What I took away from the class

This class really brought to my attention how dependent we are as a country on technology and globally what we have done to ourselves. We can blame no one else but ourselves for constructing our society the way it is which is dependent on something that is going to kill us some day. The best way to describe it is a drug attic that is dependent on his drugs, that is what we have done is made it so our society (the drug addict) is dependent on technology (the drug). Before this class I guess it never really occurred to me how much of a problem this actually was. This class opened my eyes to the issue and honestly put some fear in me because I don’t know how and if it is even fixable.  The demise of our environment is certainly on its way unless we make significant changes.

Before you know it we will not care about reality we will be far more tied up in online worlds and our multiple identities or ourselves to care about how we appear in real life. We are so concerned with presenting our ideal selves online to other people that it is almost sickening. The reason we are able to do this is the amount of control we have over our presentations online we can literally post exactly what we want and how we want to appear. The study of these social networks and online dating sites has proven how common it is to show a false presentation of oneself over the internet. Seeing that we practically live in these online worlds this is pretty scary.

This class has really made me take a step back and look at myself in the mirror and make sure that I do not fall into the trap of becoming so in love and addicted to technology where I lose sight of what reality really is. After taking this class I am really going to try to change my approach to technology, I actually modified my face book and took most of the personal information that I have about myself on it off because I really don’t feel comfortable anymore with people constantly looking at my personal information every day. I also am never getting a new phone until my current phone is completely incapable of working anymore because there is no need to do so. I have severely cut back on my texting and when I am headed out to classes and to study I don’t even bring my phone with me anymore. It is actually quite funny to see people’s reactions when I see them and I don’t have my phone and they have been trying to contact me, people get pissed off and it just makes it more evident to me how much we rely on technology. I am glad I took this class because it really opened my eyes to a major issue and helped me learn about the up and coming of social networks and the power that lies within these different networks such as facebook.

Blog #3 about final paper

For my final I did question number 2 which dealt with Slade’s text “Made to Break”. After writing the paper I realized how hard it is going to be for not only our country to continue with the going green movement but how hard it will be globally. The arguments that are evidence that is presented in the book is only just a start to the reasons of why it will be so hard. After doing a little outside research on the topic and understanding the mindsets of other communist countries I really do believe that our environment is in serious danger. Although the only way to fix our environment is to go green I really don’t think it is logical or economical, globally we have gone too far and it is going to be very difficult to turn it around.

            I do also think that it can be done with recent research being done on how to eliminate so many of these different toxins to our earth.  In order to succeed with the movement we need people all around the world to by in and not just people in our nation because our nation is just a fraction of the whole equation. The part that is so scary to me is the rate that other countries are becoming so dependent on technology like are country. Slade has a brief portion of his book where he talks about how fast china, one of the most populated countries in the world, is becoming dependent on technology more rapidly than any other country ever has. Seeing that other countries that are far more populates are becoming so reliant on all of this technology that is available is going to make it even more difficult.

            Even getting people on board in the United States is going to be so hard. All producers are doing is giving the people what they desire so it is interesting to see how many people just point the finger at the producers when the people who are pointing the finger a lot of the time are purchasing these products that are producing all of this e-waist. If we really want to go green we need to stop cold turkey with purchasing products that have harmful chemicals in them that can potentially ruin our environment. The problem to this is it will be so difficult to control in other countries that are so rapidly forming such a strong addiction to technology.

Survey conducted for final

I decided to conduct a survey on the Rutgers campus in order to help me provide evidence for the question that I am answering. I am answering question 2 and I conducted a survey in front of Brower. I thought up a short question that would take minimal time to answer to attract participants. The question was made to show the dependence on disposable products in our society. The question was "List 1 disposable product that you use every day and rely heavily on?” I made the question short and the answer so it would literally take up about 10 seconds of their time and prove my point. I made sure I asked an even number of girls to guys, it ended up being 15 men and 15 women. The answers were very close to what I thought they would be. Every single woman admitted that they relied heavily on disposable razors, which was the most common answer for most women. For men a lot of them stated that they used disposable silverware, plates, bowls, etc. in their apartments in order to cut down on washing dishes and such. Some of them also states that they went through a new role of paper towels almost every other day. Some men also said that they used disposable razors as well. The reason that I conducted this survey was to prove how heavily our culture is on disposable products. Even though this is only a minor aspect of what the book talks about it still proves a good point seeing how heavily people rely on disposable products. I will discuss the findings to my survey much more in depth in my paper I just wanted to show how important products like this are to our society.           

This just shows you how hard it will be for our society to “go green”. Most people don’t really pay much attention to going green and only go green when it is convenient for them and would never go out of their way to help the movement. It is almost funny to me when I see water companies such as Poland spring trying to make their water bottles more “green” by using less plastic. Most people buying these products don’t even know that they are contributing to the movement of going green and could really care less. I am not against the movement I just think it will not succeed seeing how our society is run by technology and we are constantly replacing technology that we own with new technology. The motives in our society are far to money based for people to go green. If our country is going to change then it has to be a forced change that makes people go green instead of just hoping people will jump on the band wagon. I know from personal experiences that people are far too caught up in making money and having the latest technology to care about the idea of going green. People are actually more concerned of self promotion of themselves online than in real life which is another reason why I think going green will not succeed.

