Final Thoughts

After writing this paper, I learned what it meant for modern-day colleges to be technopolies. I can understand that the colleges control the decision making for students for their field of study. But this is not as bad as it sounds. Colleges control which field a student can study, but they are deciding the best opportunity in the best interest of the student's future. These technological tools allow students to browse their options predetermined by the college and manage the required courses for graduation. These tools are intended to aid and assist the student in making the right decision. When students choose not to use the decision making tools properly it usually results in problems. Colleges can be considered technopolies but when the system is used the way it was intended for, then Colleges can be considered good technopolies.

Not only has this paper educated me on topics our society is experiencing as i type, but the class as a whole has as well. After the final paper, i felt as though everything was brought together well about the dilemmas of a generation where technology plays a humongous role in everyones lives. The debate of whether we are a spoiled generation that take advantage of the advance tools that surround us has brought up my awareness. I will be eager to see how the next generation will be portrayed and how they adapt to the technological resources that will most likely be more advanced then the technology today.

Final Assignment Progress Blog 1

Just started my final paper today, so far so good, but i find myself getting distracted easily due to something called facebook. I am assuming this is what was meant by tracking your progress while writing the final paper, if not this is part of my progress anyways. I'm sure other students have faced this dilemma as well, while writing their papers. Facebook has gotten to the point where it is a necessity to check, as much as an email account. Students are posting up statuses that are all similar in someway since every student is going through the same thing. "Oh i hate finals" or "I hate studying" or "I just want winter break to come!" And under all those statuses you can find hundreds of likes and comments because other students take mini breaks from their work to check up on their friends. Also another thing was, when i came to the library i knew the place would be packed with students who were working on papers and studying for finals, so i whipped out my laptop, went to facebook, wrote on my status, "is anyone at alexander library" and sure enough i got a few responses in a less than a minute. I am writing about technopolies and the use of technology in colleges. This is one incident that I used facebook in a way to help me get my work done. A nice place to sit and concentrate. Back to my paper.

The Social Network

From what i can take from the movie. The movie portrays Marc Zuckerburg as an asshole pretty much who is self indulged and focused solely on the success of his website. He does not pay attention to his close friends and makes friends with people who do not really care about him like his true friend. I keep hearing that The Social Network story is a bit misleading. Though it is true that the brothers who claim that Zuckerburg stole their idea at Harvard and are still in settlement agreements in court. The Social Network for the most part is based on the real story of the development of facebook and little is fictional. It is just a Hollywood spin on the story and is making a big impact in the theaters. The director is the same guy who did "21" which is a movie about the MIT students who counted cards in vegas to cheat the game of blackjack and make money. I do not have a problem with The social network movie. Nowadays, everything is over-exaggerated and taken out of context a little bit to make room for a better outlook and final product for better entertainment. The social network was the best movie ive seen in a long time, other than the length of the movie, everything else was very entertaining and interesting. In class we discussed how people perceive time when it comes to facebook, this was portrayed in the movie in the scene of the crew race. When the old man was like, "my daughter at another school already has heard about the close lost on something called facebook". It is true that we are more connected through facebook and we are updated by the click of a button. I would suggest that you incorporate this movie into the "Technology and Culture in America" course. Since we were the first class when this movie came out we could not really go deep into its possibilities of being an academic resource. Facebook is the future and the future of this class, i think, will be based on the capabilities of facebook. I give this film, 2 thumbs up and 9.5/10. Without this extra credit assignment, i dont think i wouldve went to see this movie, i was not interested and it seemed boring. But im glad i got to experience a great movie, based on a revolution that I am apart of today.

Facebook Effect 3rd Part pg. 214-333

At this point of the Facebook effect by David Kirkpatrick, it begins to introduce the platform that was integrated into Facebook. This allowed users to use applications on the interface of the website. At this time, myspace was still more known than facebook. But at the offices of Palo Alto were being filled with employees at a steady rate. Facebook seemed to be growing at a fast rate and it seemed to have trouble keeping up with its own growth. The new Platform allowed facebook users to play games such as the Texas Holdem and later on a bunch of other games would create crazes for the facebook community. These application companies were doing extremely well due to the success of facebook itself, "There are more than 500,000 applications operating on Facebook, created by over 1 million registered developers from 180 countries" (232). The Facebook company would form many partnerships with many application companies.

Due to the rapid growth of Facebook, Facebook needed to raise money to pay for more servers to keep the site running properly. They had begun thinking about advertisements on facebook and ended up getting a deal for 15 billion dollars. At this time Google pretty much was in control of over half of the advertisement online. And Google wanted to buy Facebook from Zuckerburg for less than 15 billion. But Zuckerburg was not at all interested.

Facebook spread around the whole world changing society not only in the states, but in different countries as well. Countries with dirt roads would have facebook. It has become an epidemic of the world's society and who knows where the end of facebook is. So far there seems to be none in sight. Zuckerburg's intentions were to create a social bound between people but being able to protect people's personal information at the same time. So far i think facebook has been a staple in American society and is considered part of the society as well. So if you do not have a facebook you may be considered not part of a social network and seem to be the outcast in terms of social situations.

