Slackticist

The assignment I got last week when we didn’t have class was about video game addiction and it was really intriguing for me. Then talking about it in class, especially about the addiction of video games and pornography it made me realize how big it really is. I mean it’s not like the Internet is only about bad things. The news seems to always talk about the negative things in society and rarely talk about great or inspirational things. Like people think that when we are using the Internet for a long time we always judge that they are using it for fun but it could be use for good. I mean, look at YouTube channels that are all based on online and social media. They have to be on social media almost 24/7 and their jobs depend on it.

One of the things that I really liked about our conversation on Thursday was about slacktivism. I had never heard of it until this class and it made me realize how much we should change. One of the rare shares that I ever post on Facebook was about the ice bucket challenge and it made me realize how much on a slacktivist I was. I was being part of something that was suppose to be a donation and awareness but I took it more like a game and late realize how much ignorance I had towards that charity.

However, there is a positive note to this, which is that it does create a voice for those people to make a change. Those people are the ones capable of making a change. For example, if I wanted to fight against the people who kidnapped the girls in Africa, I can’t really do anything about it but by me sharing something about it, it causes a chain of domino which later leads to the actual people who can do something about it and puts pressure towards them.

Going Viral

When it comes to going viral it can depend on your video, audience, or just luck. There are so many videos on YouTube posted every day that your odds of getting yours to go viral are very slim. Like i mentioned before it also depends on your type of video. One of the videos that were shown of a baseball team dancing to a song in a van was shot in a horrible angle and just not that great video, but it reached to millions of viewers, how? Maybe because just luck.  Tastemakers are big factors to some videos going viral. If I was to have a video on YouTube but never though it was viral capacity, but if Jimmy Kimmel who is a night show host would show it on his show it is very likely for it to go viral. Jimmy has millions of followers already that make any video go viral just because of his followers. It’s amazing how famous you could get even from a picture, like the example of the teen from target who’s picture was taken and became famous. He was even on Helen.

            In our society we also depend a lot on our phones or the Internet that we sometimes don’t need to memories things. For example, phone numbers are not required to be remembered because of our phones, when before I would know most of my friends phone numbers and my families. Today I only know two cell phone numbers by heart, one is my dad and the other is my aunt’s house number. Also in our jobs sometimes we don’t need to remember too much because we can use the Internet to get our information.

From history to now...

I really enjoyed watching the video of the history the phone and the computer. It is very funny to look back and see how people in the past were really excited about all these new techs, even though todays computers and telephones are ten times better than what they were 25 years ago. One of the things that I noticed while watching these videos is that all these new exciting gadgets were a big change in the social media. Today it seems like we don’t really have a new and exciting gadget that changes our computer or telephone but we do have applications that do that. This means that we are moving from tech stuff to media stuff. However, I would like to state that if it weren’t for all these renovations we wouldn’t have all these new applications, phones or computers. In social media we learn a lot but like the article “25 things you might not know about the web on it’s 25^th birthday,” Is that we are yet to know what is beneath the iceberg. We only see the tip of it and we lack the understanding of it all. The web is moving at a rapid speed meaning it only took four years to get to 50 million users. Nevertheless, now we seek for greatness and lose our interest in many things, that’s the reason why for advertising it is important to capture the attention of the viewers in less than 10 seconds or else the advertising it’s pointless. We depend on this social media that we must be engaged so much in it that it is making us stupid, according to Nick Carr.

Social Media in our Society

Social media is very important in our society. It is used for good and for bad. God has given us this great tool to communicate with people all over the world with a click of a button. We are able to get updates on people life's, rate certain items of stores, and even give our opinion of other peoples comments. We are so intact with social media that peolple are actually addicted to it. In the past when we though of an addiction, we always though of food, drinks, and even drugs but now a days we are addicted to social media. Humans spend hours online searching the web to communicate with each other. I can admit that I am slightly addicted to social media. I have a facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Instagram is what I used most and I can say I spend about 2 hours a day on it. That is, 14 hours a week and 56 hours a week. That is a lot for only an application that shows pictures.
For this class i chose to pick twitter to use as my new social media. I never though twitter was useful in my life and though it was a pointless application, but I am looking forward to use it and understand the true use for it's invention. I use Facebook about 4 times a day but it is very quick, so I think about an hour a day. One of the mayor articles that we discussed in class was the fact that Facebook is going to be down 80%. I don't really think that happens to be true. The facts backing it up are very week and just because Google search of Facebook is down doesn't mean anything. I believe that Facebook is evolving tremendously with society that we as society will always use it for many years to come. Maybe it is the teenagers that don't use it as much but once they get older and move away from home and friends, it will be convenient to use Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family.