extended blog 3

            In A.J. Jacob’s “The Unitasker”, he writes of his experience and the reasoning behind his decision to not multitask anymore. Multitasking had almost killed Jacobs and his wife while driving; not due to the popular cause of vehicle accidents, texting while driving, but only because his mind was not focused on his driving due to him trying to drive and listen to the radio and his “mind drifted from the road” (148). Many believe that if they are not doing more than one thing at a time they are not being as productive as they could be if they were doing two things. As Jacob says, “unless I’m doing at least two things at once, I feel like I’m wasting my time” (149). That usually goes for all people. Everyone is always doing at least two things at once, for example talking on the phone while driving (although that has now been made illegal), and even just texting while walking around campus). It takes a lot to do these things at once, but everyone still does it. Multitasking might make you feel like you’re being efficient, but it is actually slowing our thinking down as well as boosting up our stress levels (Jacobs). The popular phrase “quality over quantity” is very evident when it comes to focusing on one thing instead of trying to get all these different things done at once. “Our hopscotching brains make us more depressed “it’s harder to focus on the positive), less able to connect with people and form and conscience” (150). Multitasking denies us the ability to thoroughly look into things anymore.

            Going back to Jacob’s near-death driving experience, I had a somewhat similar experience. I was driving on interstate 270 south. As I was going down from exit 26, I was thinking about what I was going to do when I finally met up my friends, where we would eat, what move we would watch, texting my friends about all this and by the time I stopped thinking about it all, I was already at exit 16 not knowing how I got there, not knowing if I had changed lanes with my blinker on, not knowing at all how the quality of my driving had been. Even the simplest thing such as thinking about plans for the day could take your mind off the task you should be focusing on: driving. This 24-hour period that I refrained from multitasking was definitely difficult because I had been so used to doing it even without thinking about it. Not listening to the radio or picking up phone calls or texts while I was driving was the most difficult. Driving is probably the most boring task as well as the most dangerous task any normal human being could do. Which is why focusing on it was so important. When you unitask and make driving the only thing you are thinking about, it makes the quality of your driving so much better as compared to even just listening to the radio while driving. After reading Jacob’s essay, I learned to meditate to help me unitask. “Studies show[ed] that perhaps the best way to improve your focus and learn to unitask is by meditating” (158). Meditating did actually help calm my mind and help me focus. Even as I am writing this paper, I have no music on, no television playing in the background. It is just me and my Microsoft word up. Jacob also writes “sometimes, you have to focus on the trees, not the forest” (165). This relates to Nicholas Carr who wrote “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” who said that he was once a scuba diver and now he is just a jet skier who just skims the top of the waters. People do not like to go in depth anymore; they do not want to look closely at details because they are not giving their undivided attention to one task.

            During this 24-hour period of no multitasking, I have learned that I do focus better. I have realized that my connection with people was just so “on the surface.” For example, even when I video chat with someone, I am either surfing the net on Facebook or watching Glee or doing something else instead of giving that one person my full attention. When I video chatted during the 24-hour unitasking period, the conversation did not feel so disconnected and my mind was not running around everywhere trying to listen to the person talking and also trying to hear what was going on in Glee.

            I’ve learned that being able to unitask is a skill. Focusing on one thing has brought me to realize how important it is to look thoroughly into things and how multitasking has disconnected me from so much of the world including the people in it.

- AJ Jacobs, "The Unitasker" from The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment.  Simon & Schuster, 2009.

blog #8

According to Mark Federman’s essay, “What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message?”, this phrase/idea, “the medium is the message” introduced by Marshall McLuhan, is the most popular and most frequently searched phrase on the internet. McLuhan says that “we tend to focus on the obvious” (Federman). He basically says that the reader or the watcher or the listener takes into their mind what they want to hear or see based on how they initially feel about the topic. Everyone is indeed entitled to their own opinions, which makes or breaks how they feel about what they are seeing or hearing. He says that the outcome of this is that we look back and see how these new things have created something else for us and he calls these “unintended consequences” (Federman).

Federman writes “many of the unanticipated consequences stem from the fact that there are conditions in our society and culture that we just do not take into consideration in our planning”, which leads to Stephen Kern’s essay, “Wireless World.” Kern writes about the Titanic and describes the Titanic hitting the iceberg scene. He goes onto describe how the wireless connection has opened up doors and “the ability to experience many distant events at the same time, mad possible by the wireless and dramatized by the sinking of the Titanic, was part of a major chance in the experience of the present” (Kern, 188). This is an example of the “unintended consequence”, as Federman refers to it as an “unanticipated consequence.” This incident of the Titanic opened up the doors of opportunity for the telephone to be invented, allowing two people in different places to talk to each other without having to go to each other. Going back to what Federman wrote, he also writes after, “these range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions.” The Titanic sinking made it into history making it a historical precedent that brought about this “unanticipated consequence.”