Facebook Effect 2nd part pg 107-214

In the 2nd part of the Facebook effect by David Kirkpatrick, how Thefacebook got off the ground is being discussed. As all starting companies, Thefacebook needed investors to jump start the project. An investor named Warren Buffet came to Zuckerberg and Graham's office in Palo Alto, "He said the arrical of Buffet was a transformative moment in the life of the company" (108-109). What the investors like the most about Thefacebook was the audience it targeted and how much the audience interacted with the website on a daily basis. Like the poll on the Class Website now, the question is how often do you sign onto facebook. For the most part people sign on ATLEAST 3-5 times according to the poll but im sure that students check facebook more than that. American society is obsessed with social interaction and facebook, "...what drives them is their extreme interest in their friends - what they are doing, what they are thinking, and where they are going" (107). In Fall 2005, Thefacebook changed its name to Facebook and broadened its targeted audiences, "Facebook was no longer just a college phenomenon" (150). At this point, Facebook continues to grow at a rapid rate and sees no end of success. In 2006, the News Feed Application was added to Facebook. This allowed friends to see top news of what their friends were doing without having to go to their individual page "The News Feed would be a radical change. "It's not a new feature, it's a major a product evolution...It would remake Facebook" (182). At the end of the section we needed to read, Kirkpatrick talks about privacy on Facebook. He said, "The reality is that nothing on Facebook is really confidential. The company's own privacy policy is blunt on this score" (204). I have not read Facebook's privacy policy because i do not really care, but i agree with Kirkpatrick. We have discussed this in class one day, about how users are able to set their privacy options to who is able to see their information and what information they are allowed to access. But there are little ways here and there that your 'Face', info, and you personal matters you post on facebook to leak out to the world wide public. Facebook is not perfect and in terms of privacy i do not think it will ever be perfect. Americans need to learn that when you enter these types of societies where there is a mass number of people invloved, someway, somehow things you do not want strangers to know will get to them eventually. That is unless you do not put anything up in the first place.

Call of Duty influences Violence?

So after the last class where one group presented the Wikipedia article "GTA", the class discussed about how kids were influenced by games such as Grand Theft Auto (the kid who killed 3 cops) and Counter Strike (the kid from Vtech). Many believe that kids are easily influenced by social media and socialism. Kids who are exposed to other kids who do bad things like drugs, drink and sex are more likely to get involved. Now these games are rated M for mature for a reason. Meaning that you should not be playing the game unless you are 18 years of age. Otherwise, the parents are in control of the content their kids are exposed to and should not allow their kids to play these games if they think it is going to have this effect on them.

That being said throughout the week i was watching TV and a Call of Duty: Black Ops commercial came on. Black Ops is a First person shooter, taken place in Vietnam with Vietcong Guerrilla soldiers fighting against US special forces. But the commercial used known celebrities and professional sports players. The idea behind it was that these celebrities were holding guns acting as if they were the soldier in the game. And the slogan of the commercial was "there's a soldier in all of us". I thought this was exactly what we were talking about in class and thought it'd be nice to post this up. These war video game producers are trying to reach out to young kids and make them believe that they can be just like these soldiers and be a killing machine. If i were a parent i would not let my kids play this game until i thought they were mature enough to not take it seriously.

http://www.youtube.com/user/CALLOFDUTY?v=Pblj3JHF-Jo&feature=pyv&ad=7241155292&kw=black%20ops%20commercial

Midterm Wikipedia Audit Process

I think the Wikipedia Audit process was a good project for this class. It gives us insight on the Wikipedia Articles and Entries by showing us that some articles are almost useless for scholarly work. Most of the professors ive had at Rutgers, if not all, do not allow students to use Wikipedia as a source for research papers. I agree with this, Wikipedia should not be used as a scholarly source to research topics. As we have discussed in class, it can be used to look up a subject for a broad overview, but for detailed facts and points, the subject should be backed up by other sources such as news sources or medical journals for example. The Wikipedia's strength is to have a common place for people to search topics they are not familiar with to get familiarized with it, but it's weakness comes into play when it needs to be used in a scholarly manner.

As we all know, the American society is somewhat lazy to say the least. Technology, i believe, has had a big impact on American laziness. Since encyclopedias were all made of paper before Wikipedias addition to online search engines, people have become dependent on technology to get tasks done faster than they could before. Bottom line, technology has given individuals all this information readily available at their finger tips in mere seconds. And it has effected American culture tremendously in terms of a lazy and spoiled society.

Overall this project was a well designed assignment. The only thing i would say about the process is announcing the assignment earlier in the term to allow for students to organize better and create even better presentations. Other than that, i enjoyed auditing a Wikipedia article and have become aware of the liability of the sources in Wikipedia articles and the pages content.