Essay 4-Information beauty

Information overload

Every morning after I get up, I start my computer and open MSN, Gmail, face book, Flikr, My Space, Last.FM to check if everything is OK with me and see the latest updates of my friends. Then, if I want to relax, I surf on YouTube and Google Reader to read interesting news and videos. I know I spend too much time on Internet, however, I can not control myself and get addiction to Internet. Why? It seems I know what is good and what is dangerous, but I can not stop my car only because I don’t want to get lost.

Two-way communication

Digital media has changed our communication methods. In traditional media, our mass people are more like listeners. Computer and Internet technology has transformed it into two-way communication which means viewers are becoming co-producers. New technology not only brings us convenience of life but also give us high information pressure. In order to catch up with new technology, people are becoming more nervous and even got ‘Information allergy’. Some people can not adjust to the mess which is brought by information technology and they got the dieses of ‘Information trepidation’. They feel uncomfortable after getting to know some information and always worry about losing other information. Actually, I think the philosophy is very simple: there are too many information today, so make a quick decision and make this decision to be the right one.

Recently, a rule comes out in China which is to define people who get addiction to computer games like ‘World of War Craft’ as mental disease. Talking about the value of spending time on Internet, I think there is no standard to say what is valuable to everyone. If one really get happy when playing ‘World of War Craft’, so why not? No one have rights to judge the meaning of other people’s lives and happiness if personal feeling.

Information beauty

From my point of view, the important thing for social media is to transfer information in a more beautiful way and reconstruct the way we gather information. Information is a kind of product, so product needs quality. And the purpose of information is giving viewers some kind of power. Some information can make goods sell well and some may make us feel shock and give us deep impression. The first stage of information beauty is clear which means make viewers get the point easily and the second stage is unique which means bring fresh thinking and innovative thinking and the last stage is humorous which means make people feel happy except for getting the key point of the information.

Essay 4 – Virtual friend = Real friend?

To begin this essay I started by asking myself the question; What is a friend? To answer that question I would say that a friend is someone who loves you and needs you just as much as you love and need them, who you can share your feelings and thoughts with, can have fun with, and can call at random just to talk. When thinking about this it came clear to me that I have many different types of friends, which I have divided into three groups for clearing things out. One group that is my closest friends that I share pretty much everything with. The other that includes friends that I meet and call on regularly basis but as I wouldn’t refer to as best friends and the third which includes people I would refer to as friends but which I don’t meet often or even talk to on the phone regularly for different reasons.
So with this background I will go back to the question for this seminar; can virtual friends replace our real friends? Are we less dependent of human relationships these days? In one of my previous essays I mentioned that in the global society of today we connect and meet so much more people compared to just a few decades ago. We have the opportunity to travel a lot and see the world which makes our social connections even larger. I believe that different social medias like for example Facebook can in a certain degree help us to easier maintain certain social connections, but in general it is mostly the friends that I defined in group number three that really needs this help. This is the friends that we probably would loose contact with if it weren’t for the social medias. Our closer friends on the other hand which I defined in group number one and two are people that never can be replaced by technology. I don’t believe that sites like Facebook are replacing these real friends with virtual friends because a friend in the real world posses so many qualities that can’t possible be reflected on the Internet. These sites rather help us to connect with people on a more shallow level.
And so I will end this short essay with a quote:

“Life is a balancing act; a friend is the safety net. Love may make the world go around, but a real friend keeps you from falling off.”

Essay 4- Negative effects of social media

New media technologies and Mash -up of social network are providing lot of ease to people but I think some compact negative effects also generated by social media. May be the visualization of those effects is not seen at present but in future these will show its symptoms. Different people argue in different ways, My experience is this, I have left or it seem to me that abilities of the making analysis in depth are decreasing, I mean social activities reduced my physical and educational activities. When you read things on your behalf you have some strong arguments and knowledge, you think more and try to be creative and love to discover some things but new technology and social solutions make the things to easy that we do not feel to use our own skills all the time. So according to my point of view self confidence is lost in previous few years, for example instead reading of some books we trust more on something written on Wikipedia and some blogs and derived some desired solutions , just need of some mixing and base knowledge. Not all but many people are doing so, especially student community.
I have observed that students are sitting in class and they are more interested in the social networks or online social activities than their lectures, now it really a common practice to spend the time to get rid from other. Chatting is positive but excessive chat not only put effects on your mental, physical state but at the same time is source of wastage of time.
If we look in generalized frame we will find that without knowing about results sometime we spend our time on social networks like youtube, on gaming websites that can be used in more productive work and we realize it sometime but ignore every time our developed habits. Now a day’s people are more interfering in the privacy of other on the behalf of social media like Facebook and other, straight forward comments or usage of unnecessary language in discussion mess up other members of social network which can create a social space between the different groups. I have observed it seem that society is centralized on a social network, I think actually people are subdivided into different groups and sects within the network which have strong opposition, feeling against each other and some time they show. This can be dangerous in the future for social networks. Again as we discussed earlier essay we are losing qualities of selection vs. quantity. I have written things on my experiences more which I felt so essay is based on my assumptions.

Essay 4 – Negative effects of social media: lost the ability of independent thinking

In the article of Is Google Making Us Stupid, the author mentioned that he kind of lost the ability or patient for a long text book. And it did happen to me as well. I remember that when I was at high school, most of my time is spent at school having lessons and reading the text books and Even when I got home, I didn't use internet to assist my study a lot, which means that I study without the help of internet. As a matter of fact, most of my knowledge is accumulated during that time. I am not saying that internet might disturb my study, but I do assume that I couldn't have achieved it if I used internet a lot then, which is based on my situation now.

I feel like I depend too much on internet now, especially regarding to my study pattern. In the past, the focus of my learning is the knowledge itself including memorizing the principles or the explanations to the word or the text, the logical analysis steps for answering the certain questions, the practical usage of the knowledge and so on. And I answered every question by the knowledge in my mind or turn to the text book I had in hand or ask for my teacher or classmates' help, neither of which is internet. I was so independent of internet. And now, the focus of my learning is to find out all the relevant information to what I'm learning, since I think as long as I can get access to this information, I get the answer. So it is not necessary to memorize all of the text or go really deep into it, the only thing I need to do is to grasp the general ideas of it and some influential information relevant to the same area, which would make my learning more efficient. I did like this since I entered university, and I was indeed costumed to learn dependently on the internet.

However, I find that I am not that efficient like what I expected, since I was often got drowned by too much information, so most of my efforts are put on filtering the useful ones out of all, which are supposed to devote into independent thinking of answers or solutions. The initial aim of using Google or Wiki is to use that information to give me some inspiration, but it often ended up with an already available and even better solution than mine. So what I usually thought is why not I just adding something based on it instead of coming up with something else merely by myself.

That was just my story about internet changing my way of learning, but I do believe it is not just me, since it is just so easy to be caught by other's great ideas; it is so nature to follow those popular trends; it is so comfortable to just sit in a great and available conceptual idea framework; it is also so efficient to built up your own ideas just on other's great ones… Nothing cost nothing, so what might be the cost of such beautiful thing? I am afraid that it is our ability of independent thinking and future innovative ideas. And it is really disturbing to read the sentence like "The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children." which is form the article: Informing Ourselves to Death.

I would like to post a presentation here, which has very sharp opinions about the dark side of social media. In the last five minutes, the presenter talked about the downsides of social media, which is articulated better than my statements. So again, I think it is no need for me to say more, just let James Surowiecki to finish my arguments here. And it is being a paradox again, am I doing the right thing or not? What about you telling me when you finish the presentation.