9/29 Unit 1 Project

Written Summary 1

Technology, a way to communicate with others and still be alone. Sherry Turkle writes about how people are always alone now that technology allows us to communicate from anywhere to anyone. In the Flight of conversation she explains this while repetitively saying we are all alone. She states how technology is power and it allows us to only listen to the things that interest us. Technology has made it so people don’t have to be in the same area to talk and this has made us forget how to actually hold a conversation with people in person. It’s allowed us to keep people away and present ourselves how we want to. We are able to change the way we look on the internet and to talk people in ways we couldn’t do in person. Turkle says people think being connected to social media is the same as talking to people in person. That you can’t actually know someone through a texting conversation and that real face to face conversation teaches us things we can’t learn through social media. Yet people enjoy talking to computers because there is always someone listening. She thinks we are losing confidence in each other as humans. We rely on machines for answers instead of one and other. We feel the need to always share our thoughts and what we are doing. That we feel less lonely online even when we are alone. She believes people Should have times throughout the day where they are not allowed to use technology. That way people would actually know what’s going on around them.  

Written Summary 2

Facebook has changed the lives of over a billion people around the world, 1.2 billion users in 2014 to be exact. Facebook was created in 2004 and it changed the way people interact with each other drastically. It has allowed us to be able to share anything we want whenever we want to share it. The good part about this is that we are able to pass information to others very quickly from almost anywhere. The bad part about being able to share things so easily is exactly that. People can share whatever they want whenever they want. This causes a lot of drama and problems on social media. Another way social media has changed us is by making it easy to bring up past events. The best part about this is being able to find out information from things that happened a long time ago that people now wouldn’t know without having looked it up. The bad part about it this is if something that should be forgotten is posted on the internet then it will never be forgotten because it is so easy to look up past events. Another good thing that Facebook does for us is make it easy to reunite with people from our past. Almost everyone who has internet has a Facebook profile. Instead of needing to find a phone number to contact someone you only need to know their name. The only bad thing about this is that traditional reunions where you meet your old friends in person are becoming less of a thing. People are becoming less social outside of social media. The last thing Facebook did to change the world is by affecting our privacy. While Facebook provides privacy settings most people do not know how to use them. They have made it insanely easy to figure out almost anything you need to know about people whenever you need to know it. Based on these few things Facebook has accomplished, it still your choice to use social media and what you post on it is your own decision. 

Written Summary 3

Social media has had a significant impact on us. We have become way more public than people have ever been. It all started with sites such as Friendster, Myspace, and eventually Facebook. An outstanding 78% of U.S. citizens have had some type of social media profile. This has changed how people spend their time. We spend so much time looking at social media to see what people are doing instead of going to have a real conversation with them. Social media has made our lives way more open than most people even want to be. There are people who know other people from Facebook even though they never met them in real life. Many people think that you can hide behind your computer when using social media but that’s not completely true. It’s easy to say anything you want but it will eventually catch up to you in real life. Your social media describes you as a person and people are always there to judge it. That can be good for some but many people see others and this make them feel like they are not good enough. They want to become more like these famous people and this causes people to try to change who they are on social media. Many people are starting to become more self-aware of what they post on the internet prior to posting it. This is good because you are less likely to post something you will later regret. Many new users on social media tend to compare themselves to these popular social media users and they try to imitate them or turn their style into their own. Social media has made us more self-conscious of ourselves and this cause people to try to be who they aren’t.

Unwritten Summary

Sources

Summary 1: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html?_r=0

Summary 2: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/31/tech/social-media/facebook-changes/

Summary 3: http://www.forbes.com/sites/carriekerpen/2016/04/21/how-has-social-media-changed-us/#401957f40f65

Unwritten Summary: http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s20e02-skank-hunt#source=57baee9c-b611-4260-958b-05315479a7fc:879fd28e-c96b-4f9d-a437-e05c1bcf80aa&position=2&sort=!airdate