I just took my last exam after turning in all my essays on Wednesday and finishing up with Anthro on Tuesday, and now I am done! First semester has flown by; I can’t even believe how fast it’s been. I still feel like I’m figuring things out, but I think once the Febs get here I’ll realize just how much I have it down already. I did well in my classes, met a lot of really awesome people, stretched my mind, stayed active, and got involved. I just can’t wait to take more classes, meet more people, stretch further, explore more, and get even more involved!!!

When I signed up for DML this summer, I had just gotten back to the US after a year of being abroad, and I was struggling with the role of technology in US American culture. I came back and Snapchat was everywhere, my friends all had iPhones complete with a wide variety of apps that they used all the time, people were consumed by their social networking, and I didn’t get it. Instead of rejecting and isolating myself, I decided to put DML on my list of choices. After having this class for a semester, I don’t think I’ve changed much on my position and attitude toward technology, but I understand both sides of the debate better. I get how media helps relationships, how it gives voice to those who couldn’t be writers before, how it shouldn’t be meant to replace the face-to-face, and I realize that people have resisted every step of technology for all of history with the argument that it will make us less intelligent.

But I think that the rate of development of technology has accelerated to a point much faster than what was happening before. When written language was developed, it took hundreds of years for the printing press to develop, and then typewriters happened much later. The internet became a part of our lives just 20 years ago, and now it runs our society. The rate of technological development outruns our ability as a society to respond to it in a healthy way. I think that media affects our psyche by distracting us from ourselves and the people around us. It inhibits the development of emotional and social skills. Though it has a wide array of benefits: it is an amazing supplement to relationships and is a medium for negotiation, we need life, awareness, and intelligence as bases on which we can use technology to expand upon. That should be its role rather than serving as a distraction, time waster and an excuse not to master material. Technology should be a tool, but I think too many people use it as a key definer of their lives.