Is social media good for society? This is a very big question that we’ve basically been breaking down this whole semester and is also the topic I’ve chosen for my personal project. As we all know there are many negative factors that we’ve talked about this semester on the topic of social media and most people would in fact say that its bad for society, but Ive learned that there are actually a lot more positives to social media that you didn’t even realize because of all the negativity brought to the subject. First Ill be talking about the argument that is social media is good for society, although I personally do feel like the negatives greatly outweigh the positives.

“One of the biggest pros of social media is that it nurtures and expands relationships. Improving communication and strengthening human connection is the reason social media emerged. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, chat groups, LinkedIn, and countless other social networking sites help people build on existing relationships, make new friends, and reinvigorate relationships that have lapsed over time” (Carrier). I would definitely say that one of the greatest things about social media is the fact that it lets you connect with other people, weather its through instagram, or Facebook, or even email. People in our generation and even any generation love to connect with other people in society. We love to connect with people who have the same interests and ideas as us and what better way to do this than to pop on social media and start connecting. I mean you could just go outside and talk to people and be a normal person, but these days popping on social media to do this is normal and many prefer to just sit on their phones and do this instead which isn’t necessary a bad thing.As we’ve seen in the Black Mirror episode Nosedive, everyone in that society loved connecting with other people, even though the whole episode was just a popularity contest it still showed us that its kind of like that in our society today. But not everyone sees it right away. If our society had the technology that they had in the episode, I think a lot of people would like it because its a great way to meet new people.

Another positive for those of you on the pro social media side is that social media is an awesome way to have a positive digital footprint. In todays society businesses all over the world look on social media while hiring employees. If you are greatly involved on social media and preaching positivity and post genuine and positively reinforced things, you could potentially get a boost just on your digital footprint. Social media gives you the opportunity to take ownership of your search results when someone searches your name.Now Im no by any means saying that it is better to be involved in social media rather than to not be when it comes to jobs and employment, bu it can definitely be used to your advantage if you apply yourself properly to it. It can definitely backfire on you too though.

While analyzing this debate I’ve found that there are a lot of pros to social media in this debate, but I definitely feel that there are far more cons to it as well, lets dive into them!!! “Human beings need face-to-face contact to be mentally healthy. Nothing reduces stress and boosts your mood faster or more effectively than eye-to-eye contact with someone who cares about you. The more you prioritize social media interaction over in-person relationships, the more you’re at risk for developing or exacerbating mood disorders such as anxiety and depression”(Robinson). Over the semester in this course Ive learned a lot about myself and relating myself to the things that we talk about in class. I am greatly involved with social media and I do find myself becoming more and more lonely the longer I sat on it. I agree with Robinsons statement because its so much more different when your on social media versus being in an actual conversation with another person. I feel like you can also lose your communication skills after a while of being trapped on your phone and being on social media. Depression and anxiety are a big part of the reason that I don’t think social media is good for society. The fact that you can just sit behind a screen and say whatever you want to a person with no repercussions is absolutely ridiculous and it can really mess with peoples heads sometimes and ultimately lead to depression and anxiety for many users of social media.

Another reason that social media isn’t good for skirt is that you can become addicted to it. The only two things that call there consumers users is drug stores and social media websites. As seen in The Social Dilemma that we had to watch this semester, you can see in the documentary that social media platforms are finding ways to keep you on the screen and on the site. Its little things like notifications or that the person you are talking to is typing and many more little tricks to keep you on the phone They try and keep you on the screen and soon enough you become addicted to it and can’t stop looking at your phone and social media. Ive learned this semester that you can even go through withdrawal from your phone and social media. Thats crazy to me.

In conclusion I believe that social media has its ups and downs, positives and negatives. I loved how I got to learn all about social media this semester and really have my eyes open to things that I had absolutely no idea about. Although there are a lot of positives to social media, I do believe that the negatives outweigh them in a debate over if social media is good for society.

CITED SOURCES:

“The Good, Bad, and In-between of Social Media.” Carrier Clinic, 8 Aug. 2019, carrierclinic.org/2019/08/08/the-good-bad-and-in-between-of-social-media/. 

Robinson, Lawrence. “Social Media and Mental Health.” HelpGuide.org, http://www.helpguide.org/articles/mental-health/social-media-and-mental-health.htm. 

This week for our last blog we watched a documentary that’s called Social Dilemma. This documentary taught me a lot of things. even a minute into the movie I learned that there is a thing called Snapchat dysmorphia which is something that makes u want to have surgery in order to look more like you would in the filters on snapchat. That was just mind blowing to me if that’s actually a thing.