         McLuhan makes it clear that the audience views all types of media according to however they want to see it and make analyses and look deep into media according to their own beliefs and opinions. Also, how we are so focused on what is right in front of us that we do not see anything else that is happening around us such as the outcomes of different incidents, like the Titanic example Kern used, and how it helped develop better technology to advance our society.

Going back to the phrase “the medium is the message”, what McLuhan means by this is how the message is perceived is all up to how influential the medium is to a person, how he or she is views the medium as a whole and what sort of opinions, negative or positive, he or she has towards the medium.

Federman, Mark. "What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message? ." utoronto. N.p., 10 Nov. 2010.Web. 10 Nov. 2010. <http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm> 

Kern, Stephen. "Wireless World." Communication in History: Technology, Culture, and Society. Author: David Crowley and Paul Heyer. 6th ed. Pearson, 2011. 187-190.

extended blog #2

Katherine T. Frith writes in her essay, “Undressing the Ad: Reading Culture in Advertising, that “most people think that there is too much advertising, that it makes us materialistic…exploits children, and generally corrupts society” and that while these things are not completely true, “there is some truth to them” (Frith, 1).

In the essay “Every Nook and Cranny: The Dangerous Spread of Commercialized Culture” by Gary Ruskin and Juliet Schor, it describes advertising in a negative manner. Advertisements appear in places that are unexpected and creep up on society. The title of this essay basically describes how advertisements have “oozed into every ‘nook and cranny’ (410). The increase of advertisements reflects how much corporate power has rocketed. Advertisements had entered schools using soda, candy and other things to target children. This was a problem because it increased the rates of obesity in the U.S. “The average child was exposed to 40,000 TV ads annually” (412). Many countries have banned advertising to children under the age of 12 and before and after certain times of the day. Advertisements have become so prevalent that many call it “ad creep”. This is “the spread of ads throughout social space and cultural institutions” (412). These advertisements appear before movies, on buses, and on trains in cities forcing people to watch them subconsciously. Cities have actually bought merchandise from advertising to support these products for example, in New York, they allowed Snapple to be there drink and “some critics dubbed it the ‘Big Snapple’” rather than the “Big Apple” (413). More advertisement is causing this society to become more materialistic.

The advertisement that I have chosen is an advertisement selling brand-name cologne: Emporio Armani Diamonds For Men. In this advertisement, Josh Hartnett is surrounded by girls and other men who appear to be his bodyguards. Josh Hartnett looks as if he is content and satisfied because he put on this cologne and girls want him. Although not more than one girl, fully shown, is shown in the picture, you can see the other girls’ hands trying to touch him and the bodyguard looks as if he is trying to hold these girls back. This picture for this advertisement makes it seem like if a man were to buy this product, he would have girls wanting him left and right as Josh Hartnett does. The girl that is fully shown is staring at Josh Hartnett like he is a piece of meat she just wants to eat. This desire shown is appealing to other men because they might also want girls to feel this way about him. This picture the advertisers used for their product shows nothing of their product being used, which should be the ultimate goal. Instead they use someone famous with girls swarming him to sell their product. This advertisement is parallel to U.S. society’s cultural views: sex sells. While in other cultures this might not be true and the most appealing, it is in the U.S.

Advertising has had a large impact, both negative and positive, on the U.S. society: whether it was making the society more materialistic or advancing the country’s economy with the money made by advertising. In Frith’s essay, he analyzes advertisements and discusses the “surface meaning”, “the advertisers intended meaning”, and “the cultural or idealogical meaning.” In doing this, he has shown a way to explain and look at advertisements in depth.

