Vanity Generation

Yu-Hao Chang

The 21st century has become a veritable "Facebook age”, In early July 2011, the number of Facebook users worldwide exceeded the 700 million mark, and the number of daily share was about 4 billion. Regularly updating your Facebook status is becoming an indispensable part in many people’s life. Even Twitter, has had close to a 200% annual subscriber growth in the past three years.

This is a crisis of identity and a reality show complex intertwined. This is a narcissistic era. British scientists recently issued a warning: Facebook and Twitter is creating a "vanity generation. This generation cannot concentrate on one thing for a long time and lack effective communication skills. "Attention"and "feedback" is the sole focus of their life.

In the article, Social Life, Personal Life, School: Identity Crisis, it states the computer virtual world seems to always be dirty due to the real world being slightly contaminated. The computer gives rise to a spiritual experience, a mental construct, or a kind of feeling into the computer mind. Some people will therefore indulge in the meantime. This phenomenon reflects the contemporary "identity crisis." People seem to live in a non-realistic parallel world with self-assessment dependent upon the comments and clicks ratio.

The blog is a tool for self-speaking, and is relatively independent of the private discourse space of the open discourse monopoly. Not only does it established the individual subject, but also the main body of the dispersion into stand-alone or multi-identity space. Overall, blog writing results in identity-based psychology. Construction of identity cannot be recognized solely based on the reality of social psychology. Celebrity and star blogs highlight the quality of life, consumption patterns, and the avant-garde way of thinking. The blogs represents a specific class of superiority and privilege, such as the capacity of the leaders of the blog to speak on a the behalf of a specific group.

Codependency and Technology

Holly Owens

As technology begins to ingrain itself further and further into our lives, rather than it just helping us, we in turn have become it’s assistants as well. It has become our responsibility to encourage development of new technology and to guide it in a way that is helpful to our society. We have developed a codependency between what we need from technology and what it needs from. Kevin Kelly asks the question “what does technology want?” He goes further to explain technology wants what we want; to advance and evolve. We create and use technology to make our own lives easier, while at the same time directing technology down the path it naturally wants to go.

This codependency between technology and us has gone even further by it changing the way we think, act, learn, and even the way we make choices. Articles we have read throughout the course of this semester have made one thing pretty clear: due to neuroplasticity and the new stimulations caused by technology, our brains have changed. The book The Digital Divide explains how our generation now learns in new faster paced ways, with decreased attention spans. I often find myself in lectures looking around, wanting to read ahead, get on the internet, or just about anything but focus my attention on one thing for a long amount of time. Technology has not only changed the way we communicate and socialize, but it has also greatly increased our dependency on it. Technology has added convenience while chipping away concentration.



Technology without a doubt has now taken over the society we live in; however, I don’t view this negatively. I can see how Mark Bauerlein could make the generalization about our generation becoming the dumbest due to how media and social oriented we have become. On the other hand, I really believe without the availability of technology I wouldn’t know half of the information I do or even have access to it. Through technology I can look up for instance who the 23rd president of the Unites States was, everything he accomplished and his whole life story in seconds, something that would have taken hours in the past. While technology definitely can be misused, I really believe a large portion of our generation appreciates and utilizes the benefits technology has to offer, not just to keep up to date on gossip.


Sources:

http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=2110cff8-de56-49c6-9ea2-28905494478a%40sessionmgr12&vid=4&hid=113

The Digital Divide, Google image, Pinterest

Dumbestgerneration.com, The Digital Divide

Social Media: The Key to Small Business

By Derrick Wright

In today’s society, virtually everyone uses some type of social media; about 1 in every 9 people in the world to be exact. It only makes sense for businesses to join in right along with us. Social Media websites actually provide a very nice niche for small businesses in particular to fill. These sites are providing a very cost friendly way for these smaller businesses with even smaller budgets cost friendly ways to stay in constant contact with their customers while attracting new ones as well. By creating and managing profiles on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter small businesses can continue to fight “the good fight” against the major cooperation’s who constantly threaten their very existence.

Here are some statistics on how exactly small businesses are using these sites:



After looking at these statistics, I can’t help but to think how businesses using the same social media sites that we use every day affects us as the consumers. Personally, I know that I use my Facebook to share information, pictures, and other rather personal things with my friends. Through Facebook and other social media sites, I am able to share aspects of my life with others no matter where they are with just a few clicks. I’m not sure that businesses, no matter the size, should be included into that group. By these companies using social media websites they have an advantage. Now businesses don’t have to put forth much effort to figure out what we want or what we’re willing to buy. All they have to do is look at our personal pages and they have everything they need. They have access to all of the latest trends almost instantly. They are able to use our instinctive need to be social for their benefit. If you really think about though, the only way to do all of this is through technology. Technology is the key to this equation. So who’s really winning? We the people? Business? Or is the technology that we all seem to need and crave for the only winner here?

As of now, I only see the usage of technology going up. Mark Bauerlein has written a book in which he calls today’s generation The Dumbest Generation ever due to the social aspect of our technology usage. While I would have to agree that today’s generation, myself included, uses technology very heavily for the purposes of maintaining our social extremely large social structures, we are not the dumbest generation. We have simply adapted to the tools that we have around us. Being that we are social creatures, of course we are going to use technology that we have towards improving our social lives. I do believe, however, that we are very different from the generations that have preceded us. I believe that is at the fault of those older generations. Balance, as Mr. Mark Bauerlein explains, is a very crucial aspect of life that many people, today’s generation and older ones as well, overlook. In my opinion, the world and everything in it need balance in order to continue in existence. I believe it’s safe to say that technology usage has the balance beam of human life tilting.