Category: Blog

Digital Engagement #2 is the home page of my home site!

Hello!

My personal media profiles reflect that overall I have the vibe that I was definitely allowed too much unfiltered internet access as a kid. Overall the only social media presence I have is YouTube and my Instagram posts. I haven’t updated either in years. I think having my own Domain would allow me to show a lot more of my current self and how I’ve grown overall as a person. I was thinking something related to my name as my domain or something unique such as “asidequest” since my life seems to be just full of them. I want to cultivate an unabashedly nerdy website, something that stands out amongst the rest and shows the very optimistic ambitions of my project. I’ll probably have a more standard page as well, just for ease, but still.

The future is looking ominously like Cyberpunk 2077.

That’s mostly a joke but not as much of a joke as I hoped it would be. Throughout this class I’ve learned a lot about the digital world and how it effects us as people and the world around us. I learned both the damage and possible help we’re causing to our environment, though it seems to be mostly damage. I’ve learned a little of how to express myself online and just how important an online identity is. I’ve learned how much AI has affected us and honestly it’s seeming like a grim dark cyberpunk campaign at this point.

But the thing about being punk is fighting for happiness no matter how much the world tries to take it from you. The digital world is scary, it’s used for a lot of scary things: hacking, deepfakes, leaks of important information, doxxing. But there’s good to be found in it as well: accessibility, a world of mostly free education, contact with communities and people across the world.

What I’ve taken most from this class is that I’ll probably never fully adapt to. the digital world. Building my identity online is a strange thing to do and because of my lack of tone comprehension and general comprehension overall I’ll probably never get it down. But it’s been fun learning nonetheless, and at the very least I know some of the things going online and what they means.

Also the most important fact I’ve learned: to stop calling it AI and instead call it SALAMI. I’ll always refer to it by that from now on.

So ChatGPT went off and ran with the prompt I gave, it wrote so much more and took my singular lines into some whole other prompts. It created plots, entirely new names from what I had originally taken the text from (A dnd campaign character backstory). If I specified sentence after sentence I’m pretty sure ti wouldn’t have given me literal book chapters, but it was interesting the sort of philosophical turn it took.

https://chatgpt.com/share/672991ed-ecdc-8000-bf82-52525e4f5173

For the 24 hours I recorded, I realized just how much I used the internet. I made a more accurate grading, given how late I am turning this assignment.

A lot of my time is spent on the computer. Wednesday morning I got up and checked on my computer. I work in the library so most of my time is spent on it. That and given the sudden WiFi outage, a lot of my time was actually spent trying to help a flood of students figure out how the WiFi works.

Canvas, outlook, and google docs are things I use a lot as a student, checking my emails, my grades, my work constantly to the point it sometimes stresses me out. Then I use my EagleOne to buy my food, or Apple tap to pay from my phone just to not pull out my card. That feels normal to me now, but paying for something with a tap of your phone is something so futuristic and I could not believe how I have never thought about it before. 

I use my air pods which itself is magic to me because I don’t understand how bluetooth headphones work and I just use them like they’re the most simple things as well. I even have an AirTag on something that I commonly use to easier track it and that just makes my life so much easier. 

Overall, I’ve gotten so used to a life of convenience that I don’t really understand jist how amazing the things I use are. Even being able to Google a question such as “what is a weevil and why do they look like that” and getting a genuine answer is amazing.

Wall-E is one of my favorite post apocalyptic films depicting a world in which humanity cared so little for the planet that it made trash bots and decided at the very end to just abandon Earth rather than saving it; leaving behind an entire species of robots, one that even becomes sentient enough to develop its own personality. Just to then play God and abandon it. In most part I highlight the extreme dark nature of Wall-E for a joke, but I’m not wrong. Wall-E depicts a very real future where nothing destroys humanity besides themselves and their own hubris. The lack of care for the very planet that loved and raised them caused a dystopian world. Of course there’s a happy ending at the end of it; the humans come back after living in a paradise for generations as they decide once more to struggle for something they love. It’s a really sweet movie and very beautiful, but also it makes complete sense that people would rather focus on advancing technology than focus on what they have right in front of them. I mean they built first the garbage disposal bots, and then a giant AI ship that would be able to carry people for generations, and then multiple robots such as Eve or the Ship AI that do have distinct personalities and goals that aren’t entirely connected to people. Yet none of that matters in the face of the natural, once they find it after years of being separated. They do use their technology for good in the end, to cultivate Earth back with life and a population. Wall-E is an environmentalist post apocalyptic sort of dystopia and I can appreciate it for that.

Straight up just me rambling about my project, it’s mostly incoherent and bad.