Facebook Racist??

At first glance, the article “Does Social Networking Breed Social Division?” seems to be slightly insane. Facebook causes white flight? I thought to myself no way that is possible. You can find any person of any race, age or educational level on facebook these days so that sort of shocked me. Then I read on. I started reading about how facebook users are much faster to start “bashing” myspace users. That made me laugh a little. How many times have you facebook users been asked if you have myspace? What was your response? I recall one specific time when someone asked if they could look me up on myspace and I quickly responded with a “No way, myspace is creepy! Find me on facebook.” Rediculous right? What is the difference between the two? True facebookers will say that only got it because originally you had to have a college email account and it was a great way to keep in touch with high school friends. But now I post pictures and my aunt and mom comment on them within 10 minutes. Facebook is now the exact same a myspace and is getting worse and worse ever time an 8 or 80 year old gets an account.

Foursquare

The Wortham article about Foursquare talked about a new way of getting together with friends. Rather than text a friend to ask “Where are you?” or “Let’s get together” you can just look up their location on foursquare. Foursquare also plays to our competitive nature as humans to protect the “mayorships” of locations one aquires by going there.  This creates a game that gets adults to go out and do new things. This system is very beneficial to small businesses who can attract visitors by offering perks for people who use foursquare and come to their shop frequently. Foursquare also helps spread the word on new businesses as well, if one person sees a friend in a nearby cafe they’ve never tried, they’re more likely to go in and see their friend and try the cafe as well.

-Christina

Keep Second Life Second

This video about second life and education made me feel a little uncomfortable about how much we are allowing technologies, such as SL, flood our everyday lives. While the video makes good points in terms of being submersed in the culture of what we are studying, (i’d love to “talk to” Shakespeare characters!) I think that letting SL dictate this realm of our lives is taking technology too far. We have to draw the line somewhere, right? Movies such as the Matrix, and the soon to be released “Surrogates” (whose trailer I have included below), are meant to be of the imagination–but it doesn’t take much to imagine their world as a reality. I understand that the idea of Second Life is to completely live another life on the internet, and it is this idea that makes me nervous. I almost feel better knowing that people use SL to play out fantasies than I do for them living their real lives, it seems too easy to completely lose yourself. Education and carrying out other “real life” actions completely in SL just seems to be a connecting link to this totally technologically driven world we see in the movies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwTJ7mCcFoY

-Emily

Education

This video was really good at highlighting the changes in education that are coming our way. Many classrooms today are being filled with computers, projectors, and smartboards rather than pencils, notebooks, and chalkboards. The question at the end really grabbed my attention, are we really preparing ourselves for the right future? Are we staying technologically inclined enough to keep up with the progress we demand? What kind of education should we prepare for our children to help them keep up? There seem to be many questions needing to be answered.

–Christina.

Texting: Helpful or Harmful?

     While reading this article I remembered when my mom didn’t want me to text, because she thought I would be texting my life away, yet now I get texts from her nearly every day just to talk and see how I’m doing. The article tells us that being so connected to our parents is harmful, but I disagree. I know that for me, texting my parents allows me to let them know I’m ok or to ask a quick question without having to call them when I might not have time for a conversation, or it gives me the ability to finish what I’m doing then respond to them when I’m more able to focus on what they’re saying. I can also ignore a text if I think they’re not giving me enough space.
       I think everyone is familiar with the feeling of waking up to the beep of your phone at 3am because someone just had to text you something, I know its happened to me. Some people ask why we don’t just turn our phones off when we’re sleeping, but a lot of times we’re too scared to not be connected if something should happen. So, overall…helpful or harmful?

–Christina