"Books are pretty heavy, but their worth it."

This quote was said in class, kind of as a joke. They are big, take up space, and can literally weigh you down. The cause of this.. Information.

When used in class it did seem pretty funny. Well duh it's a book, it's going to have some weight. But if you look at this quote you can gather a pretty big concept. Books are heavy with information. In our digital age everything is going online or in "e" form. We have kindles, nooks, and ipads to hold information. Many times people don't even get books and just look up any information they need from google.

This is when we need to remember the importance of books especially when it comes to research. Research books are, for the most part, written by people who have studied a particular field and are qualified to teach it. They are loaded with reliable facts. You can get a lot out of them, A lot of truth.

If we search everything online it get's hard to differenciate between whats fact and whats fiction. It's hard to tell what websites are credible and which have just been thrown together. If all of our books go digital, they will eventually get mixed in with the rest of the internet. They would then become apart of the fact or fiction debate. Reliable or not? This is why books are so important. They have to go through the stages of getting published and making sure the information is credible. We can almsot alway rely on the authenticity of a book compared to what we find on the internet, not saying its helpful, but a book is almost always the way to go.

So while books might be heavy, they are totally worth it.

Do we want to be like God?

"It's our inate thing to create something in our likeness."

Stop for a moment to think about some of the things scientists are working on creating today. What did you come up with? We are trying to create robots, artificial intelegince, a printer that can make anything out of carbon, self-sustaining life forms... the list goes on. But all of these link back to one thing, we want to create things with out the help of nature.

The first time this happened when was God himself decided to create. When there was nothing he decided to create people in his own likeness and create a world for us to live in. He designed nature to give us all that we should ever need and the tools to evolve.

This idea leads to many questions. My first question, Is it okay to want to "Play" god? God made us in his likeness, in doing so we are like him. It sounds goofy but think of it this way. If he made us in a way he saw himself then is it okay for us to create and try to mimic him? We are trying to play god and create things out of nothing, in our likeness. Robots is the best example. We keep trying to make them to resemble us as closely as we possibly can.

If the above is true then is it okay for us to create our own nature. Consider the idea of the digital banana. The idea that we could create a carbon printer that could print virtually anything out. Were talking food, organs, plants, and more. We are fast fowarding nature's process and trying to make it as convienent as fast food. Is this okay?

In my opinion both are okay because, God gave us the tools to do this. He gave us our brains and our power to evolve in order to make life easier. We have come leaps and bounds in medicine, treatments, technology, and several other fields. However the big question is when does it become unethical. At what point do we take the role of God to far? It's something that needs to be adressed, and soon.

The first week

So I'm going on my second week of class at the College of St. Scholastica. I don't completly know how to go about making the blog for Media Literacy but here it goes.

For the first blog I want to go over a few things.

First day of class we went over the fact that Media is a plural word. We should say it as "the media are everywhere" as opposed to "the media is everywhere." I think it's safe to say this is a hard concept for people to comprehend, however I think it's important. There are many types of media, therefore it becomes a plural word. We have the newspaper, television, radio, and internet. We can go farther to say that gossip, teachings, and everyday events are media. If it puts forth information or ideals, it becomes media. This is an important concept to understand.

Now over the last few days a few quotes were made. This includes:

"Its not my job to come up here and tell you the truth." and
"Not everything I say will automatically ring the truth."

This is important to remember. While a lot will be said in class, its up to us to make sense of it and really comprehend what it means to us. Somethings will have meaning to soem classmates while to others it will make no sense at all and they will gain nothing from it. Let's look at the digital banana for instance. It's the idea that we can carbon copy food and other necessities of life. Now to me this doesn't mean  a whole lot. It would drastically change life and therefore would be in the news and become apart of our media. I don't know if thats what im supposed to get from it but I did. Others might get something else from it.

We will see how the rest of the class goes and what more I get from it. Wish me luck!