The Social Dilemma was an eye opening film that broadcasted the reality in which humans live obsessed with technology. Also, the perspectives of people who left high ranking positions from social media apps such as Google, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to give their warnings of social media on the society and experience with working with those companies. This film expressed the dramatization of our reality with a family struggling with their social media usage. It was designed to sound the alarm about the dangers of social media.  They implicate social media and a number of societal problems. For example, the propagation of misinformation including the promotion of conspiracy theories, political polarization, mental health consequences. The film focused a lot on addiction and they looked at the anxiety and depression with girls, data of privacy and targeted advertising including using the term surveillance capitalism.

The overall message at the end of the film was to be aware about the potential dangers of technology use to consider reducing the amount of time on social media. The information given throughout created an interesting claim that the documentary makes that social media somehow caused or greatly contributed to this trend of misinformation. I think the truth is the social media makes spreading misinformation easier and more efficient, but the lack of critical thinking skills is the real problem. Many people have trouble discerning between legitimate and illegitimate sources of information. I think social media technology has simply accelerated a problem that was already there. Conspiracy theories were everywhere before the internet and before the widespread use of social media usage. This technology is simply making it so that we have to face this problem and we need to address the critical thinking epidemic.

However, more people need to be aware of social media’s negative affect and be willing to make the change to decrease the screen time and find other activities to use their time instead of scrolling. I personally know how hard it is with taking social media hiatuses only to end up browsing on the internet browser for Facebook after deleting the app. Simply put, social media is addicting, but I believe there will come a time where we find the balance for our sanity for humanity’s sake.

Five things I think are positive about my generation ‘Generation Z’ are that we are very rebellious, outspoken, health driven, entertaining and ambitious. 

Five things I think are negative about my generation ‘Generation Z’ are that we can be unfocused/distracted, immature, imperious, impatient and eccentric.

Weekly News:  7 ways to help young people with anxiety

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/11/933797230/how-to-help-your-kids-reframe-their-anxiety-and-reclaim-their-superpowers

This day and age we are turning to having more digital relationships than in person relationships which is affecting the human interaction for the upcoming future. People are able to block, mute, and get notified by a person’s posts on social media. What’s most disturbing is that even though we’ve enhanced our ways of communicating, we’ve also been less constant with communication limited by technology. The multiple technologies converging and showing us that the “better” ways to communicate in some ways we’re taking backwards steps.

In the Black Mirror episode “White Christmas” it dived into a futuristic reality where a chip can be inserted into your head in order to gather information about yourself which can be used for advanced technical devices similar to Amazon’s Alexa or gather evidence from someone for a court case. This episode dealt with the case of a bad breakup that led to the main character, Joe, being blocked from his girlfriend. he found a pregnancy stick and wanted to congratulate his girlfriend and get ready for their family together but she claimed she did not want to keep the baby. after  this interaction he was not able to see her but months later she could see her block silhouette with a pregnant stomach. He became obsessed with checking on her and the child’s growth from a distance every Christmas. Until she passed away in a car crash which lifted the block restrictions on the child. When he went to confront the child, it turned out that she was not his biological daughter. This left him distraught asking “Where is my daughter?” towards her grandfather. Eventually kills the grandfather with a blow to the head with a snow globe and the child dies days later after going out in the cold to search for help for her grandfather. The fact that the girlfriend wasn’t upfront about her actions of infidelity during the relationship caused him to harper on and stalk her til the truth drove him to insanity. The act of ghosting a person is real in today’s day, but being able to mute and blur out a whole person’s existence from a person’s ocular lens is phenomenally frightening.

The whole episode was mainly set in the grandfather’s home based on the chip that the government implanted into his head when he was arrested for the deaths of the grandpa and child. He was manipulated to seem as 5 years had passed from the incident and was able to confess his doings. The man who was manipulating him, Matt, was the creator of the chip and also confessed some parts of his past to Joe to get him to feel like he could trust him with his truth. But once the confession was out of Joe and Matt’s job was done, the government could not ignore his confession as well and was free to go but blocked by everyone in the world. The government in this episode showed that although you may have a gift pertaining to technology they will use you and still give you a repercussion for your actions that they deem as unjust. This virus of social control in which people believe they can block and ghost people is  already prominent, but if this lens and chip is implemented into the reality of the world things will get beyond crazy.

