Dependence on Technology

The post I’m writing about today is interesting, in that, had it not have been for the global pandemic it could've been written very differently. Today I am going to write about my relationship with technology. Before the pandemic I felt like my relationship with technology was relatively healthy. I was mainly online to do school work and check my emails, I always made sure that I had some downtime just to hang out with friends without being online. Now, with the global pandemic, I feel like I have to be online in order to stay connected with everyone. It can feel lonely not being online during this time, being “away” from my friends. It is not healthy to be dependent on technology, but during a time like this, I feel more and more people are becoming dependent on technology. This makes me think of a quote from the show Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood “If one wishes to obtain something, something of equal value must be given.” In the show, this is known as the law of equivalent exchange, but I feel like it has some basis in our world as well. When you dedicate your life to being online you lose those unique, in-person interactions with people. You lose the emotional connection and the world could become like Julian West’s animation “are you lost in the world like me”. 

It is essential to have a break from technology, especially in a time like this when people feel more dependent on technology than ever. I make sure that my family and I have a family game night, go on walks, or even just get in the car and drive around, just something to disconnect for a while. I don’t feel as though I am entirely dependent on technology, but I do feel like it has a healthy place in my life. Although I may be online more now that I am in self-quarantine a lot of that time is dedicated to my studies and classwork, with a little downtime with my friends online. Overall I wouldn’t say that my relationship with technology is any sort of burden on my life, I have seen plenty of people’s lives ruined by technology, but as long as people stay aware of their dependency and relationship with technology, I feel like it’s nothing to worry too much over. There are always going to be downsides to everything in life, technology included, but don’t forget to look at all the good that can come from it too. 

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fullmetal_Alchemist:_Brotherhood_(anime)#Recurring_Quotes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DU1B_XkyIk

Passing Time in Quarantine

With the global pandemic and everyone in isolation I thought I would take a moment to write about some fun ways of staying in touch with your friends while social distancing. I spend a lot of time talking with my friends through Discord (I wrote a post a little while ago that goes into more detail about what Discord is). The various voice channels throughout the many servers I am a part of allow me to chat with my friends as a group (you can have up to 50 people in a voice channel). While we chat about how isolation is going we usually end up playing one of two games: Skribbl.io or Golf with Friends. 

“Skribbl.io is a free multiplayer drawing and guessing game. One game consists of a few rounds in which every round someone has to draw their chosen word and others have to guess it to gain points!” It’s essentially Pictionary online, but with the ability to add custom words to draw. It’s a great game to play with 5 or so of your friends, it can be chaotic but a lot of fun. The other game, Golf with Friends, is "an entertaining, challenging, multiplayer mini golf game for up to 12 players. The game currently has 7 levels containing 18 holes each.” Golf with friends still has some bugs in the game, but that is what makes it fun. You can ricochet off anything in the game, making it unpredictable and exciting. There’s nothing like watching your friend randomly hit their ball halfway across the course just to have it ricochet and get a hole in one. 

Both of these games are chaotic and create a lot of great memories between friends. They are both great games to play when you want to play a game with your friends online (Skribbl is free and Golf with Friends is $10). But if you were looking for something more chill to do during quarantine with your friends I would recommend Netflix Party. “Netflix Party is a new way to watch Netflix with your friends online. Netflix Party synchronizes video playback and adds group chat to your favorite Netflix shows.” It’s great if you want to have a movie night with your friends and avoids the problem of everyone trying to synchronize their shows. These were just a few recommendations on how to pass time in quarantine with your friends. Have fun and stay healthy!

https://skribbl.io/ 

https://www.greenmangaming.com/games/golf-with-your-friends/

https://www.netflixparty.com/

Manipulation of Media

There are many different ways to manipulate the truth in the media. From people’s awareness of it to the theories behind it, and from the mediasphere as a whole to the policies put in place within it. The truth is subjective and malleable, people can make the truth out to whatever they want it to be. That is why it is more important than ever to evaluate what you are reading very carefully. When reading it is very important to look for false flags. “A false flag is a covert operation designed to deceive; the deception creates the appearance of a particular party, group, or nation being responsible for some activity, disguising the actual source of responsibility.” As we move into more and more polarized politics it’s important to distinguish when something is a false flag or the truth. Parties may try to underhand each other during election season to try and get more representation in government. By targeting a certain party with false information, a person who takes the news as is instead of evaluating it may be easily persuaded into believing it is the truth. 

Worse off than false flags is disinformation. “Disinformation is false or misleading information that is spread deliberately to deceive.” False flags are at least targeted at something or someone specific to try and alter a person’s view on it. Disinformation, however, is not targeted at anything and rather chooses to deliberately spread something inaccurate as the truth in general. This might make it more believable as there seems to be no bias behind it. Misinformation can cause people to get heated over what and what is not the truth, it is especially important in today’s climate to try and keep the truth at the forefront. 

This may be more difficult to do than it first seems. People, especially now with the internet, tend to fall into echo chambers. “[A]n echo chamber is a metaphorical description of a situation in which beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside a closed system.” People will seek out other people with the same opinion, strengthening their belief in it, even if it is not right. It is easier to listen to something you agree with, then to listen to the counter-argument, because of this people might exercise the Spiral of Silence. The Spiral of Silence “states that a social group or society might isolate or exclude members due to the members' opinions.” Why debate over a topic when you can go someplace else and get your opinion validated by others like yourself? Snuffing out other opinions makes it easier to believe in your own, but this can be dangerous. If what you believe in is not the truth and you only listen to people who repeatedly tell you that it is the truth, you can become stubborn and close yourself off from new learning and understanding. 

