$Green$ group is blingin

Hey, this is RJ Rowland. Feel free to call me Rob, if you like. I’m a senior Communication major, minoring in the shameless exploitation of my Irish heritage to scavenge free booze and Lucky Charms. It figures I got Green group. I transferred into Cornell last fall, after hopping around the Atlantic coast for a few years attending community colleges. I currently live in Wilmington, North Carolina, right on the coast, and it took a little convincing to me pull away from the beach. But, so far, Cornell’s been worth it.

I’m a huge fan of sports and love to play just about anything, although my favorite is tennis (Go Roger!). I grew up in Clinton, New York, which is about two hours northeast of Ithaca, where I ran track and played soccer for four years while in high school. I love to dance and watch movies and am still listening to the alternative rock CD’s that I bought back in the 90’s. Oh yeah, and I don’t own an iPod. Yikes.

I suppose what interests me most about the development of the internet is how it has introduced the possibility of widespread dialogue between various perspectives the world over. The net is an immense lexicon of all of the world’s collected knowledge—the digital footprint of globalization. How will humanity react to this sudden overload of perspectives? We’re a generation that exists in a world that is super saturated with information. How will we learn to correctly manage these countless claims to truth? How will we learn to discriminate between what is true and false on the internet (or elsewhere as information becomes so accessible)?

Centuries ago, before the advent of contemporary mass media technologies, people relied on interpersonal dialogue, debate, and discussion to reach conclusions about the knowledge and information that reached them. That went away for a brief spell, when mass media such as television, newspaper, and radio dominated public access to information—for the most part, everyday citizens did not have the resources to dialogue with large communication entities. The internet has changed this: we now have a cyber Agora, so to speak…a global forum. It is a medium for public discourse that can compete with the traditional mass media.

I believe that the internet is just the tip of the iceberg and that it foreshadows a future of human interconnectedness in a world that is growing smaller every day.