In-person surveys about the digital world.

I first asked my mom, Paula, about technology. I started off with a very broad question, something like "what do you think about technology". I started this way both because I was curious if she would give a typical answer and because I was confident that she would not.

She began by saying that overall she thinks it is probably a good thing, because of how it speeds up communication. When pressed for more, she said "I think sometimes it outpaces us." When I questioned her on what she meant, she explained that the human race isn't really changing, but all of this innovation is occurring around us. She added that perhaps we are changing slightly, in terms of our expectations. We have come to expect everything to be faster and easier, she explained, and we have grown to have the sense that technology can solve anything. As she spoke she noted that both of these things are partially true and partially untrue (technology really can solve a lot of things). Here I asked her how she thought that we were adapting to the new technology if we weren't really changing as a whole. She said that really every generation has to start from a different point, which I interpreted as a look at history: if any of us had been born at a different time we would have worked with the resources in that time period just as easily as those in this one. She also mentioned that e may soon start "loosing history"; since the scale of innovation is speeding up so much, so are events, and there's only so much information we can hold in our brains no matter how fast it all occurred. She explained by saying: "If one generation goes from point A to point B, and the next generation goes from point B to point Q..." she went on to express that so much extra progress in one generation would fill up the space occupied by hundreds of years in a current textbook. She ended the conversation by saying that in return for all this innovation, that sense of a long history is probably one of the things we're going to be giving up.

For a friend outside of class, I asked Melanie C. I posed the question "What do you think are the best and worst modern inventions?"

She responded that the computer (specifically the internet) was the best invention, and the nuclear bomb was the worst. She admitted that the main reason that she favored computers as the best invention was because she is completely addicted to the internet and would be very bored without it. As for the nuclear bomb, she said that is was particularly stupid that we had gone to all that effort just to kill each-other. When prompted with the idea that the technology could have better uses, she mentioned that with everything that's going on in the world--like global warming--using this technology to kill each-other is not particularly helpful.