Journal # 4

"Are you crazy?" This is usually the first response I get when I tell people that I want to teach elementary students. The follow up to this is usually something along the lines of "You know you won't make very much money, right?" Now, I do have people in my life who are supportive of my dream to teach, but there are plenty of skeptics out there. I would be lying if I said that teachers make a killing doing what they do. It is a well known fact that teachers are underpaid and over worked. It takes a special kind of person, but I believe that teaching is what I was MEANT to do.
  After hearing Mauricio Garcia's presentation "Find Your Passion, Live Your Purpose", I am even more confident in my decision to pursue a career in teaching. He made some excellent points in his speech, and the one that jumped out at me most was this; "Money follows passion." When he said this, it all came together. Why would I put myself in the position of working at a job that I hate for my entire life? I know that teaching does not pay loads of money, but I know it is something that I will enjoy. It is something I will love and it is something that I will be passionate about. Another point that Garcia made that really hit home with me was this "Stop caring about what other people think". We are told this our whole lives, but do we ever really listen? Are we not always worried about what other people think? I used to get discouraged when people would make comments about the long hours and low pay teachers endure, but it has gotten to a point where I do not care anymore. I am going to do what makes me happy.

Social Media Essay

Negative Effects of Facebook

What’s on your mind? Such a personal question, yet over a billion people answer that very question on a daily basis. As of December 31, 2012 Facebook has accumulated 1.06 billion users (Facebook). Facebook is used for many things; status updates, photo albums, comments, likes, timelines, advertisements, the list goes on. While Facebook can serve as a great tool to stay in contact with friends and family, both down the street and across the world, it can also have some negative effects on society as a whole.  Not only can Facebook take away the privacy of people and cause problems in both our personal and professional lives, it can also distract us from more important things in life, and keep us from living in the moment. It is for these reasons that Facebook is a detriment to society.

            Founded on February 4, 2004, Facebook’s mission is to “make the world more open and connected” (Facebook). Created by a Harvard student, the site’s original purpose was to connect the students in his school. The site is now one of the largest sites in the world with over 400 million people visiting each month (Carlson). Facebook serves as a great tool for staying connected to friends and family. Members can comment, message, tag, and post photos of themselves and others to tell the story of their lives. With the click of a button, you can find anything from where a person goes to school and where they live, to what they had for lunch that day. With such vast amounts of information available to people at all times, it makes it easy to stay in touch. This can be great for people who live away from their families, or have friends in other parts of the world, but it also makes it easier for people to find things you may not want them to find.

            Privacy issues have plagued users of Facebook since its beginning.  Even with almost constant updates to their privacy policies, Facebook has always had issues in this department. While users control most of what is being made available to those on the outside, hackers can infiltrate someone’s account with even the strictest privacy settings and learn almost anything about them. Privacy International, a watchdog organization, conducted a report on 23 Internet service companies to evaluate their privacy policies. They charged Facebook with severe privacy flaws and placed them in the second lowest category for “substantial and comprehensive privacy threats” (“A Race to the Bottom,” 2007).  The obvious solution to this problem would be to not put anything on the internet that you wouldn’t want someone to see. Many people do not realize, but once you put something on the web, it is there forever. It cannot be erased.

            In addition to privacy issues, many people suffer from problems created in both their personal and professional lives from the result of using Facebook. With everyone always constantly looking to see what everyone else is doing, problems are bound to arise. They can be as simple as someone getting their feelings hurt or becoming jealous, to something more serious, such as cyber bullying. Especially in school age children, bullying is on the rise and is taking place less in the classroom and more so on the internet. With the anonymity that Facebook allows, children can verbally and mentally abuse one another with almost no consequences. The use of Facebook can also affect adults in their professional lives.  Many employers are now looking at prospective employees Facebook and other account pages to see the types of people they plan to hire. If someone has negative or controversial content on their page, it may keep them from getting a job, or in some cases, may cause them to lose a job they already have.

            When is the last time you went a whole day without using the internet? How long can you go without checking your email or updating your status? For many people, they could not imagine a world in which they are not constantly connected to others at all times. Facebook is contributing to this problem. We, as a society, are so concerned with what everyone else is doing all of the time that we fail to live in the here and now. Walk into any restaurant and I can almost guarantee that most of the people who are eating are also using cellphones or laptops. They are talking, texting, or surfing the web. Very few of them are likely to be having a face to face conversation with someone without the distraction of a phone or computer. In the fast paced world that we live in, most people are multitasking at all times. There never seems to be enough time in the day to get everything done and make everyone happy all at the same time. Think back to 10 years ago, before Facebook was even a thought. Could you make it through your day without knowing what your friends had for lunch? Yes, you could, and you could now too if you just lived in the present moment. Log off, sign out, and live in the moment.

            While most would argue that Facebook has revolutionized the way we communicate with one another and brought us together, it has done nothing but push people further apart and create more problems than it has solved. As Albert Einstein once said, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” Only when we decide to end our addiction to social media can we start living more fulfilling and meaningful lives, without the burden of privacy issues, personal problems and distractions that Facebook creates.

Works Cited:

Facebook. N.p., 30 Jan. 2013. Web. 8 Feb. 2013.

Carlson, Nicolas. "At Last -- The Full Story Of How Facebook Was Founded." Business Insider.

            Business Insider, 5 Mar. 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2013.

A race to the bottom: Privacy ranking of internet service companies—A consultation report.

            (2007, June 9). Privacy International.Retrieved 17 Feb. 2013.

Journal 3: Digital Nation

I found the documentary Digital Nation to be very interesting. Technology is such a large part of most people's lives that many of us fail to even realize how much it affects our day to day existence. The part of the movie that I found to be most interesting was the part about multitasking and how it affects our brains.
   Multitasking is something that most people do on a daily basis. I myself am even guilty of taking part in it. At this very moment I have several other tabs open on my computer. Facebook, Yahoo Mail, Pinterest, Blackboard, etc. All of these things serve as distractions from what I should be doing, writing this blog entry. Even as I watched the movie I was busy doing other things, feeding my daughter breakfast, washing a load of laundry, loading the dishwasher. I, like most other people, am usually busy trying to do many things at once. With the luxury  of technology, it is much easier to do this, but is it healthy?
      I really enjoyed the part of the movie where the MIT students where studied. I found it interesting that the students claimed that multitasking was actually making them more efficient thinkers and learners. When the study was done on how their brains reacted to completing many activities at one time, they where proven wrong. The fact that doing many things at once actually slows down our thinking makes me wonder, what could we accomplish if we were not so distracted all of the time?