For your response posts, address the following:
Alek Cvetkov
Greetings everyone,
I look forward to collaborating this week, this should be fun.
I can think of numerous events that I have experienced that were modified by technology. For me, I think back to the first time I played an online game and was connected with strangers. For me, it was Steam, which is like Netflix for video games and I was in my teens (circa 2003/4). This service connected me to people all over the world and some of whom I still am friends with to this day. It allowed me to grow a social bond with people before there was even Facebook.
Playing online and chatting with these people from places like the United Kingdom or Japan and as far away as New Zealand modified how I viewed the world. And in turn, I modified how they viewed Americans.
The event that online gaming influenced me was the war in Syria and the changes that came from that. Here in America, we took in many refugees, numbering in the tens of thousands, but in Europe, they took in millions. Talking to these people firsthand about the slow changes that came along with the grinding war in Syria changed my viewpoint on modern conflicts. In America, it was regulated to news cycles on and off depending on the headlines and the political season. By knowing these people for so long thanks to online games I was able to view it from their points of view.
In Europe, my friends were living it, and seeing the horrors of the war coming to their faraway lands. The sinking boats were full of people in the Mediterranean or off the shore of the UK, to the breadlines and resettlements to small towns. It was fascinating to hear about and to hear firsthand what it was like to talk to these refugees and their struggles. My own family, on my father’s side, are political refugees from the former Yugoslavia, so hearing this modern version of those events was very jarring to me.
The unfiltered information flowed to me via online game chats or voice chats. It could be an hours-long talk via text or voice chat, or short text exchanges with no other intention than to hear why things were the way they were. They in turn wanted to ask me as an America, insulated from these horrors what I thought about it all, and how I felt about it.
Without technology and online gaming, I would never have seen this point of view. And I would never have gotten the chance to understand it from their point of view.