Awkward Encounters

While exploring the various blogs located on Sakai, I stumbled across an article that really grabbed my attention. What grabbed my attention was an article titled, "Unstructured Play" by Jonah Lehrer, which was prompted by an article by Melinda Wenner titled, "The Serious Need for Play. Free, imaginative play is crucial for normal social, emotional and cognitive development. It makes us better adjusted, smarter and less stressed." Basically, these articles explored the necessity of free, unstructured play in the lives of developing children. What exactly is free, unstructured play? Daydreaming, role playing, or allowing children to make up inventive uses for normal household items would all fall under that category.

This free play has several benefits, such as it allows children to explore more creative solutions to problems, helps them work out anxiety in their lives, and also helps the children develop more advanced social skills. Growing up, I was never bought expensive toys, and I remember playing with empty dish soap containers. Not having six thousand Barbies, or the trendiest toys never interfered with my development, and according to these findings, maybe it helped me out in the end! Another interesting aspect popped up in these articles, the introduction of technology into children's lives. Wenner discusses the impact that television has on developing children. Using the TV as a virtual babysitter doesn't encourage children to be imaginative or engage in unstructured play - it creates all the scenarios for them, no thinking required. Maybe it is time to control the volume - at least when children are concerned.

And what exactly does this have to do with my comp? In the past and for previous classes have looked at the ways that school districts have educated children, what works and what doesn't - and how can we change this for the better. It could possibly be interesting to look at whether free play actually facilitates more creative problem solutions and social development. This could be done with real children or with rats in the lab - facilitating a free unstructured play period and then after a specified amount of time looking at whether this actually develops better social skills and creative problem solving, with a series of follow-up tasks. The more information collected on in what kind of environments children develop in the better - not to mention parents could save a bundle on these technological toys that "make their children smarter." Maybe reverting back to the old ways (encouraging children to play with what was around the house and have lots of free unstructured play time) isn't such a bad idea - we all turned out o.k. right?

Like many with their senior comps, I began without a clue. I did not have one clue what I would want to spend a year of my life working on. I remember our initial discussion in class, where Professor Knupsky stressed the importance of choosing a topic we are passionate or at least interested in exploring. Sitting around with my house mates, a debate broke out about what was important after we all graduate. One was arguing for graduate school, to get a good, high paying job and then life will take its course. Another disagreed, yelling that money was not everything and you did not have to go to graduate school to be successful. Tired of the yelling, I chimed in with "you realize you both are actually agreeing," this brought the room to a halt.

Over the summer, I went with my parents to visit QVC (an initialism standing for Quality, Value and Convience). While on this trip, I had the opportunity to tour the vat QVC studio. We went into a control room that contained hundreds of monitors, flashing lights and information. In this room, QVC is able to monitor how many calls are coming in, how many iteams are being bought in a minute and what part of the country the calls are coming from. One of the things that struck me was that QVC can monitor if a certain word said by the announcer triggers more buys of a product than another word. How is this possible? Is it really the word that cause people to buy the product, or is it something else?

What is proper etiquette for using your cell phone in public? After reading the chapter Going Mobile of Naomi Baron’s book Always On, it can be seen that cell phone etiquette varies from country to country and culture to culture. In Tokyo, Japan, there is hardly any talking between people, let alone talking on a cell phone. The cell phone in Japan, know as keitai is used more to send written messages then to make calls. The government began banning use of keitai in public places. Why is the government intervening? Are they trying to preserve the sense of community that the United States has lost?

What is it about texting that makes it so appealing? Perhaps it is because with the ability to text people are always connected. I have seen people texting in class, while driving, or even with the phone in their pocket at work. We have become so used to texting that some people don't even have to look at their phone to send out a message to their friends. So why in a country of talkers have we chosen to text? Probably because texting can be completed sometimes without even looking at your phone, and it can be done without people knowing, in places where a cell phone call would not be appropriate, such as in class, during a meeting, or while on the clock at work.

Baron found from her pilot study that people are most likely to use texting to: arrange to meet in a few minutes, arrange to meet in a few hours, share news, kill time while waiting or travelling, keep in touch, or ask advice (in that order of importance). We can see from this list that texting is not necessarily for maintaining relationships, but as a way to communicate for a shorter time span in which you can control the volume by choosing to respond or not respond to texts.

Although texting is popular in America, it is not as popular here as it is in foreign countries. Fortunately, our love for talking has not yet made us choose to text instead of having real conversations with our friends. Obviously cultural differences have also played a role in preventing texting from becoming as popular as it is overseas, but with aggressive advertising and our need to have shorter, more efficient conversations so we can get more things accomplished in a day will texting ever replace phone or even face to face conversations?

Chapter 7 of Always On is broken down into two large sections, the first on talking in public places, and the second on punctuation in text and instant messages. I decided to explore the first topic on public conversations as this is a growing trend. I remember when the first Nextel phones came out with the Push-to-Talk technology, essentially turning your cell phone into a two way radio. Now if you are going to take the time to scroll through your contacts and call someone, why would you want that conversation to be in radio form. Push-to-Talk was the same as using speaker phone but with an annoying sound that followed every sentence. To this day, Push-to-Talk technology is still utilitized. During the superbowl, blackberry aired a commercial showing that PTT is still very much alive.