What do you think you’d do if we have these lenses or even the chip put into us? Would you allow it or what if it were mandatory?

Implementation of Social Media Regulations??? : https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54901083 

This movie The Social Network was a very intriguing movie and I absolutely loved it. This film was about the creation of Facebook and all it’s legal problems in the beginning of its launch. Seeing Mark Zuckerberg talk in person and having him being portrayed in a movie made me see him in a different light. I did not know how committed an intellectual Zuckerberg was, but also how anti-social he was compared to the people around him. It did not seem as though he knew the definition of what being a friend was and for him to make a platform for friends and potential lovers to connect is very ironic. Mark Zuckerberg states, “People want to go online and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that? Eduardo, I’m not talking about dating site, I’m talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online” (The Social Network). Once Zuckerberg and Eduardo created “The Facebook” for various colleges to connect with other college students on campus it became a successful platform to interact on. “The Facebook” became so interactive that  Zuckerberg began to make the website available for colleges internationally to connect to. Zuckerberg began to face problems after he launched “The Facebook” knowing that the similar idea came from two Harvard Brothers who asked for his help to create “Harvard Connect” uniquely for Harvard University. Zuckerberg was sued later on by the brothers once they couldn’t get help from the President of Harvard University for the reasoning of theft. Zuckerberg was also in connections with Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, which aided in problems and triumphs for the website and himself. 

Sean Parker states “Private behavior is a relic of a time gone by, and if somehow, someway, you’ve managed to live your life like the Dalai Lama, they’ll make shit up. Because they don’t want you, they want your idea” (The Social Network). Facebook definitely created an environment in which  your business is no longer private and it is rare to be private. social media has created  the idea that uploading, posting and retweeting daily is a norm. Facebook has been implementing more ads and regulated posts for people to interact with which can be highly addicting.When Zuckerberg moved out to California and got  more help from Sean Parker, Eduardo’s position as CFO was being downplayed. Eduardo went from owning over 30% of shares of Facebook to 0.03%. This caused troubles for Zuckerberg because he had to deal with two legal issues because of Facebook.  but now those cases are far behind him and are solved, and now it is  a billion dollar business that is booming off of the population of the world’s internet browsers. These social networks haven’t implemented ways to lessen people’s time off of the network to practice self awareness and mental health checks. We are the guinea pigs for social media and the digital age.

Do you think Facebook was inevitable to be created for this digital era?

Weekly Post: R.I.P Kevin E. Peterson

This world is slowly coming to a media frenzy where there is so much information being spread that opinions and inaccurate statements are being shown in the frontline news, social media and news journals. We are subjected to the information that the media tries to program us to believe everyday. Years ago people got all their information from news channels and newspapers, but it wasn’t known to fact check their sources.This leaves me wondering what information is really real and is the news media fraud? It is true that the government controls what is put out there, but to what extent will they go to keep the citizens from the truth of the country and the globe. William Arkin, longtime NBC reporter and analyst states that, “So, to me, the crisis is that we condone perpetual war by virtue of our lack of reporting and investigation, and then, second, we fill the airwaves or we fill the newspapers with stories about the immediate and don’t give an adequate amount of space to deeper investigations or what I would say would be net assessment investigations of what really is going on”. Living in a country that puts more importance on military budgeting than the citizen’s well being is haunting alone. However, that shouldn’t stop the news media from covering all that is important that has to do with America.There should be more regulations added for the news media and outlets to express what we have the right to know and not only focus on the current problems, but of every problem.

Farhad Manjoo states that, “Late last year, Facebook outlined a modest effort to curb misinformation. News Feed would now carry warning labels: If a friend shares a viral story that has been flagged and shot down by one of Facebook’s fact-checking partners (including Snopes and PolitiFact), you’ll be cautioned that the piece has been ‘disputed’”. Being that I occasionally check my Facebook, I have noticed the implementation of “Fact Check” for certain links being posted. Most times Facebook will give you an explanation of why the link shouldn’t be shared as the truth. It is not as often that I see the “Fact Check” on Facebook, but the app is trying to change their ways of promoting the sharing of misleading information. The “fake news” concept was created by the repetitive misleading reality TV star, Donald Trump, which he would say against anything negative that was said about him in the media. “Fake News” gave the people an eye opener that there are facts and lies being programmed for us to ingest, we as a society should be more fierce about what we believe in even if it’s being televised or stated by a favorite celebrity. An idea of helping the “fake news” could be with implementing the AI to gather information all across the internet to make sure of it’s authenticity.

