even if you delete the information from X site. 

The government is struggling to protect the masses in the modern age and the newest decade. The U.S government has flimsy laws that are dated to the early days of the Internet, where it was easier to regulate the Internet and businesses on it. Then, it was easier to enable and secure a child lock or channel. Today, kids are able to switch between child-friendly and more mature content. The government hasn't been able to protect users like it had early on.

How can we protect ourselves? Firstly, read the contracts. They pertain to the handling of your information or data you may produce in the use of your device or the sites you visit. You can erase trackers by frequently clearing all aspects of your search history (including cookies!) when you do go through and erase Internet history. Easier and possibly less boring things to do are the following:

1. Keep all your devices up to date. 
2. Set strong passwords where you use passwords.
3. Keep your personal information personal. It's where it should be: just with you.

Something else to look out for are scams, which are mostly easy to spot now with out-of-pocket ads and random emails. Shopping is also something to take with a grain of salt. Be careful what you view to protect yourself from a bad buy and scams. Keep records of what you buy until you receive them. And remember to monitor your activity!

Diffusion of Innovations

First off, what is the concept of the theory of Diffusion of Innovations? Simply put, it's a social science theory rooted in communication, explaining that over time, an idea, product, or innovation gains popularity throughout a certain population. Normally, the diffusion ends at around 85% due to "laggards." It was a theory thought up by one E.M Rogers in 1962. See the visualization below in terms of market share: 

So who are the people sectioned off at the bottom of the graph? Innovators are the ones who create the object or concept in question. The early adopters are the first ones to actually apply the object or concept. The early majority is much the same, but at a larger rate due to the early adopters having already used what's in question for a long enough time. The late majority follows the early majority, except it's lagging behind a little bit. A "little bit" is a few years, unlike the last group of laggards, who are much later or  farther behind. Laggards are the latest among the population to use the object or concept, using it many years after the majority has already taken up what's being diffused/spread out.

How to Understand it in History: the Printing Press

Take the printing press for example.  The established inventor, Johannes Gutenberg, from Germany, was one of the people to come up with the idea of the first Western style of printing, as well as the only one to actually have built prototypes of what would become the famed Gutenberg printing press in 1440, later being perfected in 1450 and put to commercial use.

What good did that do him... Gutenberg, the inventor, died penniless and uncredited for decades. However, he was who would be one of the "innovators."

The "early adopters" would be the commercial printers that printed over 8 million books in Europe by the end of the century. It was a convenient invention for publishing companies and their copy-writers, churning out more books that were produced practically identically quicker than an office full of copy-writers. 

The "early majority" were rather different than the early adopters. The early adopters and those that bought from them had higher education and, with it, literacy. As there were more books being produced and educational institutions popping up due to a humble German invention, there was a slowly increasing literacy among poorer classes of late 15th-early 16th Century Europeans who were dependent on their churches. The Catholic Church at the time was not happy.

The Church was maintained on the backs of illiterate, ill-educated (if at all), low-wage peasants who were willing to pay for spiritual redemption and listen to some form of the Holy Bible that a (possibly) also illiterate priest memorized through oral telling from a higher-level religious member. Within the Church, there were holy members who were growing aware of Church violations or moralities that did not align with what they understood as "holy" or in line with the Bible. One example of an angered religious man was Martin Luther, father of Lutheranism.

Martin Luther and other "radicals" during the 16th Century were among the tipping point population, those that are in the transition between early and late majority. The "late majority" are in the Enlightenment. 

In the Enlightenment picture above, you can see men arguing with a clergy member. More of the men in the image are turned to or gesturing to the non-clergy man standing above the clergyman, seeming to be reading from a thick book. The clergy had lost a significant influence of its spiritual and even political influence in the countries they were posted in, especially France. 
Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Montesquieu were part of the "late majority," capitalizing on the evolved printing press with political, religious, moral and other ideas in books that exploded throughout Europe and the known world. Granted, there may have been extremists on ideas, possibly even fights and wars breaking out (ex. the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions).