Nothing makes finding the truth in the media more difficult than something known as media consolidation. Media consolidation “is a process whereby progressively fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media.” If one person has complete control over the media they can push whatever they want and the people can and will believe them because they don’t have someone telling them otherwise. You lose the counter-argument, the other side of the story. It is like having a dictator in charge of the media, there is only one voice and they have ultimate say. It goes against the most important parts of Democracy: the first amendment. With media consolidation you lose the freedom of the press, you lose the ability to publish whatever you want. How can you trust what you read and hear if there is no one to present the other side? 

Everything that I have talked about in this post is a danger to modern media. People need to raise their awareness that not everything they read may be the truth. They need to take a step back and compare the same story with different sources and see how they align to make sure they are getting the full story. False flags and misinformation are everywhere now, with people trying to manipulate the public so they can push their agenda. It is important to keep an eye out for these. It’s also important to make sure you are not falling into an echo chamber that promotes only one viewpoint and utilizes the Spiral of Silence to block out any others. Finally, we see time and time again the same major corporations buying out smaller companies, it is our duty as American citizens to make sure that all voices are heard as part of our first amendment right. We must make sure that no one company or person has control over the media because once that happens we lose one of our fundamental rights as a part of the US Democracy: freedom of the press. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership

Social Media and Me

To continue the theme on from my last post, I’m going to talk a little more about my experiences with social media and how I use it. I stated before that I didn’t have my own personal social media accounts until I was 12 or 13, but I still had access to my parents accounts. They would allow me to learn the platforms before I had an account, they also taught me about cyber safety during this time. It is essential to know “that everything we post online is permanent.” Once posted it can’t be taken back, that is why you need to assess what you are posting before you post it. My parents drilled this into my head before I got my accounts, but once I got the ok I immediately started making accounts for different social media platforms: Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Even though I got the ok to start making my cyber footprint I never clung to social media. I tried out a variety of different platforms but I never felt the need to post anything on them, I mainly used my accounts to comment on my friends posts. If you find my accounts on Twitter and what, there isn’t much there, just some old posts from before college. I mainly use Snapchat to send pictures and chat with my friends, but other than that I’m not really present on social media. When I  was more active I  still made sure that what I did post, I wouldn’t regret later. I’ve never felt the need to cling to social media like the stereotype of my generation. I might post every now and again when something major happens in my life, but other than that I don’t really see the point. I don’t need everyone in the world knowing what I’m doing every minute of the day, I’d rather just live my life in the moment then live online.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90315706/kids-parents-social-media-sharing

Leaving Social Media

I didn’t have an online footprint until I was 12 or 13 years old, much like the young girl in Fast Company’s article “I’m 14, and I quit social media after discovering what was posted about me.” Throughout this article, she talks about how even though she herself has never posted on any social media platform she has an online presence thanks to her family posting about her throughout her childhood. When she finally logged into Facebook and went to her mother’s public page and “saw the pictures that she had been posting on Facebook for years, [she] felt utterly embarrassed, and deeply betrayed.” Personally, my parents did the same thing, but I didn’t think anything of it. It was just my parents sharing events that happened while I was growing up with family and friends, a lot of parents do this so I didn’t think much of it. The key difference between our stories though is that my parents allowed me to see what they were posting before they did it, in her case she was completely oblivious as to what was going on. I can see how this would upset her, but it could have been an easy situation to avoid had there been better communication earlier on. If her parents and sister told her about what they were going to post beforehand, she might have had a better relationship with social media. 

https://www.fastcompany.com/90315706/kids-parents-social-media-sharing

Discord and The Diffusion of Innovations during COVID-19

With everyone in lockdown due to the global pandemic that is COVID-19 people are looking to different apps and websites to stay connected. One app that is thriving during these times is Discord. What is Discord, you might be asking? “Discord [was created] to bring people together around games” but it’s become much larger than that. Discord is being used everyday to keep people connected with both voice and text chat. I would argue that the growth that Discord is going through right now is because of a phenomenon known as The Diffusion of Innovations. The Diffusion of Innovations has “four main elements [that] influence the spread of a new idea: the innovation itself, communication channels, time, and a social system.” These four elements have directly impacted Discord’s growth. Discord, as an innovation, is being spread through the many different servers it has available. Anyone has the capability to make a server and can customize it to their needs, this leaves limitless possibilities, which is one of the major appeals of Discord. Now is the time to make a Discord server, whether it’s just for you and a few of your friends, or it’s for your local community to help stay in touch. Discord is growing because of The Diffusion of Innovations and is helping society stay connected during these tumultuous times.

https://discordapp.com/why-discord

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

Self-Actualization

Self-actualization is the most important of the 8 values of free expression. Professor Smith stated that under this “[f]ree speech enables individuals to express themselves and thereby create their own [identity] — and, in the process perhaps, find kindred spirits. Freedom of speech thus becomes an aspect of human dignity, human agency and autonomy.” Self-actualization allows a person to look inward and discover more of themself, and what makes them different from everybody else. This allows a person to look at the world through their unique point of view. With this unique point of view they can contribute new ideas, unique to their experiences, out unto the world, and this, in turn, will cause more people to share their unique ideas with the world. It creates a perpetual loop of new, unique ideas that have the capability of bettering the society they live in. In a Democracy, you need people from all walks of life to share their experiences. It is the only way we can get a grasp on the world we live in and how we can change it. We must build off one another to push the world forward, and the first step is self-actualization. http://medlawlit.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_9.html