Thursday, March 5, 2009

Movie prompt 5 ;)

Things in this film looked dramatically different from my school experience. Perhaps it was the gap in years from this film to my high school graduation, but there was definitely a change. The one girl mentioned she had her first multimedia class her sophomore year of high school. To me, that was completely different than what I experienced. Even in elementary school we had computer time once a week with old clunky computers that printed on the paper with the ends you needed to tear off. It was basic things like arithmetic and a possible one page paper, but to us, it was great. We certainly didn't have to wait until high school for multimedia either, we had various coursed throughout school, and in sixth grade we had to develop our own web page.
This reminds me of another line from the film about how each generation receives more of an information benefit than its predecessor. I think that will always be the case. My brother was the first person in our family to buy a computer, and due to him buying it, I now had access to his. Every parent wants to provide the best for their children, so they get them the most modern things available, so the child has the most advantages, even over the parents. In Tracie Hall's paper the grandmother comments that she "never had nothin like this", and that was just a public library, look how far we've come since.
While things in the movie did seem outdated (the hairstyles), it just shows how quickly things change in the digital age. I often hear people talk about their younger siblings getting a cell phone or something at a much younger age than they did. As the movie stated access to the web is access to the world, and the time of a strong back and hardworking person being the epitome of a good employee are over. The American world is a competitive world in which every advantage is necessary.

Dave

PS: Did anyone else notice the high school guys were all going directly into business and the girls were teaching others and tutoring younger kids?

3 comments:

  1. It is interesting to think about just how far we've come in about a decade technologically. This movie was only made around a decade or so ago and it is now a staple in schools to have computers. In fact, we've gone as far as people not even using the computer labs at schools and just using their own laptops.

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  2. I agree with you that we have access to technology at a younger age now, but I see the same tendencies I saw in the movie and in my high school in terms of people of lower income have less access to internet. Even though those kids now are more likely than before to access it, they are still less likely than the normal to upper class kids. I could tell that inequality in my high school and how that influenced kids' future dramatically.

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