There is a quote from this movie and I goes, “Have we all been put under a spell”. And this really hit home for me. Like have we? In the movie it is largely talked about that everyone is addicted to social media and most of the people that realize it are in the tech industry. Personally I really do find myself on my phone all of the time most days and struggle to get off of it and get stuff done, and a lot of people are like that and it has to stop.

It also talks about the apps that you have on your phone like instagram, facebook,snapchat, and YouTube and I never really noticed this interesting fact, but all of these platforms are honestly trying to fight for your screen time and your attention. They basically are fighting to make you more addicted to there app or site and its just mind blowing to me how they are doing this. Thats like saying yes lets try and take this persons time and how much time in your life can we get you to give to us .

I just topped the video and am actually mind boggled right now. Social media sites can see ow long you look at someone’s picture and monitor if your an introvert or extrovert or how long you look at your ex’s post lolol.

I think is crazy how they explain the model and the avatar and how social media can predict our emotions so that we will watch our screens longer. Advertising is actually huge in social media to keep you on longer. The more and Moree I watched this movie the answer to my earlier question is yes, we are under a big big spell.

There is another saying and it goes the only two things that call there customers users is illegal drugs and social media. And that got me thinking dang we really are addicted to our cell phones and its basically a drug to connect to other people and these networks are basically taking over our minds like wow.

Overall from watching this amazing and eye opening documentary it really scared me that this is actually happening and I learned that im basically addicted to my phone. People like talking and connecting with other people and we’ve actually become addicted. Social media platforms do a really good job of keeping you on the screen for a long amount of time and Its starting to take over some peoples identity. and it has to stop. Society has a social media addiction.

Weeky news: Heres some news about the corona virus : https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01989-z

This week we got to watch an absolutely thrilling episode of black mirror called White Christmas. Now I have to admit this episode really reminded me of the entire history of you with the eye technology that they had, but this was definitely a whole different ball game. So basically two people Matt and Potter are in a house simulation and they both tell each other why they are each there. Matt goes first and tells potter that he’s there because he illegally gave people advice to get romantic lovers play by play and also he didn’t report the murder of one of his clients getting killed by the person he was trying to pursue. Matt then explains that his real job is getting these things inside peoples minds for a week to develop another conscience for them to console everything around them and basically make there life perfect.

Then we get to potter. Potter appears to be a very kind and innocent man in the start of his story. He had a girlfriend named Beth and he finds out that Beth is pregnant through the garbage can where she through out the test. They then get into an argument and Beth blocks potter. Blocking someone means you can’t see or hear hem and vice versa back to you. So after she blocks him,Beth completely disappears, known knows where or who she’s with until potter finds out that she always used to go to her dads on Christmas Eve. So he goes to see her in a very stalking way every year and discovers that she actually kept the baby.

Years and years after visiting, he discovers through very close watching that its a baby girl, and potter is. explaining this all to Matt while they’re sitting and talking about it and why they are there. Blocking a person also means that they can’t see your offspring by the way too so that’s why he couldn’t see his kid. After a couple more years of watching potter discovers the death of his once known lover Beth through the tv and it was a train crash.Since she’s dead, the block died with her and he can see his daughter now.

Once he goes to see his daughter he discovers that his wife cheated on him and the kid wasn’t his and he loses it, killing Beths dad and letting the little girl go outside and die. little do we know, Potter really isn’t speaking to Matt, its his sub conscious talking to him and confessing everything because the real potter will not say a word. Once they get the confession its all over. But in actuality Matt did those terrible things so now everyone is blocked from him inches life now.

Reflecting on this episode I absolutely loved the suspense and the characters too. It was a mix of all of my favorite things. This was definitely my favorite black mirror episode to watch so far and can’t wait to watch more.

Check out this article: https://theweek.com/articles/948800/3-ways-bidens-covid19-task-force-control-pandemic

This week we had to watch the social network on Netflix. I have to admit when I first read the description I thought it would be very boring but as the movie progressed it got very interesting.It starts out with this super smart guy getting dumped. Then him and his friends create a website where they rank how hot a girl is compared to another girl. The one friend(Andrew Garfield) is spectacle of this and doesn’t want him to do it but he ends up giving him the formula anyways. This site then its sent to all the girls on campus and its the big buzz.Then two men that are somewhat rich ask Zuckerberg to create a website that helps Harvard students get girls on social media. Immediately he says he’s in.It keeps flashing back and forth between present and past of what Zuckerberg does and it appears that he has multiple law suits being charged against him. This movie basically describes how Facebook was made, thats what im guessing.In the movie Zuckerberg tricked the dating website guys into thinking that he was making there website but was actually making Facebook for himself.Throughout the movie it is very awesome to see the little details that happens in his life that he puts in the website, just like the little relationship status.When Facebook hit, Mark was the biggest thing on campus getting all the girls for him and his friend and he was getting talked to left and right by people.When Marks friend found out he absolutely lost it and I feel like he lost a lot of trust from him. In this movie I love the actor that plays Mark and the way he says everything on the intellectual scale and the way he presents himself as being the smartest man in the room.

