Technically Social

Technology has advanced far deeper into our daily lives than I ever thought possible. Our interactions with one another have drastically transformed in recent years. I always thought video games changed kids’ lives and stop them from being as active. But it doesn’t stop there. The fact that I am even writing this blog post so that I can communicate with a vast array of people is another milestone that now is taken for granted. The antiquity of printing words on paper in hopes people will physically grasp its pages has simply become too time consuming. Imagine having those words at the press of a button and a few swipes left or right. The world has become elementary at best. With all the progression in technology, how has the world truly gotten better? Information is at your fingertips, yet most will not research what they have heard for themselves. Just in case the word research is new to you, it is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “diligent and systematic inquiry or investigation into a subject in order to discover or revise facts, theories, applications, etc.”. Googling something is basic form research, and sadly enough has become the standard for most. How many people have encyclopedias anymore? Who goes to the library? You can even learn a lot at a museum. The point is, mobile phones have changed our lives in a way that if you aren’t careful, you can easily fall into the google trap. Now, don’t get me wrong google is a great starting point, but people tend to give out the wrong information because the internet makes it so easy for anyone to put anything online. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean it’s right.

The way we process information now should be better because everything is easy to get to. However, the internet has had an adverse affect. Information is so easy to get people are no longer digging deeper for truth. I remember the days of combing the library trying to figure out the complexity of the Indexing and Card Catalog system. Going from floor to floor in search of one book only to start the process over because the book turned out to not exactly be what I wanted. Time consuming, yes! Frustrating, yes! But when you have people with you it was fun. Okay fine, call me old fashioned. I have grown with technology. I consider myself to be “tech savvy”. I have a Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram; but that’s where I draw the line. Social media has become a spectacle of each person’s life.

How many Facebook friends do you have? How many of those friends could you see in person and just start up a conversation with? I have seen countless of my social media friends in public and 9 times out of 10 they won’t even look my way. Is this really the way we prefer to socialize? Life has truly become the Matrix. We post so much about ourselves online. According to “Life in the network: the coming age of computational social science”, a journal article published in 2009, y social science leverages the capacity to collect and analyze data with unprecedented depth and scale. We have to understand that everything we post online is stored online and used to collect your patterns. Ever wonder how those Facebook ads seem to be on things that interest you or things that you recently researched? That’s due to the data being hurt on you daily that you don’t realize. With all the freedom and ease of today’s world comes the threat that it can all come crashing down. There have been bigger and bigger hacks carried out on information stored through technology. From Target to the Federal Government, no one’s private information seems to be private anymore. You truly have to protect yourself online, but let’s be real; if you haven’t fallen victim to identity theft yet are you really thinking about it? You should be.