Research Log #3

Social Lives and Social Media

The ever increasing role of technology in our lives is portrayed in a humorous but predictive manner in a cartoon by Mick Stevens. In the visual a just born baby clutches a tablet device and exclaims something it has read off of it, presumably a Facebook status.  This visual attempts to show that technology is affecting children at younger and younger ages as time goes on.  The current and future generation will grow up with technology and its social media and will presumably heavily rely on it more than people in today's society.  Since we manage our lives through the technology we use games and social media have a better chance of accessing us through this technology.  The example of blogging in "Social Media and Young Adults" is an example of how our society is pushed to be more streamline and communication is expected to be fast.  Long, detailed blogs and dwindle to simple one sentences on Facebook or under 140 characters on Twitter.  This can also be seen in the decline of reading for pleasure in our generation, instead of reading lengthly blogs, people are skimming through short statuses about breakfast eating habits and the status of relationships.  Entertainment through this social media is now not meant to be time consuming but used whenever the person is bored for short durations.  Interactions between people and friends have evolved as more and more people create a Facebook or twitter account.  Through games such as "Farmville" or "Words with Friends" people interact solely through a screen and keypad instead of face to face.   Social media is not necessarily used for entreatment, but for monitoring a person's online status.  In Clive Thompson's article "I'm so Totally, Digitally Close to You" a women with a Facebook profile is mentioned as saying she has to monitor her profile to delete unflattering or unwanted pictures or see if people are talking about her.  This issue portrays the negative aspect of being so connected to everyone; everyone knows everyone's "life" with one click of a mouse.  A questions arises, how well does our online selves portray our real life selves?  This is a second issue of social media, it can be unreliable and false.  Through this growing use of technology for future generations, caution is advised.