First blog on process of final

For my final I decided to answer the question that deals with the book “Made to break”. I personally found this book to be one of the most interesting ones that we have read. Another reason why I want to do this is because I am big on saving the environment and I believe that our environment within the next 150 years if we continue to stay at the pace that we are at with a disposable society will be completely destroyed.  Also the fact that we continue to throw out electronics that contain toxins to our environment is also going to contribute to the demise of our ecosystem. I am really interested to do some outside research in finding out what college students around Rutgers think of the situation. I also want to conduct some surveys to find out just about how much waist an average person generates. I honestly believe it is too late to try and start going green because people are far too caught up in their online worlds to even care. I think most people contribute to the going green movement only when it is convenient and most people would never think to go out of their way to contribute. Our society is far to based off convenience and accessibility to the internet to care about going green. The only way we would be able to save our environment somewhat is if technology was built to last for about ten times the time it is currently built to last for. I am looking forward to looking into this question much further in depth and learning much more about the topic. Hopefully there is not a set “death date” with our own environment.

Pg's 107-214 Facebook effect

            In pages 107-214 the author opens my eyes to some key aspects of how facebook took off and how many other businesses in our culture can take off. In chapter 5 the book goes into discusses all the investment offers that facebook was receiving and the magnitude of the offers. The author states “He had signed the papers to close the Accel investment.” (Pg. 127).  Zuckerberg took the money because this would allow his business to grow to the max potential. The real issue that was brought up for me was the importance of developing faith in your business in this culture. All of these investors had massive faith in Zuckerberg’s company because they could see the potential growth in it. In our culture it is important to develop faith in the people surrounding the company or else the company will fail because there will be no belief in the company and no one will want to invest in it. Most successful businesses have investors in their companies because that is what is needed in order to help the business grow. If no one believed in facebook and its users were the only thing pushing it is would be tough because there would be no money there to help the business grow. That’s why if everyone believes and has faith in a company then investors will show interest and the business will be a success rather than not.

            In chapter 6 the book goes into discussing how these investments which they talk about in the previous chapter made it seem like there was no limits on the potential growth of facebook. This makes sense to me because they received a lot of money in investments. In our culture it almost seems like when the money is there then there are no limits to what you can do, you can literally do almost anything. That just goes to show you how are culture is run. Where there is money there is power in our culture which is the sad truth. Our society in this country revolves around money. The book quotes “Facebooks first priority was hiring more people. Now there was money for it” (Pg. 128). This quote displayed an interesting message to me in terms of showing me what money was actually capable of doing in a society like ours. It is quite simple for me to see that money lets you do whatever you want in our society because it is what our society is based on.

            In chapter 7 the book talks about the step from the site just being a college audience to moving to just about every one having access to the site. The site now not only targeted college students but all students and also not only students but anyone who wanted to stay connected to their friends. The book states “This is astonishing customer loyalty for any internet service.” (Pg. 156). This quote just goes to show the importance of the users/customers of anything and developing that loyalty in them by providing a great service. You have to know you’re doing something right when customers are that loyal. Without this loyalty a business or a website would be absolutely nothing. It is important for business owners like Zuckerberg to realize the importance of keeping the users and customers happy. In any business that forms in our culture today should primarily revolve around the customers.

            Chapter 8 and 9 go into discussing the importance of Zuckerberg in beginning to think and act more like a CEO and the influence photos have on facebook. I find it really interesting that photos have such an impact on the website. It would have never occurred to me that they could be so powerful and could be everything the people wanted. The author states “…that made photos so successful.” (pg. 180).  The influence of photos was always a mystery to me and I always tried to figure out what it was that made them so powerful. I believe it’s the power of actually seeing something rather than reading or hearing something. You actually grasp the full affects of what someone was doing or what they did. When you just hear about it you form your own image of something but now people have images already made for them on facebook which is absolutely crazy.

            Chapter 10 which is the last chapter on this blog was the chapter I was most excited to blog about, it talks about the privacy of facebook. The book quotes “offer adult users a both work profile and “fun and social profile””. (pg. 199). I believe that our privacy is slowly diminishing to nothing. Although we choose what we want to post on facebook it is still a mystery to my where our privacy has gone and if we will ever get it back. I personally don’t really know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I believe that people have 2 identities as well; an online identity and a real life identity and I think that our values have been totally twisted. I think our morals and values of our online worlds are relaying into our real lives and screwing up the flow of things.  