I liked how they took the advice from Napster and we had just watched a documentary on that so I thought that was awesome.Sean parkers story on that documentary was awesome and he also came up with the name Facebook instead of the Facebook, this was his biggest investment in the company.I also liked that Mark and Sean both had there hearts broken in high school and college and because of this went on to make two very successful websites and be very successful individuals. But I think that when Mark really invested in Sean is when the whole thing took a turn for the worst. If he would hav just listened to his CFO then I think this whole aw suit situation could have been avoided very easily .Zuckerbeg ultimately screwed his CFO by taking his shares of the company out if new investors came unmaking Andrew Garfield file a law suit against Mark.

Just reflecting on this whole thing, I just really like the way that the whole movie was put together and the flashbacks and going to the present from there. Facebook is one of the most profitable companies in the world and just seeing how it was created and the whole story behind it is just awesome.

Check out this news article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/us/migrant-children-expulsions-mexico.html

This week we were told to watch an episode from the newsroom season three episode one. I never seen an of these episodes before but its basically what happens inside a newsroom while a crisis had just happened and how thy get and report what has just happened. It was actually very interesting because I’m the type of person who loves investigation type stuff and this was definitely right up my alley.

The episode starts with two people talking about there wedding and how many brides mates are gonna be there and then the girl notices an explosion on the tv. It appears to be some kind of bomb at the finish of a race. Right when it happened yo can see the silence in the newsroom become absolute chaos and everyone trying to get evidence. One person was referring to tweets but that idea got turned down fast because as we’ve learned in this class before, you can’t always trust people on social media. They also said that they wont able to interview them either because it wont be credible information.Like I said I’ve never watched this show before, but the newsroom is being very hesitant to put out any information because they want to earn back the trust of there viewers. So I’m guessing something happened in the past to make the viewers question their credibility. There were a confirmed 140 victims with severe burns on there body. Every piece of information they get that is credible they are reporting right away. And by the way I love the actor that reports the news too, he’s from dumb and dumber which is one of my all time favorite movies.They have sent two people to Boston to further investigate and get more information and I think the episode is going to start spicing up now.One of the people in the newsroom seems to have a lead o the attack which makes this even more good of an episode.Throughout the episode the reporters do in fact use the information on social media to piece some of the information together and joke about not even needing to watch the news and to just pop twitter open and look on there.three quarters of the way through the episode there is basically a man hunt for a suspect and suspect has been killed in a chase. Near the end of the episode they find information off of Facebook that is credible and seems to be a win for the company. Eventually they get the terrorist and the episodes transitions into what the next will be

Overall I really enjoyed this show and will maybe continue to watch it. I thought the acting was awesome and I loved how the detective work was done as well. This show definitely gives me like a criminal minds kind of vibe where they have to slowly piece together the evidence one thing at a time while also protecting their own people and company. This has definitely been one of the more enjoyable things we’ve watched this semester.

Check out this article: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/29/politics/donald-trump-government-officials-hatch-act/index.html

This week we had to watch a video on bots. More specifically political bots. This video talks about how bots can put a finger on the political scale in our country. In the first couple minutes it talks about hoe bots played a factor in the EU election and promoted upcoming candidates in Indias election too. It also stated that the Isis terrorist group makes several bot accounts to spread all sorts of propaganda around the world. So basically the groups that use the bot accounts are making it seem like normal people are just expressing there freedom of speech, while in reality these groups are using these accounts to push towards there overall goal in the end game. The videos states that the first time that bots stuck there nose in US presidential elections was in 2012, where Mitt Romney got caught buying bots when his followers drastically went up by a good amount. You can also but thousands of bots for just a low amount of money. In the Trump and Clinton election there were bots used in that as well. After the first debate, over 1/3 of the tweets sent out by both campaigns were bot activity. On twitter they claimed that over 8% of all accounts are non human activity accounts. Considering how many people are on twitter that use it, that’s a very very big number of users that don’t have any human activity that could in fact be a bot.

