Scavenger hunt

The scavenger hunt we had to do was actually not as easy as I thought and I'm sure a lot of the other students can agree with me with on that one. Because we've been searching for information online pretty much our whole school career, we would automatically think that we're competent enough to find all the questions in a matter of minutes, but we were dead wrong. I remember on one question i had to do, it took me around 15 minutes to find the answer for it. I tried using yahoo for one question, but had no luck finding it until i searched for it on google and because of that reason, I always still hate yahoo. Overall, I actually thought the assignment was engaging and a good break from the traditional lectures we normally have.

Concept of Convergence

Nowadays, we use the internet without much thought about the term "convergence." When you think of the word "convergence," technology doesn't exactly come to mind, at least not for me anyway. This term actually has a lot to do with technology. According to freedictionary.com, convergence is the combining of different forms of electronic technology, such as data processing and word processing converging into information processing The internet was created simply as a means for communication amongst computers at various universities and laboratories. As you already know, the internet nowadays does a lot more than that. With the internet now, anybody that has access to a computer and internet can read the news because all three of those mediums has been converged into one. Cell phones are good examples of technological convergence. Most cell phones today comes equipped with a camera, internet, mp3 player, etc. Games consoles today, such as the playstation 3 can also play DVDs, so you won't be needing to shell out that extra 50 bucks for a dvd player if you already have playstation 3 or planning on buying one. Companies want to be able to make technology more efficient, and that in turn, makes it more marketable meaning you will see many different companies work together to make a good product to sell such as microsoft and apple working together to create itunes.

Physical and Virtual Documentation

A majority of the population today has a computer, whether it's an old outdated computer or a new apple macbook. With the convenience of being able to save pretty much anything onto the hard drive including photos, important documents, videos, etc we become dependent on this technology to keep everything important to us safe. The problem with saving important documents in digital format is that it's not foolproof against keeping important photos, documents, videos safe. At any moment our computer could fail. We could be surfing the internent one day, and catch a virus that won't even let us access our computer without having to reformat the hard drive, meaning everything on the hard drive will be gone. Of course we can save photos, documents, and whatnot on some kind of cloud storage system, but that is not foolproof either. That business/website could go out of business any day, and when that happens, you'll be left with nothing. I went on a trip to Vietnam during the summer, and took a lot of pictures. When I got back to the states, I transferred all of the pictures onto my laptop, and deleted all the pictures on the memory card so there's enough space to take new pictures. If my laptop was to get stolen or break, all those precious pictures will be gone. Now that I'm writing about it, I'm going to make sure to burn all those pictures onto a cd to be on the safer side. All course physical documents does have its place, but it will cost you. If its an important document, you can always print it out which will require a printer and ink. If there are meaningful photos, you can always go develop them, which costs money. Like I said though, a lot of people have become dependent with the computer that they won't bother printing out important documents or go develop their photos as a backup. For me, I don't remember the last time i went to go develop photos that i've taken or printed out any essays that didn't require it to be turned in to the teacher.