Midterm follow up blog

Wikipedia can absolutely not be used as a scholarly source. Here are the reasons why is shouldn’t be used as a scholarly source. Anybody can go on an article and write whatever they want weather it is accurate or not. A scholarly source needs to be perfect there cannot be any false information in the article and with Wikipedia there could be false information because anybody can write whatever they want. In our group findings we did find that most of the information was accurate and the factually stated information was 99% on the dime but that 1% that isn’t there is what makes it not a scholarly article for me. I found a lot of strengths for Wikipedia. The first one I found is that it is a great starting point to get a broad overview of a topic that you are studying. If you have a topic that you have no idea about hen Wikipedia is defiantly the place to start, with saying that you can’t rely on the full validity of it but it can help fill in a lot of blanks for you. Whatever you gather reading a Wikipedia article needs to be verified in other sources. The weakness is quite obvious; it is not 100% accurate of a source. This is a huge weakness but you can use Wikipedia for starting points and getting educated on a topic in a short amount of time.

            These strengths and weaknesses tell me a ton about American culture. Although Wikipedia is not a scholarly source it is used like one all the time in colleges and high schools. I actually catch friend’s writing papers off stuff they pull from Wikipedia all the time which scares me. To me Wikipedia is just sending out culture down a path of laziness and carelessness. In our society already we are far to spoiled with all of our gadgets that we carry around and how easy it is to access information no matter where you are. On a side note I felt it is necessary to mention that I was hiking last weekend with one of my best friends who has the new i-phone and we took a break and he decided to Skype with his girlfriend on his built in web cam. I felt like he ruined the hiking trip because I wanted to get away from this kind of stuff and I feel like this technology is completely invading my privacy. This is just an example of how easy it is to access others and information and now with Wikipedia you can literally type in just about anything and there is a Wikipedia article on it. Even scarier to me is that when these students receive their papers back they are receiving good grades on the papers that they designed around Wikipedia. Our future is a future of laziness in my opinion and I don’t think many can throw a valid argument back and say our future is not headed for a lazy and careless culture. Some might even argue that we are already a lazy and careless culture!

            I learned a lot from this midterm assignment. I can see now how biased sources can be not just Wikipedia. I learned how important it is that while doing research on a topic that Wikipedia can serve as a great starting point but it is very important to use scholarly articles while conducting research because it could lead to problems such as false information if you do not seek scholarly articles. The last thing that I can take away from this project is that it is so important not to fall into the trap of laziness that our culture is so destined for. Instead of just resorting to easy findings such as Wikipedia it pays off much more just to find scholarly articles and do the job right.

Facebook effect Pg's 1-106

The first four chapters of the book “The facebook Effect” was very interesting and went over some interesting points that brought in connections between the book and our culture of technology. Chapter 1 starts out just giving some history on Zuckerberg and gives us background information about him. The chapter just talks about how facebook got started and discusses some of his smaller web projects that he worked on before facebook. It talks about his experience at Harvard and the motivation behind his creation of facebook which was creating a directory based on real information about students. An interesting point that I took from this chapter that I can link into American culture is the way that Zuckerberg started is the way that most people get started on something like a business or a successful website. Our culture has such a competitive mindset that people like Zuckerberg even when they think that it won’t be successful continue to try to make a success out of something. I believe that this is one of the things that drive America to make it what it is which our competitive spirit is.

In the second chapter of the book it goes into discussing Zuckerberg moving to Palo Alto California for reasons of his newly created website. The book states “Zuckerberg and Moskovitz took about 5 minutes to decide they wouldn’t return to Harvard” (Pg.64). I drew an interesting tie with this quote to American culture. Every day in our culture you see people making sacrifices in order to become successful. For example you look at Bill Gates who is one of the richest men in the world; he dropped out of school to work on Microsoft. In our culture in order for people to survive people need to make sacrifices like Zuckerberg did in dropping out of Harvard, which I would say is a pretty big sacrifice. Technology has made it easy for us as people to be more ok with making such big sacrifices such as dropping out of school because it has opened so many more windows in online worlds for example like facebook.

In chapter 3 the book goes on to discuss in a nut shell the power of social networking and the internet and the capabilities that it has. The book quotes “Social networking has now extended across the entire planet” (Pg. 85). This quote just shows the power of a social networking site like facebook. It is crazy to think how powerful something like this is. This site is worth mass amounts of money and there are millions of users that can connect all over the world. The meaning of “location” is almost completely eliminated with sites like this. In online worlds there is really no such thing as location because weather your chatting on facebook chat with someone in China or someone down the street it doesn’t matter, because in the online world you’re the same distance away, it is absolutely mind boggling to think about this. I think that we as a culture are just getting started, I am just waiting for the computer to bring other sense in such as smell and feeling into the equation!

In chapter 4 the book goes into more depth about discussing facebook and the process it took to get where it is today. The book quotes on page 91 “You were asked to list your relationship status and weather you were interested in men or women.” The reason that this quote caught my attention is because I think that this is a prime example of how the internet is slowly eliminating our cultures privacy completely. I’m not saying that this is the only way because there are a million other examples of how it is reducing privacy but this is one example. Our culture is slowly handing over privacy little by little and eventually it will be completely gone. This site allows people to see when and where you were somewhere and exactly what you were doing at a certain time which I think is absolutely ridiculous. I personally do not have facebook for the sole reason that I would like some sort of privacy in my life and I don’t like to be stalked by people wondering what I was doing on a Saturday night and who I was hanging out with. This reduction of privacy is a huge issue in our culture today and it certainly needs to be addressed.