Mandatory Blog Post #4 - Emig and Brummett

It didn't take long for the Internet to become an integral part of everyone's lives. It began as an experiment in the 1960's known as the ARPANET and led to the development of protocols for internetworking. Internetworking is where multiple networks could be joined together in a network of networks.Since then it has grown into something much, much bigger and intricate. More people are using the Internet each and every year. Here I have some statistics that I copy and pasted from Wikipedia. The numbers were collected by the International Telecommunication Union.

Wikipedia is a credible source

This boom in interest came along with the invention of the laptop and maybe more importantly, the smartphone. When the iPhone hit the market it was insanely popular, and it allowed for its user to have access to the Internet no matter where they were. Other smartphones soon followed and now you can't even go to a movie theater without someone using their smartphone. Technology has taken over our lives and has affected how we perceive the world.

Janet Emig's analysis of inquiry paradigms brought up the idea of the governing gaze. The governing gaze is a persons preferred way of perceiving. Before the Internet, people had to find information through books or journals. This was the preferred way in academia and once the Internet came along, all of that changed. We were able to find anything at anytime and this shook the academic world because there was something completely new for everyone to learn from. The book purists thought the web was full of garbage that no one could take seriously and those who accepted it found that it was rich with knowledge and cat photos.

Because the Internet has grown so much, its influence in the world has changed some things for good. For instance, I don't print papers anymore, I hand them in digitally; I do all of my research online, I can't even remember the last time I cited a physical book for a major research paper. I approach academia at a much different direction than those before me, I don't think that I or anyone else can go back to the way it was before. Too much has changed and will continue to do so.

The Internet didn't just change the way we perceive, but what we perceive. Many futurists believe that humanity will at some time reach the omega point; that is the universe reaching its highest point in complexity and consciousness. Technology may be (it totally is) that next step in evolution that lifts humanity to its highest point. At some point in the near future, technology will create everything we know. Barry Brummett wrote a piece on epistemic rhetoric, it explored three different ways that rhetoric was epistemic: methodological, sociological, and ontological. The future of the internet is defiantly ontological. In the study, ontological, in terms of rhetoric, means that rhetoric creates everything that we know and understand about the world. The Internet may very well do the same. 

We have new ways of communicating and peoples lives are beginning to be shaped by the Internet. If the web is responsible for the majority of our communication, then it may overwhelm people who communicate face to face. We learn a great deal from the Internet and it is starting to change our daily lives. Some of us are on Facebook all day while other are on Twitter. Some spend their lunch breaks watching YouTube videos rather than talking to their coworkers. Instead of going home and interacting with family, people play video games or use their tablets.  Things are different now and I think it is pretty neat.

Technology has invaded our lives and  it's here to stay; no Geneva Convention will be able to change that.