As a result of all the bot activity on twitter, analysts made a website called Bot or Not which analyzes the twitter accounts based on the frequency of the tweets, types of networks and friends they are connected to, and also the type of message the tweet that’s being sent out conveys.

I think that other countries trying to intervene with our countries business is awful and there should definitely be consequences to it. I was watching the debate last night and this was actually one of the topics disgust. Vice President Joe Biden said that if he is elected, he will punish whoever is doing this.That is of course if he can figure that out because it can be extremely challenging to find such crimes and where they are happening. As far as the bot or not website that was created, I fully support it. Like I said before I don’t think its right for other people in other countries to be participating in our business. The website will ultimately crack down on the bots from the other countries and delete the accounts I’m guessing so I support it and think it was a very good and well needed tool to stop this.The fact that presidents from our campaigns in recent yeas are doing this I think is disgusting. I do believe there should be some type of penalty for doing it too. Its like buying votes in a way, spreading the propaganda all over the internet. The elections should be ethical with little to no interference and I think our country is an will continue to work on his issue.

Check out this article on the debate https://theweek.com/articles/945421/why-joe-biden-won-final-debate

This week we had to watch a documentary on Napster. Back in the 90’s Napster was notorious for everyone that had a computer basically getting their music for free. It started with a hacker getting access to a whole bunch of files or something like that and then you can share the files with all your friends so that you could get access to whatever songs you wanted. So obviously the Music industry took a severe hit and crashed immensely.

This documentary is all about how this revolutionized the way we use computers and the way we look at the internet, like this was a very big deal back then.I think this was the dawn of like technology and how we think about it and what we can do with it. This had to be one of the things to start the trend of oh what if we did this with the computer or, maybe we can have all of this open at once on my computer or something like that.

I really enjoyed the documentary and I really liked hearing the story of the co founders of Napster and their story too.How the one really struggled at home and didn’t have a real stable family and he had to go to foster homes a few times. Its very heart warming to see people that don’t have a lot, to face that adversity and get through it and still make one of th best discoveries ever as far as technology goes today. When they met they were both like hey your exactly how I pictured you to be and that was just funny to me.The founders of Napster were some of the smartest and most bright minded individuals back then for the discovery. To look at how far we’ve come now looking at this from way back then is just absolutely incredible and scary to me in a way. Like one hundred years from now technology is going to look completely different from now and I do think that’s cool and all but its just scary to me to keep progressing like this but I also love it.

I really connected with one of the co founders (Shawns) story. He faced a lot of adversity throughout his life, but then he found sports. It said in the documentary how much sports and music helped him disconnect from all of the stuff happening at home and he just was happy. And Im the same way. I went through stuff as a kid and football saved me in a way to just focus on it and embrace the love for the game instead of focusing on the bad stuff.

Looking back on all of this Im really thankful that I live in this generation with the technology being decent and not having to struggle too much to download a file. Its the little things that the technology of today brings us that im thankful for and its only going to get better from here.

Check out this article about the debate this past Thursday

https://time.com/5900628/biden-trump-town-halls/

This week we had to listen to a very empowering Ted Talk about online social change. The talk starts by the women telling us that there was a bombing in Turkey and she tells us that the news reporters wait for the government to tell them what to say. One news reporter was so sick of this treatment that he went to the scene where the bodies were being walked in the coffins and he posted a picture of this on twitter. The picture went viral and then the media had to cover it because of how viral it went. Then a year later in Turkey there was a protest, but the media also tried to cover this up by putting a penguin documentary up. The lady jokes about how she loves penguins and all but that wasn’t the most important news of the day. A person took a picture of the two screens next to each other and that picture also went viral. Spreding the news with our phones and social media has been the way that most people get there information for years, and can you blame them after something like this happens?

Then she says that she watched 4 young college students organize a countrywide citizen journalism network called 140 journos. This network then became the central hub for uncensored news for the country. And then she’s seen 4 young people in Egypt use digital connectivity to organize supplies and logistics for 10 field hospitals. She asked the founder of the one operation when he thought of it and when he started working on it and the time between. The man said 5 minutes. Thats absolutely crazy that he can be that passionate about something to get started on it right away with no hesitation.

She then brought up the very interesting fact that back in the day people didn’t have twitter, instagram, Facebook to spread the word about what was happening and what to protest. So what did they do? Ill tell you, they had to mimeograph 52,000 leaflets by sneaking into a university duplicating room. They stayed up all night working on the civil rights movement leaflets and then they had to distribute all of them by hand! Thats crazy to me. Now a days people just send out a tweet saying this kind of stuff and it goes viral and then that’s how you get the big news. People really had to grind It out bak then.

