WEEK 7: Will ubiquitous media affect our daily life, I mean, to some extent? 

The reading material from this week seems to have much fun to me. It managed to help me continue some of my pessimism feelings about ubiquitous media. By using computers, we humans are already becoming half-cyborgs in our daily life to some extent. The chapter 8 from Along Together gives an interesting example about one situation we are facing to. For instance, when we sit together to have dinner and chat with each other, one of us might take out of his/her mobile phone from his/her pocket and begin to read it. At this time, he/she could be set as an outsider by rest of us and might be labelled as “absent”. From my point of view, the convenient mobile internet sometimes has a negative effect on us.

According to the author, “multitasking” seems to become a normal phenomenon of humans from a bad habit. As a consequence, we are getting used to be interrupted from thinking, talking and even sleeping at any time by reading mobile phones or other media. Just a sounded information push from your Facebook or a stupid picture sent by your friends that you are going to delate as soon as possible, every tiny notification from your mobile phone or your future ubiquitous media could affect your concentration. For me, it is really horrible to imagine about.

I could even imagine further that when ubiquitous media are become that normal in our daily life, we could be surrounded by different notifications (even they could be mute) anytime and anywhere. Little by little, ubiquitous media could be able to lead us to act and to think. At that time, we could become real cyborgs. Finally, the boundary between machines and human beings becomes more and more narrow and vague.

That is to say, we could be assimilated with machines at that time.