Disruption is found every where around us from people to technology it is all a disruption to the way we live. That is what we have been looking at for the past few months, how technology disrupts our world. We learned about this through California and more specifically Silicon Valley, that’s why we went to California which you can read about here.

California here I come!

We went to places such as Twitter , Google and Apple. It was truly amazing to visit these huge tech companies that influential our lives massively.

 

 

While we were in California we also had to do a project loooking more in depth at these disruptions. We did this project in partners, my partner being Sam. Over the coarse of the project I feel we worked well together though we could have improved our communication skills since at times it felt like we had different ideas of how we wanted our videos to end up. We had the choice to decide what way we showed this, we could choose from puppet shows, photo journal, podcast and video. Sam and I decided to go with creating a video as we feel it would best showcase our place. The place we chose out of California that we visited and showed disruption was High Tech High.

If you want to read more about my experience at High Tech High read this post.

High Tech High

At the beginning of this project we weren’t sure what way we should take it. Eventually we came up with the idea though of looking at how HTH is disrupting the education system around it. Our thesis ended up being: With the new ideas that High tech high is showing in their school, they have changed the education system in the community around them and eventually worldwide. After getting the thesis we continued to research HTH and plan out what we needed to do once we got to California.

It was then time to travel to California!

We went to high tech high a few days into the trip. We got lots of different angles of the school as well as interviews so we could learn more about it. It was an amazing experience to be able to see how other students experience school.

When we got back we then worked on our script for our video. We spent a few days on this and then we got to working on our iMovie. Here is our first draft:

We knew we had improvements we needed to make such as adding different clips and making the transitions smoother. That’s what the next and final draft was for:

This was a really interesting aspect to our unit on disruption, but we weren’t done there. We then had an essay that we knew would be the final step to this unit. Our essay was all about how technology is a disruption. This was a synthesis essay which is basically using sources to support your argument. I decided to focus on privacy on social media and how that has changed through history. We had a week to prepare and get the information we needed to complete the essay. We made essay outlines and this is mine:

This really helped me get my ideas ready and the info ready for the essay. One thing we were supposed to include no matter what was the book we read called Little Brother. This was a book about San Fran and the government taking over after a terrorist attack. So with that we had two classes to complete our essays, I was ready to write!

 

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Technology as a Disruption
Isobel DeVille
February 28, 2018

The first social media platform was called six degrees and connected people to there friends and family by sending messages and posting them to a bulletin board. From the very beginning social media has changed us and effected the way we live. As technology continues to take over this is becoming an increasing problem within all of social media and technology in general. Worldwide technology is evolving in negative ways such as Russian bots who are taking over social media, taking away your privacy and changing the world that we live in currently.

Social media is changing the way we live, from communication to education it is all effecting us in positive and negative ways. For example Google created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google is such a huge influential company that has changed the way we go about our lives. One hundred years ago you wouldn’t be able to simply “google it” meaning open up a web page type in a question a find millions of responses but rather you would have to go to the library and research it. In this aspect technology has made our lives better and easier to live. Another example of how social media is changing our lives is Twitter. Twitter was created as a platform where you could share anything you wanted with no censorship. That’s an issue currently though as they are considering creating a censorship against topics such as terrorism. David an employee from twitter explained that there is great divide within the company as there are so many differing opinions as to whether it’s taking away freedom of speech. This shouldn’t be an issue since technology is such a powerful tool and yet we are all taking advantage of it.

 

Russian bots are yet another increasing problem as they are taking away your privacy and changing the way you interact on social media platforms. A bot is defined as a robot and are used to “wrap assigned ideas around the most personal stories” by spreading information and many times are set up by trolls who are real people but have a reason to spread rumours or change minds so they use bots. As Ben Nimmo says “ it’s like a plane flying on auto pilot.” This is changing the way you use social platforms because they are influencing what you see, read and talk about. For example on twitter Russian bots are said to have helped with the 2016 USA presidential election. “Accounts and bots on Twitter and Facebook engaged in a systematic routine of promoting misinformation and propaganda-style messages — ostensibly to praise Trump and denigrate is then-opponent, Hillary Clinton.” Business insider Bryan Logan. This election changed the world we live in and possibly how we continue to live and it all could be because of Russian bots. This is such a huge problem that should not be happening and needs to be fixed.

“In the 1970’s, congress passed a law to make a particular form of subliminal advertising illegal because it was believed to be morally wrong. That advertising technique is child’s play compared to the kind of personalized manipulation that companies do today”- Harvard news from the article Privacy in the internet be very afraid analyst says. Privacy through history has become increasingly complicated. Many people think they are protected and on the internet are safe but in reality they aren’t. For example cookies on sites, cookies can follow you around and track exactly what you are doing. They can see who your friends are as that is one thing many people don’t think about when you say privacy. Through all of that information they can tell exactly who you are and things like where you live or even what you like and dislike. Another example of privacy in a wider aspect is devices watching you through cameras. In a podcast about this issue they say that though it may not be likely that people are actually watching you through the camera they will look at what you look up, what apps you use, what your friends are doing and even what you have recently bought. Though this may not be as bad as watching you through your device it is still scary to know that you are always being watched. A great example of this is in a book called Little Brother written by Corey Doctorow. Within the book the government is watching exactly what people are doing so they have to find new ways around this issue. Truly privacy is something that needs to be protected and yet simply isn’t.

 

Social media is defined as “websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking”. We have changed as people and society as social media becomes larger. It is changing the way we interact with other people, the way we look at them as well as taking away our privacy. Overall we have to be careful and use this powerful, influential tool for the better.

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This essay I found very interesting to learn about and I am proud of the essay that I produce by the end of the two classes we had. Overall I learned a lot from this unit and had a great time on the feild study that helped us learn all of this.