People who would be considered "laggards" were likely unable to read, unwilling to read, or in a place where reading wasn't too important or necessary.

People may be late to, or never will, adopt new technologies, due to unsureness about the technology or because they feel they are able to continue comfortably without the technology in question. There's also people who may not be educated enough to adopt the technology, just like the lower classes of Gutenberg's time until the Enlightenment. They weren't able to read well if at all. Why waste time or money on something you are unable to use or appreciate? This question may be why people are noticeably late to adopt technologies, if they do at all. 

A.I: Radical Technology and Racial Divide

A.I, short for artificial intelligence, has been in constant improvement and development, going as far to be called "revolutionary." Except, it has only one flaw. It lacks in facial and vocal recognition for people who happen to be non-white. Misidentification of people because of A.I claiming there was a warrant or 87% similarity to a wanted person, no identification of non-white users, and A.I misinterpretation of words due to an accent. 

There are two notably superpowers leading the A.I development on a global scale. China and the United States. The top 10 A.I superpowers can be viewed here. Taiwanese computer scientist, businessman, and writer Kai-Fu Lee is a leading expert and speaker on how these two superpowers have been competing for A.I dominance on a hemispherical scale, and possibly even a global scale. Two global superpowers have advanced past other developed countries in the race of A.I development. But what's wrong with this picture?

These are countries with both subconscious and conscious bias. 

Take China in 2022. It's a "surveillance capitalistic" nation. A surveillance nation, as defined by Shoshona Zuboff, is the "unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data." There is a constant surveillance presence, like street cameras routed to a police-viewing center, throughout the country. There is a much heavier concentration of surveillance in the Xinjiang region which is home a minority of China called the Uyghurs. Surveillance, predominantly supplied by Huawei, here is something more... authoritarian and invasive. See Chinese surveillance below:

Now, let's take a view into the United States and her companies' versions of A.I: Google Home, Amazon's Alexa, Apple's face and finger recognition on their iPhones and MacBooks respectively. How well developed is A.I in a country as diverse as the United States? It's obviously well-developed enough for mass production, but it's not made very accurate to the American consumer. 

The 2020 U.S Census states that Whites have dipped from 63.7% (2010) to 57.8% in racial or ethnic prevalence. Recorded Latino/Hispanic numbers are 18.7%. The Black American population is at 12.1%. This means that facial and vocal A.I systems must be updated to better recognize this growing number of diversity. For instance, a number of Latino/Hispanic adults retain their parents accents, which cause issues with a system like Amazon's Alexa recognizing what is being told. Sometimes, people have to change their accent in order for A.I to recognize a voice. 

Other times, facial recognition systems used for a larger company, organization, or school does not individualize recognize a face with no white features, like skin tone or facial structure. Features are generalized and the technology can be fooled. 

So how much trust are you willing to put in your A.I system? Is your Alexa something you're going to rely to understand you the majority of the time or will you need to change your accent? Is your organization's facial recognition system able to recognize you? Is your surveillance system accurately able to identify people?

The world is a big place with a lot of people. A lot of people in a big place have a lot of time, resources, and intelligence. More information may lead to an overwhelming amount. More information may lead to a bias in coding or development. 

Ask yourself: is your technology bias?

KEY: Each One Teach One on the Printing Press

Communication methods have been constantly evolving from oral communication, to paper communication, to communication through technology. Today, communication happens orally, on paper (through written or printed word), on social media, and even through the use of hands by gestures and sign languages.

At certain moments of history have provided explosions in communication methods. One of the more notable technologies in Western European history is the revolutionary printing press (seen above), initially a simple creation requiring attendants.

The History

Invented by Johannes Gutenberg (circa 1400-1468, seen right), full name Johann Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, the printing press was born in a period of uncertainty to its inventor. Gutenberg was entangled with legal issues shortly after his business partner, and friend, passed. These issues threatened to erase his name from creating the first Western printing technique. What the legal proceedings did succeed in doing at the time was sullying Gutenberg's name, as he died penniless in 1468.

