Module 5 Essay

Living in the age of technology which increases in leaps and bounds with every passing year I often think to myself: how on earth did we survive without this!?  With the mention of airline traveling in our text let's use that as an example.  Think of buying an airline ticket before the internet and computers.  You probably had to travel to the airport first of all just in order to make a reservation!  The triple convergence took all the latest and greatest technological advances of our time and combined them together to create more convenience, more productivity, and even more innovation, or as the book states "multiple forms of collaboration".  Education is at the fingertips of computer owners across the world, research too.  Entertainment is supplied very easily to bored housewives all across America because of the convergence of media and technology.  But I sometimes wonder, is all this increasing dependence on technology hurting us?  The more we use the computers for every little thing in our day to day lives, the less human interaction we have.  And the less human interaction we have the less likely we are to make meaningful connections with actual people and the more likely we are to become more and more dependent on our laptops and tablets.  I can't help but wonder: is that maybe harmful for the future of humanity?  Wait a minute...are we slowly being conditioned to become robots!??? I'm kidding, I'm kidding (kind of!).

In the whole India/Indiana debacle all I left with was a reinforced hatred of politicians!  What a travesty it was to let stupid politics get in the way of a venture that was to be beneficial to both the tax paying residents of Indiana and the hard working citizens of struggling India.  In regards to that I would say that both India and Indiana were exploited, and they were exploited by the politicians who used the situation to gain support for their own shady agendas. I do not see or understand the problem of outsourcing and saving 8 million dollars of tax payer money?  Why shouldn't the Indians be rewarded for their hard work in getting the best education available to them and trying hard to provide for their families?  Why shouldn't the best value be applied and why should the tax payers be forced to apply more funds for the exact same type of work, but done by only Americans?  It is ridiculous and bad business practice.   

Intellectual property is exactly what it sounds like: ideas.  Just like you would patent an idea or invention, the issue of ownership is arising for your innovative technological ideas.  Advances in technology are being counterfeited and ideas are being stolen.  So, with more and more innovation emerging from open-source collaborations and communities, intellectual property law has to adjust-or else we as a society will not get the benefits or be protected from the drawbacks of a flat world.