Reading Quest 4

HUM 101 Roy Forrest
Reading Quest 4 from "The Digital Divide"

Section Two - Social Life, Personal Life, School

---- Identity crisis
          This chapter is based on how we are becoming more and more dependent on newer and better technology or computer use in our lives.  The cultural virtual world is also something that has progressed over time that is now more abundant on how to, in a sense, describe yourself on the internet.  It is also talking earlier on metaphorically on how the way the system is set up is comparing it to a human body and how it copes with things in a health sense.  Such as anti body things to help fight off bad things entering it.  Some people also get the feeling of online personal feelings such as if they cross a boundary that they are not used to they can feel uncomfortable, they can feel relief, and even finding self satisfaction.  The communication has become very stylized on the personality that people take part in the conversations they have.
---- They Call Me Cyberboy
          This chapter is talking about the earlier days where he was talking about the new thing that was hitting the computers in the late 1980's called the internet.  The people that knew him at the time were unable to understand what he was really talking about and ended up calling him cyberboy and meaning it in a bad way like an insult.  He also went on talking about how Macintosh soon became a central way of getting high like hippies on drugs, where they spent their waking hours doing this.  They were in a sense some of the first computer aged nerds in his description.  They would always try to recruit new comers to their world to convert them to this new world.  Eventually big corporations wanted to use this because they liked how they needed to stay ahead of the curve in the world and wanted to keep in touch with public relations.  It became a marketing paradise.
---- The People's Net
       This chapter is describing the ways that people are really loving the internet for how we spend our time on it really backs this comment up as well.  In this chapters figures, the amount of time spent for people using the internet is on average 20.2 hours looking at internet sites in March 2001, which was a gain from 15.9 hours the previous year, and 12.8 hours the year before that.  So we are spending more and more time on the computer.  People are now using the internet not just for communication, but for purchasing and shopping for products online where there are more than 100 million Americans doing this now.  It seemed that the government dubbed the internet as a research project that soon became alive to the public that became confusing in a good way.
----  Love Online
      This chapter is describing the close relationships of people meeting online.  He talked about his own personal life with how his son used the internet to meet a girlfriend.  The writer had similar experiences where he would meet someone somewhere for school, but after they left the camp.  They would not really keep in touch after they left each other.  This form of communication for his son, he was able to meet someone online in a place that he was not having as much luck with the ladies in his normal life.  So it built up to the point where they spoke of going out even though they were very far away from each other.  Her father screened her phone calls but did not pay as much attention on what she was doing online from her computer.  Eventually the son did have phone communication with the father asking permission to see her.