Info I310 Hw1: "My Media-driven Life In Medias Res" or "How I was Social Networked, News Feeded, and Video Shared into Submission"

Due to my abstinence from television as a means of entertainment/communication of ideas, I will capitalize this essay around computer usage, discussing details of each component of computer media I use and how it functions within my own life. In order to discuss the impacts, we now revisit several questions Marshall McLuhan devised to communicate the “Laws of Media”. First, what does the medium enhance? Second, what would it reverse? Third, what does it obsolesce/close off? Lastly, what would it allow people to retrieve? In order to answer these questions, I must now break computer systems down into their media components. Such components include e-mail, news feeds, social networks (Twitter), video sharing sites (Youtube, Vimeo and their ilk), and also personal files like word documents, video games, and personal journals that only exist on the hard drive. Internet-based technologies such as the e-mail, social networks and video sharing sites have several effects on the way I would perceive and interact with the environment, which are (1) they would enhance me by raising awareness of events in far-away portions of the world that I otherwise would never have found about (such as the 9/11 attacks in New York City), (2) they would enable me to retrieve (for example) documents such as my family history that otherwise would have been difficult or impossible to recover, (3) they would obsolesce means such as television, radio, and newspapers because of the ability to retrieve information at any time or place, and (4) they would reverse the security/privacy that I would have had without the interfaces of such technologies, if not careful (sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc are infamous for this!). Media located on the hard disk, however, affect my activities in very similar, but not identical fashions. While the stuff located on that private sector of my digital systems may be similar in that they would raise my awareness of concepts or events, they at the same time would oftentimes reflect my own consciousness, instead of that pertaining to any higher authority outside the realm of my hard drive. Also, there exists some degree of risk that privacy and security could be reversed, via the usage of tracking software, spyware, Trojan horses, or viruses by outside entities, however, on the hard disk, such problems are easier to control for via the usage of such mechanisms as encryption, password protections, User Access Control (thank you, Microsoft, for this wonderful [*snickering*] innovation…) and even hidden folders with randomly generated names that I myself created. In short, even if I were to attempt to ignore the influences the media would have on the perceptions of life I would have, they still exist in full force, for they are a part of my daily life in almost every regard.