Journal 7

My community: Standish, ME. My hometown, a small southern Maine town outside of Portland. We have a population of a little over 10,000, with our community mostly founded on agriculture, Portland jobs, and small local businesses. Standish doesn’t use technology particularly uniquely, but this is the community I have been most involved in and I feel like I can speak most accurately about. 

Digital Technologies that Benefit our Community:

Ride Sharing Apps: Our town lacks sidewalks and any form of public transportation. Up until ride sharing apps, If you didn’t have a car and you didn’t know anyone who had one who was available, you really couldn’t leave the house. Even walking and biking wasn’t really an option unless you were staying in the neighborhood, as the main roads don’t really have a shoulder and people have a tendency to treat the speed limit as a suggestion. While the number of drivers in these ride sharing apps within our town are few and far between, it has allowed those without cars to mobilize like never before. 

Digital Communication:

The tricky part about this assignment I’ve found is that it’s hard to objectively say that one digital technology has been only been beneficial or only harmful to a particular community. I do think digital/instantaneous forms of communication has been beneficial to our community.  Twenty years ago, most of the homes in Standish were rather spread out and separated by trees and dense vegetation. While I do believe that a community is made up more by the members of the community than technology that assists it, I do think that digital communication has made our community much closer and less reclusive than it once was. However, you can’t look past our affixation and constant connection to one another. With the ability to remain connected one another indefinitely, we start losing a sense of boundaries and remain socially “on guard”. 

Technologies that Harm Our Community:

A precursor to this section: While these technologies are ones I believe to be harmful to our community, I don’t think there are many digital technologies that are worth completely banning, and the ones that are normally aren’t legal. Every digital technology was made to serve a purpose, and while those purposes aren’t always met well or without unintended consequences, they seek reform and redesign rather than simply banning them. That being said, these are the technologies which I would like to see banned the most.

Web Content Sites:

While they may be fun and harmless, the way they are designed right now to keep you engaged with their platform (as they should), it leads to less productivity and unintentional prolonged engagement to the site. While this comes off over the top, (and it almost is), just like we have talked about earlier in the semester, social media has been designed to be addictive and we start working away from that practice as a whole.

Instagram:

Instagram in a small town leads to exposure to a lifestyle that isn’t accessible in Standish, Maine. I can only speak to my personal experience and Instagram users I’ve talked to, but when you are isolated in a small town, looking at influencers who spend their days vacationing has lead to an unhealthy outlook of the life you currently lead. While Instagram can be a great place to connect with friends, there are a lot of psychological effects which this platform utilizes which I’m not familiar with.