Alia Wong's Essay On Technology And Education

In Alia Wong’s article she talks about how Rueben Loewy makes some key points on technology and education in kids. He makes a claim that the digital revolution has dramatically changed the way kids perceive reality. Wong inserts a quote from a principal researcher at Microsoft Research explaining the reasoning and it says ““ the rhetoric of digital natives’” is dangerous because it distorts the realities of kids’ virtual lives, the result being that they don’t learn what they need to know about online living.” Another claim that was made was that kids are getting a distorted view of the digital world. The article says that Parents and adults are throwing all these things at the kids about the digital world. kids are being told that the digital world is only full of cyberbullies and pedophiles. The article supported this by putting a survey from the 2012 Pew Research survey that of roughly 800 U.S parents and their teenage children found that eight in ten parents are concerned about

theirs kids Internet privacy while seven in ten said they are worried about their kids interacting with strangers online.

A question that is raised in this article is if it is the adults that are fearful of the digitalized age rather than inclinations of the youth.

Loewy says that the restrictions that kids are getting from the older community about what social media is hindering them from learning how to use digital technology proficiently. He also says that even though it is important to keeps kids safe online that these focuses give kids “a distorted view of the digital world.” Loewy also says that “It is a view that reflects the fears adults rather that the aspirations of youth.” A question that can be answered in this article also can be “How much of a digital age community are we becoming?”. This article gives consistent points and examples of how we are steadily becoming more and more technologically innovated in all aspects of our lives from the classroom to the the work room. Some examples this article provided were that classrooms now a days had iPads assigned to students, ebooks, laptops

etc.

In this article by Curtis Wallen he talks about how he created an online fake profile by the name of Aaron Brown to see if a person can really disappear online. As he started going through the process of transitioning to this anonymous person he realized that he couldn’t do anything that associated with himself or the name Curtis Wallen. he changed his approach and decided that he wanted to go in a different route and create a whole new identity. He got driver’s license, student ID, boating license and other means of identification. He set up various social media accounts. He has a website for his twitter account that let random people tweet about any and everything and to anyone. By doing this he was doing a completely opposite astroturfing which uses fake social media profiles to spread the illusion of dissent. By doing this it showed that none of the information that was being sent out by these accounts were representative of any discrete interests. Wallen said “ I’d created a false human being, but instead of carefully coordinated deception, the result was simply babble. Wallen uses this identity as a way of showing how companies and other things use surveillance as a means to target people for example he says “ credit lenders have the ability to hide offers from people who may need loans the most.” He comes to the conclusion that it is essentially impossible to achieve anonymity online.

The question this article raises is it possible to be completely anonymous online. Wallen uses a new identity to try and see if he can be hidden from all the predatory ads and pop ups that are tailored to people that come when a regular person uses social media or looks up something on the internet. In the article wallen inserts a piece of information from an MIT professor named Catherine Tucker and privacy advocate Alex Marthews that analyzed Google Trends. They came to the conclusion that people would stop searching things like national security, police brutality, protest or revolution etc. because they would most likely stop searching these sensitive material because it might get them in trouble with the U.S government. This question is answered at the end of the article when Wallen at the end of his article comes to the conclusion that complete anonymity online is essentially impossible. He says that simply downloading a secure messaging app and using a to won’t all of the sudden make you ““NSA-proof.” and doing it right is really, really hard.” He also goes on to say that he was majorily disappointed because privacy shouldn’t require elaborate precautions.

Synthesis:

Wallen and Wongs articles are very similar in some ways. Wong’s article talks about how Loewy says that the restrictions that kids are getting from Adult’s of the community about how social media is hindering them from learning how to use digital technology proficiently. This can be connected to how Wallen talks about the information of how people use the internet and companies and the government use it to target us with ads and a pop ups. Wallen uses some information about how people don’t search things online because they are afraid of how it can be connected to them. Wong’s article shows that kids in this community parents are restricting their kids to interact and learn more about how to use the digital technology that is apart of their everyday lives in the right way. So in these two situations both group of people adolescents, and people that use the internet are being hindered. The Kids because they can’t get the full use out of the digital age and regular people that use the internet because they don’t have the privacy to search something as simple as wanting to know about a disease without a company that tweeting them about it because they know they searched it. A larger question Wallen’s article raises are why does someone have to go through so much to get privacy. The fact that he had to go through so much as to create new identity that had no ties to him at all and he came to the conclusion that you still can’t get privacy is astonishing. The question that Wong’s article brings up is why are people so afraid of letting kids explore the digital world despite the obvious reasons of strangers and pedophiles.