The Machine

I was excited to see Kristen's blog post about the reliance of XML on HTML. The video we watched for class made a lot of claims in an interesting way. It was interesting to see the creator type his essay within the source codes of different websites. At first I thought he was altering the code in an interesting way and would show us the results, but he just kept moving on to the next thing. I didn't feel like he made a very good argument for his points. He really just presented his essay while jumping around the internet.

The creator of the video claimed that we are teaching the machines and they are using us. I felt like there were a lot of things he could have talked about to expand on this idea. He could have given examples, like, "The average American spends such and such amount of time on the internet a day," or "Such and such number of new iPhones were sold within the first ten minutes of being released" to try and show that technology controls our buying habits and what we do with our time. He could have talked about how disposable cameras are a museum item because of the difficulty posting such pictures to our Facebook accounts.

But this creator did not. He simply stated that, "Machines are using us." I feel like this is very similar to the claim that we must "Save Rock and Roll" from unidentified, imaginary threats. (The link is to my personal blog. You are welcome to explore it. I mostly talk about my fish.) Without any facts or further explanations, I feel that this video is incomplete, or at least unhelpful. I'm really surprised this came from a professor.

Good job, video creator, you know how to use the "view source" function!

Sorry for the late post. My husband and I are working on fixing my laptop which is suddenly having a fit.