HW 15

Henry:
I appreciate your short summary, whereas mine was long and boring.

Johnson sees video games, TV, and the internet as opportunities to learn and improve skills constantly used in life. You believe that blood and violence fit into the mood of some games; you would not see details about the violence in words in games like Halo. It is actually nice to listen to a different view on the digital world, especially if that view is not criticizing the digital world. Johnson sees digital devices as a positive contribution to society while Feed bums down the idea of digital devices. Anderson forces us to rebel against corporations by using less digital devices while Johnson just educates us about the good stuff of these devices.

You say that books do not encompass all the other mediums but I think that picture books are a great way for kids to learn. Kids can read a sentence and look at the picture to figure out what the sentence means. I don’t know if you would say that it is the best medium but I am just saying books do incorporate other mediums.

While your post was a great summary, I feel that it does not incorporate your feelings and does not spark any new ideas. I would like to know how this excerpt has affected you.

Your experiment reminded me of my experiment to test whether music distract people from what they are supposed to be doing. While we think that music is supposed to distract us from doing our work, my experiment found that music has no affect on our study habits. But my experiment should not be enough to make any conclusions. IT seems, from yur experiment, that multitasking did not work that well for you. What does that say about what Johnson said about multitasking to train our muscles? Do you think it worked for you or did you not do enough of it?

Please comment back so we can raise new insights.

Jacob:
Good point about the subconscious and conscious categories. But I think increasing your AQ by watching TV is also unconscious; we do not notice our social skills getting better.

Johnson's purpose was to disprove assumptions made by people who have more faith in books than video games. He argues that video games, TV, and the internet play a part in our intellectual development. Video games help us think logically using to-do lists. TV improve our social intelligence and forces us to think about relationships. Lastly, the internet holds a large amount of information which can be accessed easily.

Johnson and I agree with you that we are pretty superficial. He says that multitasking is a good skill but it does not allow us to think deeply about what we do. Like as I am doing homework and chatting on AIM, I am not really digging into the information from the homework.

I think Johnson's argument about video games makes sense. Before books would exist, people would look at video games and see them as educational because it trains the muscle in the brain. Then when books are enter the world, people would see it as a bad thing because reading isolates one into the book. I can also see your point of view though; video games and the internet are illegitimate methods to interact. People who read books are those tend to do more community service (the book?), allowing them to actually interact with flesh and blood rather than through DRDs.