Do you think that AI could help collect the data to bring forth the facts of a topic?

Weekly News: https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/us-election-news-10-23-2020/index.html

The internet and digital music took people by surprise. Napster was created as a website for trading music mp3 tracks between user to user. Napster was looked at as a site for illegal music sharing. This pirated music sharing on the internet was a problem for record labels which in turn went into legal issues. In the documentary about Napster’s existence, “Downloaded”, it was said that Napster did not stop the share of ‘illegal’ music sharing once the government tried to shut down it’s system. After the people went to other music sharing software such as LimeWire or Music City to download their music. The government and RIAA thought that tackling Napster wold change the norm of downloading music, but it just showed how inevitable of getting music tracks were in the society. The record labels weren’t ready for the changes digitally which took them by the biggest surprise when they found out their music that was unreleased and released was being shared on this site. The legal issues came about because these record labels wanted full control over the delivery and monetization of all their records.

Napster was a free popular website which gave people the upper hand to receive any track they wanted through sharing from desktop to desktop. John Perry Barlow stated, “They were saying it’s just a matter of copyright is going to be fixed and maintained by some combination of both enforcement and education, this sounds like the War on Drugs, I don’t think this is gonna work…” The fact that the United State of America always tries to find a way to enforce and capitalize off of the problems in the society is pretty twisted. The idea of there being an education created and enforced to everyone over the very new digital world where there are millions of ‘pirates’ and hackers that can code their way to continuing the norm of downloading was a militant idea. Downloading music became a huge problem which made the government start creating lawsuits for copyright and infringement issues regarding mp3 tracks which can cost at least $1,000 fine. Being that I was born in 1998 and was more worried about a bottle than downloading my next mp3 track, I didn’t know that Napster was the founder of the mp3 track sharing world.

I personally grew up downloading music from LimeWire and loved music to the point where I created a YouTube lyric video from my Windows Movie Maker app for Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ song. I listened and watched my lyric creation while gaining a few views for a couple weeks before it was taken down. Little did I know then, that copyrighting was a huge problem for the digital world. Do you think we will be able to create YouTube videos with our favorite music on it without getting sued or having the video taken down in the future?

Weekly News : https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2020/october/more-proof-the-media-and-big-tech-are-in-the-tank-for-biden-as-they-suppress-damaging-email-story

Here is an episode of “The Proud Family” rendition of the illegal downloading of the music era. This is one of the ways I found out about it being a problem. This can be watched clearer if you have Disney Plus (S01 E05).

Zeynep Tufekci spoke at TEDGlobal 2014 Talk engaging on the topic ‘Online social change: easy to organize, hard to win’. Tufekci begins her talk by stating, “So recently we heard a lot about how social media helps empower protests, and that’s true, but after more than a decade of studying and participating in multiple social movements, I come to realize that the way technology empowers social movements can also paradoxically help weaken them. This is not inevitable, but overcoming it requires diving deep into what makes success possible over the long-term. And the lessons apply in multiple domains”. Comparing the Civil Rights Movement and the current Black Lives Matter movement, there is a big difference in speed and emotion due to the different circumstances, country’s problems and technology advancements. It seems as though now people with their phones glued to their hands can be more prone to be distracted from what the true message is for protesting. Many people make a call to protest or even attend the protest to then post about the event and be done with the protest once it’s over. For the Civil Rights Movement, there were specific leaders who made sure that the people of the movement were on the right track to get the government to change the unjust policies against people of color. Now it has become a norm for police brutality to be recorded and seen on social media and people move to the next topic very quickly than back in the 1960s.

