This class has offered some insight into many different valuable areas for understanding technology, how it develops, and how it will continue to develop.
In my opinion what was most valuable in this class was technological trends. By covering what has repeatedly happened in the past with developing technologies we can gain valuable insight for the future, especially for someone like me who is in this field. It was extremely valuable to understand how consumers adopt new technologies and how much time we can expect this adoption to take place. Additionally, having the language and terms to define these trends and patterns is very useful in looking at our fields from a more broad perspective which I appreciated from this course.
I did learn some useful things in theoretical approach to developing technologies, such as the dangers videogames can present to young children and the impacts various medias can have on people. Understanding this can not only help me improve the world but also produce successful products. I plan to take this valuable information into my career and build on it. I also learned how to be critical and look at technologies from various angles, such as their limiting and enabling factors and how we can expect various consequences of our products. If we think about these things beforehand we can be better prepared for the future and better control it.
It was valuable to understand how content is managed by the government on television, and how once a service is considered to be widely available, much stricter guidelines are placed on it for content control, such as how cable television only permits certain things at certain times for the likelihood of children watching. This could extend into the future with newer mediums and I should be prepared for this by understanding how existing policy functions. It is also useful to know how slowly policy develops, especially in the light of artificial intelligence being halted for 6 months on account of government policy not being able to keep up with artificial intelligence progress. It was also valuable to know how policy can affect our day to day lives, such as how how net neutrality is still an important developing political scene involving our rights and our access to the internet.
This takes me to social issues, which there are plenty of the technological world. This is why I think this is mainly so important because the youth is part of the future and it is up to us to amend, sustain, and grow what exists in our technological world. One social issue that has continued to plague our society that we still have no solution for is the protection of privacy and data online. There are frequent data breaches exposing people's data, and plenty of places in the world that do not require websites to ask visitors to agree to cookies. This is something that still needs addressing, even after all this time in development. Another existing issue might be cyberbullying and toxicity in multiplayer games. Managing online communities prove to be very difficult in the online space, even today. These problems require attention and understanding for me and my peers to address in the future.