Then she says that today we go to fast about spreading the news and that we have to go slower and be more tedious about our approach. She says back then, working slowly and collectively made them be able to think together and more collectively as well. I personally think that we really struggle with this kind of thing today. Its always an argument. We should be able to consider everyones opinion but still be united and still think as one. We should be able to make the hard decisions together and create concuss among ourselves.

Check out this weekly news article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/sports/football/nfl-postpones-titans-coronavirus-patriots.html

This week I listened to a podcast called Note to self and the subject that they talked about this week was seeing ourselves inside the Black Mirror episodes that we’ve been watching this semester. As I listened to this even from the start of the podcast it was very interesting. In the beginning they talked about how in the one episode you can talk to your loved ones after they died and that we actually have this technology today. For example there’s this mother of three named Ginger and she has terminal cancer, but she going to be using a new service that lets her communicate with her kids on her behalf after she likely dies in the future. When I heard this in the podcast I was so freaked out that we actually had this technology. I am actually really interested in how many people might actually use it to help them cope with a loss too. It can be a very helpful product. But I definitely don’t want to see the full life models like in the episode, that would be very very creepy.

Then on the podcast they talked to the creators go the episodes and got there take on how they make them and its actually very interesting. They basically think about a topic and say oh what id this happened or what if this happened. Both writers come at it at a more laughable view of just how ridiculous some of the topics are but at the end if the one writer is laughing at the consequences of the episode and another is truly terrified, then they know they did a good job with it. And I completely agree. For most of the episodes im literally like oh my gosh this is so ridiculous, but then you get into it and are like oh man the consequences man. S I understand where they come from while writing these types of episodes.

After that they talked about and I found absolutely insane that the one ratings episode is actually happening in China!!! I found this absolutely insane. Im not sure to what extent its being done or how this system particularly works, but its happening.

They then went on to talk about more real world implications from the black mirror episodes. They said that all of the episodes are basically a worst case scenario foreach in particular topic that they choose. One of the things that Note to Self has been telling its viewers to do is actually put a sticky note over your camera on your laptop. As weird as that sounds, in the episode called “Shut up and dance”, a kid was filmed after visiting a website that had some kind of virus that attached itself to his computer and the person could literally see everything on the laptops camera. This actually could happen in the real world and should make people do this with their computers too. I think im actually going to start doing this just to play it safe.

What other episodes do you think can come into the real world?

Weekly news: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/us/politics/trump-covid.html

This week we had to watch another black mirror episode called “Hated in the Nation”. Although this episode was a bit loner than the rest, it had me on the edge of my seat the entire time. Im so into detective work and solving crimes and autopsies. This is like a huge investigation, except its so like in the future based with all sorts of amazing tech like the AI Bees that society added so that the pollination of flowers could still be done because the real bee population was dying out. Well little did everyone know that a terrorist would hack the bees and use them for his own personal murder game. Im not going to give every single detail of the episode but ill summarize it a little bit.

It starts when our main characters Karin and Blue who are both detectives are notified of a body of a famous journalist. Then they are notifies of another body of a famous person. Through a lot of detective work they find out that the only links between both bodies are that they had a single bee inside their head that was damaging their pain receptors inside the brain. This causes extreme pain and the victims will do anything to stop the pain…even kill themselves. Then the detectives fins out on more similarity between the victims. Both have had their names come up on twitter with it being the hashtag of #DEATHTO and then their names at the end.They find out if you have your name this list and are trending number one then you will die at a certain time. I won’t bore you guys with the details but it gets exciting when the detectives figure out that the system got hacked by a single terrorist. Eventually they figure out the terrorists plan, but there’s one flaw. When they turn the system to the bees off, The bees then target and kill every single person who tweeted out #DEATHTO. The episode ends in dramatic fashion as Blue faked her death and tracked the terrorist and on the day of the court case she catches him and sends Karin a text saying she got him. Im not sure if she killed him or brought him to justice, but that was one good episode.

My overall reaction to the episode is just WOW!!! It was so jam packed and right up my ally. It was so cool to see a very interesting investigation of a murder, but it was so like in the future based. It makes me think, well all of these episodes make me think about the technology of the future. But what if the bees did start dying out? What would be our solution for that? What substitute would we use. I was also curious as to hoe the bees died out in the episode, but I don’t think they ever mentioned it. This episode I\kind of gave me a criminal minds type of vibe which I absolutely love. The ending was honestly the best part though.

What substitute could we use if bees dies out in the future?

Weekly news: https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-latest-updates-092520-11601019557