Social media has become a huge distraction for the citizens and an advantage to spread the word/media of what is going on while protesting. Tufekci explained that she talked to many protesters and the protesters explained that they were just despairing and frustrated and they hadn’t achieved much less than what they had hoped for. It showed that the Internet was the fast route and not replacing the benefits of the slower work which would in turn bring forth gain. For example, Dave Ramsey states, “You can’t work three hours a week and make $100,000. Get rich quick doesn’t work. Crockpot mentality always defeats the microwave mentality”. We live in a society where anything we want is handed to us if we press a few buttons on a screen. Many are accustomed to getting things fast and if there is no work put into getting it there is less likely that one may put importance to it. Social media is that fast outlet where people can immediately get their information, sex, products and media to satisfy their needs at the moment. However, these problems that we are having in America is not a quick fix action when it comes to these protests. There needs to be more importance and urgency added to have people know this is not just a regular social media post. There needs to be a border between the social media and news on social media to distribute to the people on social media more seriously. America needs to focus up on what is actually important to the well being of the country’s future and the next meme definitely isn’t as important. 

Do you think social media outlets should be mandated to help people focus more on the importance of the world and less screen time on the app?

Weekly News – It is said that this election will historically have higher rejected ail in ballots than ever. This world needs prayer. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2020/10/08/rejected-mail-ballots-projected-major-factor-2020-election/3576714001/

The movie, Snowden, was about Edward Snowden who put his life on the line to expose the CIA having full access to everyone’s data and devices in secret. This film exposed that there was and is a lot of information being hidden from the public eye/civilians. It came to a point where the government was holding a press conference about the global threats of data and the Senate Intelligence Committee was asked by Senator Wyden, “What I wanted to see if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” and the answer was “No, it does not… Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, uh, collect, but not wittingly”. If the government can blatantly lie to the Senator knowing that Americans are watching through their media channels goes to show that this isn’t the first time the American people have been lied to. There is more being hidden for politicians’ agendas to rule over people and keep them unaware of the inhumane actions through the spread of lies through media platforms. Snowden did his research after this conference was held on the Heat Map to see how much data was actually being collected per country. It was shown that the United States of America was collecting more than 3 billion emails and calls, not including the telecom while Russia was collecting around half (1.5 billion) as the amount of the USA. This is extremely scary because although Snowden put his life on the line to commit to sharing this information to the public, does it mean that the data collection has ceased in any way. I feel as though due to the increase of technology use and need there have been more advanced ways to stalk people globally to get the information that the government believes they are rightfully granted access to. I understand the threat of 9/11 in reasoning about why the stalking of civilians and potential terrorists began, however, that opened the door that I don’t think the government would want to shut it down because they crave the information of everyone and everything.

Everyone has a digital print and can be very vocal through social media apps and phone messages. Although, I personally don’t have anything to personally hide from the government criminal wise, I still would not want the government to be hearing and watching my next moves through my data, messages or camera. The last part that stood out to me in the movie was when Snowden was explaining the Nuremberg trials and how the government would find ways to shut down jobs if they felt it were becoming criminal. Snowden explained, “But then the next trial was just the judges and lawyers and policemen and guards and ordinary people just doing their jobs, following orders. That’s where we got the Nuremberg principles which then the UN made it to international law, just in case ordinary jobs become criminal again”. This was an explanation to a fellow CIA member who didn’t believe that his work was criminal because he was simply working for the government saying that it was just war. This mentality is what most people who work in the government believe such as CIA agents, policemen and politicians. Believing that since they work for the government they have power against people. I don’t know how we Americans can completely change the government for positive, but someday there will be change.

Do you believe that we can overthrow the government and change the amendments set for us to follow by?

Here is a weekly news article.. Video games as a child improves memory? https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/the-recovery-room-october-2#3

This Black Mirror episode, ‘Hated In The Nation’, was a scary and crazy episode, which wasn’t too surprising knowing Black Mirror’s futuristic climate. This episode exploited how the freedom speech of the internet can turn into bullying. People having “Twitter fingers” and not being able to actually have the guts to state the same statements aloud are astounding to me in real life and on this episode. People were able to make such an impact towards a journalist who wrote a controversial article and created the hashtag ‘#DeathToJo”. Jo saw all the tweets that she was being tagged in and from the hashtag and was quite amused because she wasn’t as phased as the internet’s rage wanted her to be. However, she was killed that night by an electronic bee in a very violent way. These bees were able to be hacked and used to attack and reroute their actions from doing the job they were created to do which was simply being a bee. Soon, the bees went on killing sprees mainly based on their hackers opinions on if the person deserved to live based on their actions. This goes closely to today’s nature of ‘Cancel Culture’ which people over social media believe they have the right to cancel someone’s existence and accomplishments based on the person’s past social media posts, videos or actions.

