In the black mirror episode “The Entire History of You” the memory implant recording and storing everything you see through out the day. This is kinda like how now with the smartphone people are constantly recording and taking pictures of themselves and others and then posting some of them to social media account. The social media accounts then every year on a day you posted or saved something you took on you phone is pops up as a memory. Now while your whole day is not there for you to look back on you still have other things that you found as important that you are able to look back on.
These memories serve as a flashback to what you might have been doing that day and just be a pleasant reminder of some fun times you might of had with some of your friends. Sometimes these memories that get saved and popped up could also be bad ones that you forgot about and did not want to think about again. Kinda of like how at the end of the black mirror episode Liam is going through and re-watching all the good times with his ex wife and ends up taking the memory device out of his head. This could be accomplished in real life by either deleting the memory or creating a new account that is not linked with any of the memories.
We also read articles on whether or not google has been effecting our ability to concentrate and read things in depth. While I think google could be having a negative effect because information is so readily available I do not think it is the main cause of this problem, I believe that the main contributor is the smartphone. The smartphone has made information, social media, games and tons of other things just an app and a click away. With google you need something that either is connected to WiFi like a computer or has cellular data like a smartphone to be able to access google’s information that is available to you. If you do not have access to these you can not use google and you either have to go to a place that has these things so that you can access google or end up going to the library and doing things the old fashion way.
The smartphone is able to be used with either a WiFi connection which you can get just about anywhere nowadays or if that not available using your cellular data. Through out the day our phone become our biggest distraction with constant notifications and just the desire to always be doing something from playing games on it to texting or just scrolling through your social media. This ability to switch from activity to activity is why I think our ability to read article in depth and over concentrate on things for a long period of time is decreasing. Do you think that smartphones might be the cause of this instead of google?
News Article
With Covid-19 being the talk of pretty much all of 2020 I figured why not do the first article on that. This article talks about how cannabis and specifically CBD might help treat Covid and help patients with a better and saver recovery. Covid creates a high amount of inflammation and after being treated leaves the patients with damaged and scared lung tissues. Early studies have shown that CBD can help reduce the inflammation and also help with stopping the damage and scaring of the lungs by doing this it increases your chance of survival and damage to the body.
SOCIAL MEDIA & SOCIETY 
I believe smartphones are the cause of this and not Google. As you stated smartphones have become the biggest distraction. We all feel the need to constantly check our phones and skim through feeds. The smartphones affect our ability to concentrate because we always have it on us. Wherever we go we need our phones. It is not a bad thing because emergencies to happen, but it does take away from the ability to have a regular conversation with somebody or just enjoy someone’s company without always being on our phones. Since we can do so many things on our phones our attention spans are decreasing as well.
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I agree with your comparison of the “grain” technology in Black Mirror and the memory notifications on Snapchat. The similarities did not occur to me and alarmed me after reading your article! As you stated, we can not go to exact moments in our pasts, but Snapchat does allow users to save certain memories and push notifications of photos or videos from years prior. However, I have to disagree with Ty’s and your perspectives on Google and smartphones. Yes technology has became such a crucial part in our lives that we feel the need to be constantly checking and updating our feeds. But to say, “Google or my phone is distracting me” is equivalent to saying “guns kill people”. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. To blame technology for “distracting” us is absurd. Technology such as smartphones are mechanisms that allow the individual to reach and discover new found knowledge that previous generations did not have at their disposal. It comes down to the individual and how he or she applies that piece of technology to their life.
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I’d have to agree with tyre I don’t believe that google is to blame in this topic, but instead our phones. The amount of time people spend on their phones is enormous, and they end up reading a lot as well. This in turns, creates this idea of reading online a bad thing making it harder to stay concentrated, but I believe its our phones that make it this way. By using our phones all the time and reading online and on social media services we teach ourselves to read in a different way and make it harder to read in books the conventional way and concentrate on certain things.
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Hey there Austin, I thought this was a great blog and I had a lot of fun reading it. I would also agree tyrese and say that our phones are the cause, because of the amount of time we are on them. Yes, they are great devices because we can stay in touch with people we care about, but when we start zoning out on just keep on scrolling in social media it can be counter productive. We have to find that perfect medium where we can be on and off it, being off them will also help us connect better with others and strengthen our relationships with one another.
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