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.

Blog "Made to Break" Chapters 7-9

In the last three chapters of the book “Made to Break” the author displays a lot of interesting points that really stuck out to me. He also poses some arguments in the reading that I can’t say that I agree with totally. In Chapter 7 Slade discusses the idea of chips entering society and at the start of a shift into an information society, which clearly has continued shifting and still is today when you analyze our society and observe how information based it is. The chapter goes into talking about the start of an information society was the start of what we know as e-waist. At this point (1960’s) technology was becoming smaller and more portable, thanks to microchips. The author states “…were driving the repetitive consumption of a variety of new products that now included digital watches, calculators, computers, and computer software.” (Pg. 198).  This quote really stuck out to me because even today I see this trend of repetitive consumption with things such as I-pods, cell phones, watches, and other electronic devices with microchips. You see this idea of product addiction as well come up because people constantly want the new models so even if their watches don’t fail they will still repetitively consume these products. The interesting part of “miniaturization” that they talk about in this chapter is products can only get so small. They can only make products so small before they have to start changing the ways that they market and sell the products, I believe that in the future the idea of repetitive consumption will be much harder because it is going to get much harder to change a product to the point where the customer feels they should by the new one.  The chapter also goes into discussing the slide rule. The book quotes “The obsolescence of the skill set that older generation engineers possessed.” (pg. 203). Although the slide rule is dead for the most part, if you look at this quote deeper you can see how crazy it is. When you think about it if there was only one person that possessed the skill to run a massive program such as the internet or a certain web site that people relied on this could cause huge problems if this person kept to themselves or something happened to that individual. It’s scary to think about this because our society is so reliant on technology so if something were to occur to someone that poses skill sets that no one else does it could cause huge problems for our society.   

In chapter 8 the book discusses the idea of “weaponizing” planned obsolescence. The chapter also goes into discussing the idea industrial espionage but the main thing I want to focus on for this chapter is a quote that I found intriguing was on page 228, the quote states “Throwing away… May soon lead us to feel that marriages (and other personal relationships) are throw away items as well.” (pg. 228). The fact that the book referred to marriage as an item totally caught me off guard. I cannot believe that our grasp on items of technology has gotten so lost where we can refer to a personal relationship as an item. This is a statement that I can agree with in a lot of ways which is even scarier to me. If you look at the value of marriage in the modern day it is not nearly as significant as it used to be. I blame this a lot on technology itself because it makes us loose grasp of reality in a lot of ways. The number of divorces in the modern day is significantly higher than the numbers of the past. The main reason that I personally blame this on technology is because technology invades physical interaction between humans. Technology over online worlds has increased significantly and interaction in the household because of this has certainly decreased because people are so caught up in their online worlds. The values and morals are slowly diminishing because of technology and its only a matter of time before the internet will control our children and make them socially illiterate in situations where they have to physically interact with people face to face.

Chapter 9 which is the last chapter in the book discusses cell phones in our culture. The life span on cell phones is note nearly what it should be and creates massive amounts of e-waist. It discusses that miniaturization, psychological obsolescence, and technological obsolescence are all factors in our issue of e-waist. The book talks about why e-waist occurs and shortly after it displays a fascinating quote. The book states “By 2002 over 130 million still-working portable phones were retired in the United states”. (Pg. 263). This is a massive reason as to why e-waist is a huge problem. People are throwing away perfectly good technology, this is a sign of our culture becoming steps closer to us all being technology addicts. Product addiction has everything to do with people throwing away perfectly good equipment for the sole reason they want the latest stuff. I am calling it now that eventually we are not going to be able to do this anymore because we are producing so much waist that the government is going to have to step in and put a stop to it. if people continue to buy and get rid of perfectly good technology we are going to have a huge problem on our hands and eventually our environment will be completely destroyed. Before you know it we’ll be sending people to the moon and other planets to live because the earth will no longer livable! This is a scary thought but in the future if we continue like we are going now I truly believe that we won’t be able to live on the earth because of all the damage we are doing to it. the end of the book discusses some solutions to e-waist and I can see where the author is coming from and I agree with his arguments but I also think the government definitely needs to brainstorm more ideas and put regulations on this because if they don’t then our earth will slowly be destroyed.