Reflective Blog #5

"Describe how using social networking technologies changes how you communicate with your family and friends."

The ways that social networking has impacted how I communicate with friends is HUGE. There are times where I go weeks or even months without physically talking to friends, yet we will message on Facebook regularly to keep up. The convenience factor is the key here. 

Currently I am planning my 30th birthday party and a scooter rally on Facebook, as well as tracking my attendance at around 10 other events in the next few months. This makes it so I can contact everyone that is going, send reminders, get reminders myself, and search for other events too. 

As far as family goes - I try to avoid them online as much as possible. I have a few family members as friends but I try to keep in touch with them via phone or in person. It is nice, however, to see pictures of my cousins and other family members I don't get to see often.

I feel that the move towards social media and how ingrained in our society it has become is fairly inevitable. I have been a member of various incarnations of social media for nearly 15 years now, and have always known it would be huge. First it was personal home pages, then it was blogs, then it was your Myspace page, now it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and many more that are used every day. 

Reflective Blog #4

"Consider the impact of personal networking devices, in terms of the environment. What do you think are the biggest areas of immediate impact? How about long term impact?"

This is an area I am not hugely familiar with. I think, however, it is easy to see a few potential positives as well as some negatives associated with the environmental impact.

Let's start with the positives -

1. Less wired infrastructure could lead to less large-scale development, construction, and destruction of natural areas.

2. All-in-one digital devices allow access to many things we used to buy individually. Things like newspapers, magazines, books, cameras, video cameras, movies, cds, audio recorders, pdas, etc. are all being combined into singular wireless devices that allow access to most forms of media.

Now, some negatives -

1. Our need as a society to have the newest, fastest, devices often leads to cycling through technology well before it's usefulness has expired. This leads to more production and more waste. Both of which demand natural resources and contribute to pollution.

2. Unknown long-term health impact of large-scale wireless networks and personal devices. Who knows what these wireless signals could end up doing to us and natural over the next 100 years. Maybe nothing, but maybe we will see a huge epidemic of cancer and birth defects.

3. The need to replace old wired infrastructure with wireless infrastructure in buildings will create a large amount of waste when we need to dispose of mountains of old cables and outdated hardware.

4. Increased usage of these services creates more demand for more bandwidth, server space, and more meaning there will be more electricity used, more centers built, and a more impact on the environment. This could potentially be negated by the lowered demand for physical media such as dvds, cds, books, etc., however.

For some additional reading, here are a few interesting articles on the topic of wireless devices and their impact on the environment that I found after writing this up:

http://www.bsr.org/reports/BSR_CTIA_Wireless_and_the_Environment.pdf




http://www.gsma.com/publicpolicy/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/environmobiledevices.pdf

Reflective Blog #3

 "Nothing is really secure - Get over it!"

I think that this statement could be taken a number of different ways, but I am gong to assume that it is meant to tell people to not worry too much about security since everything is so insecure.

This line of thinking is pretty unsafe. Imagine if we applied the same logic to other parts of our lives. "Cars aren't safe so why bother using seat belts?" or "Racism isn't going away - get over it!". It would be a pretty sad fate for us to live out our lives not trying to make things better or improving upon our current systems.

The reality is that nothing is truly secure, true, but that does not mean we shouldn't at least try to make things secure. I'm not going to leave my house unlocked when I leave simply because someone could pick the lock anyway! Doing something as simple as making sure you password protect your WiFi network and choosing the correct security settings for network sharing could be all it takes to prevent someone from accessing your data.

I have a feeling that as wireless technology becomes more and more plastered into our culture, and as people become more tech savvy we will eventually get to the point where people understand the things we need to worry about, but until then I think it is probably a good idea to make every effort to get people to lock their networks down, put passwords or locks on their devices, use passwords that aren't simple, and whatever else they can do without it being a huge issue.

I have a laptop, smart phone, tablet, desktop pc, a wireless network at home, a wireless printer, a hard drive shared on my network, and more that I have to deal with. For me security is a concern, but it is definitely more in the back of my mind. I have passwords set on everything, I make sure that my sharing options are correct, I always put lock screens on my devices, and I try to use different passwords for everything online. I recently started using a password keeper so I could use unique passwords for all websites and not have to worry about forgetting them. Nothing too fancy, and nothing that is very inconvenient.

In the end, however, if someone much smarter than me really wanted to hack into my facebook to read my messages or steal data or get into my network and look at pictures of me hanging out with my dog (how exciting!) they probably could. That doesn't mean I won't try!

