Fishing and Clicking

Revenue through clicks, and klicks of revenue. 

I will be the first to own up to being a bit more naive than I had wished I was when I was younger. I was the type of person to scroll through Facebook wondering if scientists had really been hiding a cure-all for aids, rediscovered through the testing conducted on Africanized honey bees. 

I know, it's bad, but bear with me here. 

When I was thinking on the writings of David Auerbach, and what he spoke of in his essay, You Are What You Click, I began to think about click revenue. Back in the day, when I was a young middle schooler, full of hope and convinced that all people were formed with an extra set of breasts that receded in the womb (thanks, click bait), websites capitalized on simply putting the catchiest thing they possibly could in the title, load the pages up with ads and other click bait-y articles to attempt to lure you in further, and then post it to Facebook in the hopes of getting the attention of lots of poor curious saps. 

And it works! It works because deep down, the little kid in us delights at the possibility of knowing something ridiculous. The innate nature of humanity is one of curiosity and exploration. Why would we explore space otherwise? This continues on today, in the forms of 'slideshows'. Each slide puts a tiny amount of information that is stretched across ten slides so that it forces you to visit the page 10 times. It is a clever way to really work that angle for revenue. 

So, if I had to give an advice to my younger self about how she should have operated on the internet, I probably would have told her to turn off cookies, as those are just plain annoying, and I would have told her to visit youtube and watch some SciShow videos, because she would have loved those to death. But most of all, I would tell her to not let the click bait kill her curiosity. I would have told her to keep on exploring, except maybe to do it somewhere other than Facebook.  

(img_src: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHNbitDDW3A) 

The Judgement of Everything

What isn't part of the big gray area of life?

Everything has a cost, as it has a benefit. This is a common rule of life. With good, there must be evil; with yin, there must be yang, and some of each within the other. However, Neil Postman takes this notion a step further with his analysis of an old tale involving the great king Thamus of upper Egypt, and his take on writing, in his essay The Judgement of Thamus. 

If we are to take a moment to reflect on the objects and changes around us, we are sure to find similarities to postman's analysis of the computer, and how this change in technology has shaped our current experiences and ideologies. 

If we are to judge something up and coming, not even fully formed and functional, but sure to be on the rise in the future, let's say, self-driving cars, then there are certainly many benefits and detriments that can be wrought from the concepts and test-drives that have already occurred. On one hand, we would be able to nearly abolish normalized parking space. We may be able to create a better system of public transportation. We may be able to share costs on the purchasing of vehicles. On the detriments side, as always, there is the fear of becoming too complacent. The fear that if something were to happen, would the people inside be able to take control? One of the biggest problems with self-driving cars is the moral dilemma. If a person is in the way, does a car's AI prioritize the person in front of them, or the person in the car? Can a car prioritize a child's life over that of an adult? 

As with each step in technology we take, we are forced to make new decisions and think about the world in ways that it had never been thought of before. We can neither predict the way that any new technology will shape our future completely nor ensure that any new technology will the used to harm others.

(img_src: http://www.kiveand.com/car/car-power-diagram)