While the printing press was an invention built in the wrong time, its Asian counterpart and inspiration was not. The Chinese and Koreans had their own variations of printing. For instance, China printed via "relief blocks," which titled the printing technique as "relief printing." The Western printing press moved from private production to public production in 1454. 

By the end of the 15th Century, roughly 8 million books had been printed by means of the press. In 1517, Martin Luther used the press to produce the infamous 95 Theses that caused a schism in the Catholic Church. Once this religious revolution happened, the press became a means of spreading ideas: religious, political, and otherwise.

An Invention that Failed its Inventor Proves Itself to the World

While Johannes Gutenberg died penniless and ashamed, the printing press created a means of intellectual revolution. The Reformation of the Catholic Church was bolstered and recognized by the masses due to the ability to print religious intellect that did not align with the Church, which had massive influence over Middle Age Europe. 

The Enlightenment, a time of revolution in philosophy, scientific investigation, government and human thought, would've failed to take off or grown mutated in predominately French ideas between countries. The United States may have never gained its independence or written her Constitution. Revolutions that created sovereign nations might've collapsed early in their battles. Philosophical and political, respectively, Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Montesquieu were only a few thinkers that were able to spread their ideas so quickly, thanks to the quick production and distribution of their written works.

While less-than-wanted or agreeable ideas were also spread out as a consequence of the mass production of an evolved printing press, it created a need for people to debate and learn to understand various ideas, theories and manners of how to approach ideas they may not be in agreement with. An invention is never 100% good just as the world is not 100% pure and good. An invention is as its users intend it. 

However, the question remains: was the printing press a critical piece of history? Did it create history as we know it?

Unheard Anti-War Voices

2001: the year the United States self-inserts its military power into the Middle East.
2021: the year the United States pulls out of the Middle East due to agreement with the Taliban.

The U.S thrives on war both that it is involved in and not, be it economically or socially. It's all a matter of power. Due to recent political shams, issues, and shifts, the United States has lost much of its international power and is struggling to maintain its power over the youth of the United States.

Th United States has been conceived as a global superpower. Its international standing used to be the ever-powerful "world police" or "international cops." Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S passport was one of the most "powerful" passport possible until plummeting significantly through the ranks of passport power. Below, you can see how much of the world was occupied by U.S forces. The white regions show no American military presence whereas the darkest areas are significantly occupied, whether due to war troops or American bases.

 

Sites like antiwar.com keep people informed of the current wars (like the Ukraine-Russia war that erupted earlier in 2022) more than encouraging less. However, staying informed through a less bias website may diminish the power of American propaganda, especially that of which surrounds the politically-intriguing theme of "war" that the American people would prefer to not have.  

American propaganda can be seen in how students are taught history and current affairs. For instance, the United States paints itself as a Land of Dreams and the "greatest country" in the world, however does not allow for students to learn about American failures in human rights concerns, war, and racial views. Due to wars in the Middle East and dislike of heavy immigration of people of color (Latinos) coming through the Mexico-United States border, American politics encouraged discrimination of Islam and Latinos by calling the minorities that fall under this topics any horrible name between "terrorist" and "rapist" and "drug dealers." When you search for United States propaganda, there are only suggestions for the World Wars, not today.

The United States is becoming blind this way.

In the website called The American Conservative, alternate and unbiased views of American work in international affairs are explored. Exclusively international affairs (no American interference) are also explored. Sites like those mentioned in this writing are being underused and covered up by "bigger" news and media because that's not what brings in money or appeals to the "American way."

When talking about war and its propaganda in your country, be mindful of what it meant historically. In the United States, the "American Dream" was and remains to be exclusively for the straight, white, Christian working male, who also happens to be rich. Immigrants, racial minorities, religious minorities, et cetera, are excluded... and the number of straight, white, Christian working males is declining. That kind of dream is dying. Voices of the minorities are rising up. 

Who's to say speech minorities like antiwar.com and The American Conservative won't also rise up? In order to facilitate speech diversity and combat propaganda, it's the responsibility of the people to educate themselves and fight back. 

So fight back and educate yourselves.