Knowledge is Power
There never was a clear definition in my head as to what Digital Media entailed before going into my first lecture yesterday. I figured it had something to do with different ways of sharing information through mediums like Facebook, Twitter and blogs like this one. Although after class I realized it was so much more than just sending text and a few images back and forth.
I learnt that Digital Media included things like forums, music, animations, ideas, websites, search engines and most importantly it’s the way we tell stories. Of course it’s not picking up a hard copy of your favourite book and flipping through the pages, it’s using new technology to keep people informed about the things they want to know.
Now, I found this point very interesting. My Professor, Ramona Pringle, talked about how back in the days before computers and the Internet, when newspapers were popular, people had to sift through the news they didn’t care about to get to the stuff they wanted to know. And through the simple act of glancing at headlines they would be more aware of what was going on around them.
In today’s society we have lost that extra bit of knowledge about the world. We can use our hot keys to quickly jump to the article containing the keywords we want to read about. We can Google specific topics or choose to only follow certain Twitter accounts. We are missing out on the news we need to know, for the news we want to know.
So the question this topic arose is this: Are we really better off without the constant stream of information we should know?
In my opinion, we aren’t because even if avoiding the topics we don’t care for saves us a few minutes a day, are we really gaining anything by losing out on knowledge? I know that thanks to what I heard in class I too will be trying to learn more about my world, even if it is just ten minutes a day. I leave you with this quote by Peter Drucker, because I believe he summed up this sentiment perfectly: “Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.”
– S. Blake
Samantha M. Blake 