Earthblog

When I was a child (said with a gravelly weathered voice), we bullied with real fists, none of this high fluting technological stuff.

Note: I’m not an old man. I’m 29 years old. Part of the generation that saw the .com boom, the Y2K scare, a revolution drawn together via Twitter and Facebook. But the truth is, when I was a child my school was just getting a computer lab.

Kids, these days, are getting cellphones for Christmas or an iPod touch or some other device that in my child-mind, I’d envision one of The Jetsons owning. FaceTime – video conferencing with friends in real time still amazes me. Forgive me for sounding like a dinosaur.

Living in a culture that is overly reliant on mass media definitely has its perks, as we are in the position to choose from various media platforms and providers like iTunes Movie Rentals, YouTube, Netflix and Torrents. Gone are the days of running to Blockbuster to grab a movie and candy – which can be attributed to the take over by such online media giants as Apple and Netflix. Society is now facing a new chapter in mass media, and whether we like it or not we must now place our loyalty in the hands of yet another large, internet based, money grab corporation, but the question is: which one has the consumers best interest at heart?

Technology’s affect on early childhood development leaves people on the fence.

With technology permeating almost every aspect of our daily lives, it is no surprise that children are being exposed to it at a younger and younger age. Mobile touch technology, made popular by Apple, is more prevalently found in the tiny hands of toddlers and elementary-school youth as they develop and learn to interact with the world.

The “Broadcast Tapes of Doctor Peter,” a compilation of video diaries from the late Peter Jepson-Young, a Vancouver “doctor in his 30's” dying of AIDS in the early 90s aired on both CBC and HBO. In it, the young doctor chronicled the decline of his body, ravaged by the little understood and highly stigmatized disease, for the entire world to see.