Reed - Digitized Lives Part 2

This book is very powerful in a way that makes you think about global issues, nothing related to technology, and makes you understand how they connect and influence each other. Chapter four was very appellative for me and it made me go through some thinking about racism, which is a section of the chapter in mind. I decided to discuss this section because it is a very old topic, compared to technology, which is very recent. As Reed mentioned in his book, by the time technology was starting getting power, many people said that racism was loosing it, and becoming a less of a problem. A very interesting aspect of this section of this book was the fact that Reed defines race as a creation of racist people, so they can distinguish themselves from the other “races.” Actually, races haven’t created as much problems as certain social forces due to their racism. In my personal opinion, the word race has very different meaning for different people. For some it might mean different behaviors, people, color, mentality in a negative way. For others it can be simply a different culture. This mentality is the difference between racist and non racist. The issue is that this doesn’t go only through mentality, but also through actions.            

People said this issue was over by the time technology came up, but we forgot the power of social media. It can be great and connect people, but it also can have huge negative impact. We can’t forget about the historical facts, and that is hard to ignore, so racism is going to keep existing as long as different mentalities exist. Racism is so exposed on social media, that it can create serious issues for individuals or groups. In my opinion the biggest difference between social media and face to face is that, because we can have anonymous profiles, and talk to everyone around the globe, we don’t care about the consequences as much. Racism happens in all platforms, and there are even special ones created for this purpose.

What I personally think is that technology has provided us an incredible power to communicate and bring all people together, and we are using it to separate each other because of racism and other factors. I don’t think there is anything we can do in the real life, and in the digital life. And I also think that every single issue that we have or will have in the future of real life, it will also be translated to the digital life, specially through social media.