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Reminds those that disparage Facebook that it can be used to keep people in contact that live far apart, whether they be friends or family. I highlighted a sentence that I found rather discouraging. She said she preferred keeping in touch with people via IM over the phone. This alarmed me. (Imagine me doing one of my odd emotional/physical reactions...in this case going limp on my couch.) I believe there is a sort of communication hierarchy. In that hierarchy, I think that the phone should always be superior to IM in human communication due to its inclusion of tonal inflection and variation that is lost in any kind of writing. Certainly IM is more convenient, but it is less human.

I think it is dangerous and, honestly, somewhat prescriptivist and ableist to associate human communication solely with traits like "sight" and "voice." There are many people who lack to the ability to hear or speak but still manage to communicate in a deeply real, emotional, and human manner.

Touche. Great point.

Sir Ken Robinson speaks about how our education system strips students of their creativity. It teaches us to not risk ever being wrong. "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will not come up with anything original." The hierarchy of educational importance begins with math and science and ends with the arts. The system was born of the Industrial Revolution pragmatically. We're in post-Industrial Revolution times. Academic inflation is necessitating that one gets a MA for a good job.

This makes me think back to the other day in class when Dr. Wesch brought up excellent questions. Who decided in 16 weeks is enough time to be educated in a certain subject? We cram so much information into such a short amount of time. Even the way we are taught to learn is sometimes misguiding. Ken Robinson makes a great point when he states the following: "All children are born artists...either we grow into it or we grow out of it or rather we get educated out of it."