#ZombieLife

We hear all the time that we are a generation of "Zombies," or we are so wrapped up in our technology that we have lost our oral and written skills. But have we? The big question is if our generation is actually the "lost one." Are we the people that have no social interaction skills, no drive, no will to work?

In her book "The Already New," "Lisa Gitelman discusses the reality of media and its ability to be a single entity as well as a thing of history.  In the intorduction of the book Gitelman poses the question: "What actually is history?" Gitelman states,"If history is a term that means both what happened in the past and the varied practices of representing that past, then media are historical at several different levels." The teenagers and millennials of today are looked upon as being so consumed, reliant, and enthralled with the latest and greatest technology and social interaction yet how will that look fifty years from  now? Now when the newspapers and the televisions or even color televisions were invented and created there was some old-timers shaking his finger and fussing about how the times were changing and nothing would be the same because now children would not play in the yard or get good sunlight anymore. These naysayers did not know the history they were apart of and neither do the people of today.

Gitelman describes it greatly as this: "But media are also historical because they are functionally integral to a sense of pastness. Not only do people regularly learn about the past by means of media representations—books, films, and so on—using media also involves implicit encounters with the past that produced the representations in question. These implicit encounters with the past take many forms. A photograph, for instance, offers a two-dimensional, visual representation of its subject, but it also stands uniquely as evidence, an index, because that photograph was caused in the moment of the past that it represents." Yes media can harm us in a way, it can poison the innocence of children and force them to see adult content at young ages, or it can be a dictator in a way and tell us exactly what we need to be thinking about; however there are upsides to our emerging and highly technological era. Today we can now find photographs and articles at the tip of our fingers instead of taking prolonged trips to the central library to search for hours.

Another interpretation of her book can be taken from the sentence, "When media are new, they offer a look into the different ways that their jobs get constructed as such." I believe this is a sentence that means so much in the definition of what our media today actually entails. If you take a Newspaper 40 years ago they ran everyday and were available for delivery or purchase in the store. No a newspaper, though there is a decline in paper production, has three or four social media sights, a website, and an actual online version of the paper. This shows the evolution of our media and the advances we are taking to rewrite and make history.

The summation of this article and the reality of our world is that yes there are pros and cons to everything in life, there is always a silver lining or a dark cloud but it is if you choose to see that. We are making and marking history with the techological advances made in the 2000s, and to say it has no impact on history or completely ruins history would be foolish. Are we zombies? Possibly...but we are infact interacting socially, but in a different way than those before us.