In Turkles Alone Together, she mentions something about "sex robots." How can you seek a significant other in a robot? Weather it be a boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife there is no way you can be "in love" with a robot. They have no emotions. I couldn't even begin to imagine trying to have any type of relationship with a robot. A relationship with another person has emotional ties. If robots don't have any emotions, there is no way to have a relationship with them. This idea is just ridiculous to me, and I wouldn't recommend having a relationship with a robot to anyone.

As I begin reading Sherry Turkle's "Alone Together" it makes me think a lot about some of the first technologies i had as a child. She talked about Tamagotchi Pets. I remember as a child my friends and I all had Tomagotchi Pets and you could connect them and they could visit each other and be friends. Technology seems so more advanced now than it was then when i think about things like that. She also talks about furbies. This brings back all my first encounters with "robot" toys when i was a child.

I found the Rip Van Winkle insert in the last chapter of the book very interesting. Bauerlein says "The signs place the moment roughly in time. Rip has slept through the American Revolution. He leaves a colonial village and returns to a new nation, missing out on a providential sequence in world hisotry. Independece has been declared, a bloody war has been fought, a government has been formed, and a consitiution has been ratified. The villagers have lived through a cataclysm, but Rip knows nothing about it." This little excerpt reminded me of teenagers today. It's like we are so engrossed in technology like social networking, television, and music that we have no idea what is going on in government and politics. At least i know i don't. How many of you are voting in the next election? I know I'm not. Is it because I'm too lazy? No. I just truly have no clue what is going on in the world around me. I could just pick one way or the other because my parents do, but I'm not going to. This chapter really hit me and showed me that i really need to listen more and try to learn about the world around me.

The Dumbest Generation

       I read the first two chapter of "The Dumbest Generation" and liked it better than I thought I would. It isn't exactly something I would pick up and read, but it entertained me. I found myself laughing because some of the things it said a typical 18 year old does, or questions they can't answer, applied to me.
       Something that i found interesting was when he said on page 36, "Hence the middle class teenager may attend a decent high school and keep a B+ average, pack an iPod and a handheld, volunteer through his church, save for a car, and aim for college, and still may not know what the Soviet Union was or how to compute a percentage." I found this interesting because how is this technology's fault? If this teenager went to a decent high school, shouldn't the teachers have tought him/her that? And if that teachers did teach this student that, then it's the students fault for not paying attention, not technologys. A student should apply themselves correctly and not be tempted by distractions like texting, tweeting, or Facebook.