James Vincent states, “However, the report found that if individuals felt that their Facebook friends were more likely to agree with their position on a given issue they were 1.91 times more likely to join in a conversation about it, with this tendency increasing among those who held strong opinions – they were 2.4 times more likely to join in conversations online. The suggestion is that these mechanisms accumulate; snowballing to create an atmosphere online where the most fervently held opinions are the most likely to be aired, while individuals with moderate or dissenting views hang back on the sidelines. Although the report’s scope was limited, it’s easy to see how widely its findings apply … and how important they may be to democracy as a whole” (Independent). People seem to be more engaging and willing to express their opinions over social media without fear of being exiled, that is if they are commenting on other people’s lives. The more people comment, the more power commenters believe they have and it has shown that they can get the exposure they crave digitally. Some of these people who search for evidence to bring someone’s reputation down, especially for celebrities, can be seen as these killer bees from the Black Mirror episode. Also, the media has affected the way people view other people and their circumstances. The society has become a norm to criticize and nitpick everyone else’s life but their own publicly. It can be pretty frightening to even express yourself because it may be used against you in a month or even decades later. In a way it is positive when finding evidence against people who are truly unjust. But where does the limits of this expression of speech through social media come to a realization that you can’t actually cancel someone’s existence. Do you think there will be limits to social media hate posts and comments from various people and bots?

Justice For Breonna Taylor. Rest In Paradise Breonna.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/23/us/breonna-taylor-attorney-general-grand-jury-announcement/index.html

.

In the Black Mirror episode, ‘Be Right Back’, a widowed wife received the opportunity to turn all her husband’s social media data into a robot that looked and spoke like her late husband. She did not have a lot of time to grieve her husband before she was exposed to the robot and this made her go insane and kick him out. He couldn’t go too far away from where he was ‘awoken’ and therefore she kept him in the attic. Although the robot clone looked like the husband, the data did not include all the human-like emotions that he had. The clone was a temporary facade that added on to the widow’s list of problems and traumas. Being that the robot clone couldn’t go far away from her foreshadowed that people can’t be too far away from the technology that they have connection to, like an invisible wire. This invisible wire has innumerable people hooked to their ‘robot’ phones, tablets and laptops. Although this episode was created in 2013, there is a close alternative today that can even try to replicate yourself if you talk to it long enough and is called ‘Replika’. Replika is an app used to chat to and it is overall gathering data to become you, so that you can relate to it. It is pretty scary to see that years later this is an option. Replika had me thinking, what if the company decides to team up with robot cloning? I think I’d like to keep my data to myself and in my brain.

Laura Johnson states, “So when it comes down to it, what makes a social network a social network is the fact that you have already made each of the relationships. Your pre established connections have been built one by one, directly by you and an online social network is where those connections can have a place to live collectively”. This reminds me of the film, “The Social Dilemma”, it explained that these social networks collect so much personal data in order to predict what ad you’d choose or whose picture you would double click on. Technology is moving a trillion times faster compared to our brains that have not evolved as much. We don’t even know how much it will affect us in the long run. AI is literally trained to know what posts we like and how to increase the interaction with the app. Essentially the technology is winning over most of our lives and it’s become a norm for this. We need to make more of an effort to stay away from the social media apps because these apps are more intelligent than us because they gather information about our digital existence to use against us. The way this world is looking, I wouldn’t be surprised if an Black Mirror episode is mirroring reality in a few decades.

Is technology the new human? Do you think we are too far deep to stop the machines from replacing human interaction?

Here is an article about machines with brains like ours. https://medium.com/@mishaallakhani/machines-with-brains-like-ours-an-intro-to-deep-learning-a5dff4c24e97