{"id":567,"date":"2011-11-23T08:42:43","date_gmt":"2011-11-23T16:42:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wkiri.com\/comphist\/?p=567"},"modified":"2011-11-30T10:09:18","modified_gmt":"2011-11-30T18:09:18","slug":"assignment-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/comphist\/2011\/11\/assignment-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Assignment #5"},"content":{"rendered":"

My five mind habits:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Communication: Everything is instant.\u00a0 I assume if I haven\u2019t gotten a response back within a certain amount of time (depending on the method of communication) that I will not receive a message back at all.\u00a0 It\u2019s not that I will not receive a reply in a longer time than these intervals; I am just surprised when I do.\u00a0 For a text message this is about fifteen minutes, for a missed phone call about an hour and for an email one day.\u00a0 In the case of a delayed reply, I will obsessively check my inbox\/phone for whether I have received a reply, as if my mind cannot move on until I do.<\/li>\n
  2. Planning: Everything is last minute.\u00a0 If I want to see someone that day, I text or call and the plans are made.\u00a0 The more casual the interaction, the less time beforehand the plans are made, and always electronically.\u00a0 The maximum time plans are made beforehand is about tow weeks, and this is for a large party (for which invites are sent via Facebook).\u00a0 However, these electronic invitations have created an interesting mind-habit: doubt about the real number of people attending.\u00a0 This is more and more true for larger and larger groups.\u00a0 This is caused by the anonymity of the mass text and Facebook invites, where you can respond with \u201cmaybe\u201d or not at all without feeling rude.<\/li>\n
  3. Travel: Everything takes forever.\u00a0 Even with the use of cars and planes, the speed of long-distance travel has not changed in decades, whereas the speed of communication has rocketed forward in recent years.\u00a0 In the days of endless airport security lines, I have often felt myself yearning for instantaneous travel that is as quick as email.\u00a0 Now, this may be simply natural human impatience, but I find that these yearnings are tied to technology in my mind.\u00a0 With so much being instant in our world, long-distance seems impossibly slow.<\/li>\n
  4. Meeting new people: the Facebook stalk.\u00a0 The second you meet a person of interest, you Google them.\u00a0 In middle school, we used to check last year\u2019s yearbook for interesting tidbits, which is so far less revealing than a Facebook page.\u00a0 You can learn whether or not a person is single, how old they are, where they work, where they go to\/went to school, and if they have any damning quirks, all before having a real human interaction with them.\u00a0 A recent episode of How I Met Your Mother called \u201cMystery vs. History<\/a>\u201d outlined this strange new conundrum in terms of the dating world, where all the mystery can be Googled away once you know the person\u2019s full name.\u00a0 Google and Facebook have caused an expectation of instant and full knowledge of a person.\u00a0 I know that when I was first getting to know my boyfriend before we were dating, his lack of a Facebook page was very infuriating.\u00a0 I ended up Googling his name just to satisfy my appetite for insider facts.\u00a0 This is the new mind habit\u2014the expectation of little privacy.<\/li>\n
  5. Studying: the Wikipedia\/Sparknotes effect.\u00a0 The first thing I do when studying is look up the topic on the internet.\u00a0 Instead of pouring through textbooks and assigned readings again before a test or big assignment, I look it up.\u00a0 The best way I\u2019ve found to frame the way I study is to find the topics that other people think are important and focus on those.\u00a0 This is not a perfect system, however, and has backfired for me on a couple exams.\u00a0 However, it is always effective at one thing: settling the nerves.\u00a0 The mind-habit at play here is again the quest for instantaneous information.\u00a0 I want to know the key topics so I can do well, but I do not want to spend hours re-reading to get to that point.\u00a0 In a way, I think studying has suffered the most in the new world of technology, as it has instilled an impatience detrimental to the effectiveness of test preparation.\u00a0 Whereas research has become faster and more expansive (in good and bad ways\u2014but if you know the type of source to look for, the internet is still faster that a library), good study habits have, perhaps, begun to erode.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The future:<\/p>\n

    In writing this, there is one very clear answer for the area I want technology to leap forward in: travel.\u00a0 After flying twelve hours to get from Portland to Beijing last year, airplane travel has truly lost its appeal for me.\u00a0 Airports are crowded, there is a strong possibility that security will grope you, you have to get to the airport at least an hour early, the plane air is always dirty, and the plane seats are impossibly small.\u00a0 In the end, ever since 9\/11, airplane travel has simply lost its charm. Although airplane travel for the masses was truly an amazing innovation, it\u2019s time to again leap forward.\u00a0 The Star Trek transporter<\/a> is, of course, the ideal.\u00a0 Just the though of instantaneous, safe travel to anywhere around the world is so exciting.\u00a0 But how would the arrival of science fiction transporters affect the world?\u00a0 Once widespread, it would mean the elimination of automobiles and airplanes, at least for civilians.\u00a0 The military outcomes would be vast and, in a way, unknowable.\u00a0 Would warheads be beamed to other countries instead of being flown and dropped?\u00a0 Would you need a password, or several passwords to beam to certain locations?\u00a0 Would hacking\/cracking these transports be the new computer hack?\u00a0 No matter what, the introduction of these transporters would completely change the way we see the world, and the way we travel it.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    My five mind habits: Communication: Everything is instant.\u00a0 I assume if I haven\u2019t gotten a response back within a certain …<\/p>\n

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