Extended Blog 1

Today’s society, as we see it, has been taken over by the media; whether it’s from television to video games to even the World Wide Web, everyone is using one or the other. The points made in the two articles, “The End of Literacy? Don’t Stop Reading” by Howard Gardner and “The Dumbing of America” by Susan Jacoby, and the two essays, “The Greek Legacy” by Eric Havelock and “Secondary Orality” by Walter Ong, all come down to one similarity: that the media is taking people away from written information. The importance of reading and writing has not been overemphasized. It has not been emphasized enough. Reading and allows our brains to grow and even expands your attention span. I agree with the claim that says the American culture will eventually become a oral and visual based society. Even myself included, many more people would prefer watching YouTube and watching television to get the latest news rather than reading it somewhere. Although “the decline of book, newspaper, and magazine reading is by now an old story”, people are still giving into the media and its ways of turning the society into a visual and oral one rather than a print based society.
In Howard Gardner’s article in the Washington Post called “The End of Literacy? Don’t Stop Reading,” he writes about computers are slowly getting rid of literacy. Students reading scores have been dwindling due to the lack of time they spend reading. Libraries had been made to allow people to pertain to the scholars who have information to share by reading their researches. “Half the adult population reads no books a year” (Gardner}. People prefer watching television to get current events rather than picking up a newspaper and reading it. Books allow readers “to enter a private world for hours or even days at a time” (Gardner). Nowadays, people feel the need to always be connected with someone because they cannot deal with being in complete solitude so they connect to people through Internet and such. Reading may make people feel as if they are all by themselves because they are not connected to someone through the Internet.
Susan Jacoby writes about how the media sucks people in and takes them away from reading making literacy rates slowly decrease in “The Dumbing of America.” Her title is self-explanatory for her article. She writes that if Richard Hofstadter, a Columbia University historian, were to still be alive “to write a modern-day sequel [to his previously published article], he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture” (1). The use of video has greatly overtaken the use of print. “In 1982, 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for leisure and within two decades the percentage of college graduates that read novels or poems for leisure decreased to 67% “ (1). The act of reading has significantly lessened. More than 40% of Americans under the age of 44 had not read a single book within a year and this was all due to the rise and advancing of cell phones, laptops, video games, etc. Many argue that when children are sucked into the television or into video games that they are not getting dumber, but that they are actually getting smarter and learning how to focus and expand their attention spans. This, however, was proven wrong because the “University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spend watching videos” (1). She writes that this “new American dumbness [is caused by] not lack of knowledge per se but the arrogance about that lack of knowledge” (2). What she means by this is the people who feel that they do not have to know certain things and they show no concern to learn new things.
In Eric Havelock’s “The Greek Legacy,” he starts off with writing that “the introduction of the Greek letters into inscription somewhere about 700 B.C. was to alter the character of human culture, placing a gulf between all alphabetic societies and their precursors” (Havelock, 38). In doing this, the Greeks invented literacy. It changed the way humans thought and brought upon a larger area and more ways for people to think. He writes that even in the earliest times, children were using stone and papyrus (when it was invented) to write and learn their alphabet. It shows the importance of reading and writing even in its earliest stages.
In Walter Ong’s “Secondary Orality” essay, he makes it very clear that print is essential to everything we do. “…even with a listener to stimulate and ground your thought, the bits and pieces of your thought cannot be preserved in jotted notes” (Ong, 51). It is necessary to be able to have written proof of an idea or of a thought that one has had in order for one to look back on it and remember it more clearly than having to remember it on one’s own. “In the total absence of any writing, there is nothing outside the thinker, no text, to enable him or her to produce the same line of thought again or even to verify whether he or she has done so or not” (Ong, 51). For example, if there was no written text about Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, anybody could easily take credit for that action but because all his thoughts were recorded on a piece of paper, there is total proof that Thomas Edison was indeed the inventor of the light bulb.
Although these different technologies have advanced and bettered our society in a countless number of ways, reading and writing are still very essential to our society in the educational sense. Technology, from here on out, will only become more advanced and improved, but this does not mean people should undermine the power of print and how it can make the society “smarter”.


Havelock, E. "The Greek Legacy". In D. Crowley, P. Heyer, (Eds.), Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.


Ong, W. "Orality, Literacy, and Modern Media". In D. Crowley, P. Heyer, (Eds.), Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Jacoby, S. "The Dumbing of America". The Washington Post. 17 February 2008. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021502901.html


Gardner, H. "The End of Literacy? Don't Stop Reading". The Washington Post. 17 February 2008. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021502898.html

"A Mobile Network Society" -Manuel Castells

Manuel Castells write in his essay, “A Mobile Network Society”, that cell phones were once used as a substitution “for the fixed-line phone when people were on the move” but now it is used to keep us connected to the network constantly (304). The main reason why cell phones were made have been overlooked due to all the technological advances that people have made and due to this, cell phones are now known for their quickness and effectiveness to get connected to the mobile web.

Constantly being connected to this other world outside of the “real” world, as in the people physically around you, disconnects us from what is right in front of us. Everyday, people are always looking at their cell phones, texting, going on facebook, etc. People usually feel more comfortable when talking behind a computer or a phone and this allows people to get more acquainted with each other. “Wireless communication considerably enhances the choice of interlocutors, and the intensity and density of interaction” (305).

Castells says that wireless communication blurs “spatial contexts and time frames” (305). I feel like what he means is that when people start doing things on their phones and getting sucked into the wireless community, it takes us away from what’s around us. For example, when I am texting in class, I do not hear anything the teacher is saying because I’m in my own world and space is blurred because I am no longer in the classroom; physically I am, but mentally I am not. Another example is how time is blurred. It used to be that work was during the day and had a set time and when we got home, it would be time for our family and ourselves. Now, people are given cell phones at their jobs so that they can be contacted anytime of the day. This, therefore, blurs time in a sense that cell phones allow us to be connected to everyone at all times.

Cell phones have become more than a necessity, but a want. There are good and bad points to having a cell phone. None can deny that it has improved lives and changed them as well.