Chandra Thompsons Reading Response #4

Chandra Thompson
English 100 Section F
Reading Response #4

In the video “Digital Nation,” produced and directed by Rachel Dretzin, the topic was internet and how it has dramatically changed our lives. In the video, it covers many aspects of life from work place at IBM, school, to army recruitment offices. It also brings up the fact that MIT students are among some of the smartest people and continuously are connected with digital technology. Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self believes that as the digital technology advances that pretty soon many people won’t be able to feel what they are feeling without being connected. According to Turkle, “...with the constant possibility of connectivity, one of the things that I see is ... a very subtle movement from "I have a feeling I want to make a call" to "I want to have a feeling I need to make a call" -- in other words, people almost feeling as if they can't feel their feeling unless they're connected.” In making this comment, Turkle is trying to say that with the possibility of being more connected than we already are, many people are going to become addicted to feeling like they are going to need to do that rather than just doing it.
There is also much controversy around the Army Experience Center in Philadelphia. With video games and digital technology there, many people feel as though it’s luring in young teenagers and almost making the army look easy and bloodless. “It's high tech; it's sleek; it suburban. It's like Chuck E. Cheese run by Uncle Sam, and it really seemed to appeal to young teenagers, which I found really interesting. This was like pre- pre- pre-recruitment. Just plant the seed in their head, and then see what happens a couple years later. So I found it fascinating, I found it amazing, and I found it a little bit disturbing,” Noah Shactman states, in regards to the Army Experience Center. “I think the idea of luring teenagers in with play to then go do a very serious job, especially post-9/11, or really go to war, there's a fuzzy boundary there,” Shactman explains what he finds disturbing about the idea of the Army Experience Center. In other words, Shactman believes that it is amazing in a sense that they can now starting recruiting younger kids in a sense with the games and such, but he also finds it disturbing to think that kids might believe that it’s that way in real life.
I agree that digital technology may be affecting people’s ability just to want to do something rather than want to feel like they need to, almost they would do if they were someone who had an addiction. As Sherry Turkle put it, they will start saying that “they want to feel like they need to make a call” rather than “I have a feeling I want to make a call.” Sometimes I feel myself thinking stuff like that or I will send a random text because I won’t feel connected to anyone if I don’t text or call anyone. I, also agree with what Noah Shactman said about the Army Experience Center. In my own life, my brothers play war games on their xbox all the time and I noticed around the time they started playing, they started saying that they wanted to join the Military or Army. Before that though, they never said anything about joining the Army. My youngest brother started playing war games when he was 11 and he expresses an interest in maybe joining the Army when he is older and my other brother is 19 and still in high school and has expressed numerous times about joining the Army more within the last two years. It’s crazy to think that digital technology is having this kind of effect on the youth of today. As time goes on, I believe that many people will believe that they need the technology to live as they do when addicted to something else.