We have two French women students staying with us for the summer. They are doing an internship at the Rosenstiel School of marine science. Both women want to be marine engineers, are very computer literate and think about things the way engineers do--logically and methodically (those are good qualities). Both women are on their first trip to the U.S.
Last night we went out to do some shopping for necessities. One woman commented that "Miami looks so familiar". I asked her what she meant. She answered that it looked just like Grand Theft Auto, the video game which uses Miami as a background for a portion of the game. Miami looks like GTA? This concept troubled me.
Fellow Hamilton alum Matthew Chamberlin posted yesterday on the future of Facebook. Matthew stated:
"As a broader concept, there is an entire generation of people who are growing up living their lives online. It's completely normal for them and they don't call it "social media." They call it "life."
Another post yesterday talked about how the study of history is changing. Rather than digging around looking for bones and broken pots, historians will data mine the terabytes of blog posts, photos and tweets stored on servers to understand how we lived and the events that shaped our lives.
While I understand the three examples above and I suspect that Matthew is correct, I would caution everyone. We have just lived through the greatest economic crisis in eighty years, a crisis brought on in part by an egregious imbalance in values. To think of Web 2.0 as "life" is an equally dangerous view in my opinion. Remember I can always turn off the electricity. Then what is life?
Miami, FL