Reflective Blog #2

While the price of a acquiring a cell phone and associated service is going down, the cost of using a cell phone and associated service is going up. What do you think is meant by this statement?

I got my first cell phone in 2000 when I was 17 years old. It was a Motorola Startac flip phone with 3 lines of green text. No graphics, no colors, no games. If I remember correctly the phone was free and the service was $35/month for unlimited local service and a 1 year contract. Most people I know got pennies for a penny or around $50. The fees for roaming and long distance were absurd - but the monthly contracts were totally reasonable.

Now, however, we pay hundreds of dollars for our phones (depending on how inclined you are to have the newest/hottest tech), we are locked into 2-year contract, and our service is more expensive than ever. Between our monthly minutes, texting, and internet, it isn't unheard of to pay $100 for a single line of service. That may or may not include unlimited internet, but generally it does not. It also would not include the ability to tether your phone to other devices, to leave the country with your phone (without paying insane costs), and "unlimited" generally comes with a few limiting factors (eg they will throttle your bandwidth if you dare to actually make good use of the service you pay for).

But why? Why are we still paying huge amount of money for a service that is now used by, literally, billions of people worldwide. The best answer I can come up with is that the cell providers A. don't want to eat their infrastructure costs for upgrades such as 4g and new towers so they pass on these costs directly to the consumers in the form of inflated prices for things such as texts (really, 25 cents per text message in 2013?), overpriced internet, and no reduction over time once their costs have been recouped. B. they see the demand for service and lack of many other options so they are able to keep the prices high and C. their is little perceived demand for competition or innovation so the companies can do as they wish.

Infrastructure costs may be high, but I wonder how much longer cell companies are going to have the current hold they have on the market. Between smaller companies offering extremely competitive prices and VOIP services such as Skype, Gchat, and now Facebook, there are many options for those who don't wish to pay for these services.

Staying in Touch

For this post I will be discussing "What technology do you use to 'stay in touch' and why?"

The ways in which we stay in touch are many and include obvious things such as postal mail, telephone (land line and cell), texting, email, Skype,  Facebook, blogs, photo sharing sites, and more. Many of us today use a combination of these to keep in touch with one another. I would wager that the younger generation leans towards using Facebook, texting, and email as their main ways to keeping touch but for many these technologies have not yet taken hold.

As for me, I am almost purely digital. I keep in touch with my family and friends via Facebook, communicate with instructors and classmates via email. I do use the phone to talk to family and friends, but mainly just family these days. I text when I need info, and planning meetups usually involves a Facebook invite and maybe a text as a reminder. Skype has started to become common enough that I do on occasion use that, but it seems as if most people have not yet embraced the idea of video chat.

Looking at how this has evolved over the past 15 years or so of my life is pretty incredible. I am just old enough that cell phones weren't really affordable or widely used until I was a senior in High School and I still remember the days of 32.6 baud modems. I dialed into AOL every day after school from 9th grade until we got cable internet when I was in 11th. This period of my life completely changed my communication style. I went from always having to either call someone or go directly to their house to simply emailing or texting them. No longer did I write notes to friends, I simply sent IMs. And once webcams became available I remember chatting with people across the country for the first time and being amazed.

For me, digital communication is what I am comfortable with. I feel safe and confident behind a keyboard. I feel more able to express myself and I am able to keep track of things as well. I am a very unorganized person "offline", but on my computer I know right where everything is and how to find it if I don't. It is a matter of interest, convenience, and maybe a little because I hate making phone calls. And a lot because my handwriting is terrible.

First post for networking

I have been blogging off and on for 13 years now. I have never really maintained a blog meant for other people to read, I have just always posted things about my life, my interests, photos, etc. So, while I feel comfortable writing blog entries - it is somewhat new for me to write focused blog entries on specific topics for class. 

Two blogs that I love are BoingBoing.net and 2StrokeBuzz.com. BoingBoing is a blog that talks about technology, culture, and almost anything else. They always post really interest things. 2StrokeBuzz is a blog about the scooter scene. I love old Vespa and Lambretta scooters and this blog talks about scooter rallies, new products, and reviews gear and scooters as well. 

Case Study 3

For this assignment we were to review the same news story from 3 different international sources. I chose to cover the release of secret emails detailing Osama Bin Laden's burial at sea.

My sources were as follows:

1. Aljazeera - Secret details of Bin Laden burial revealed

2. New York Daily News - Internal emails offer details on Osama Bin Laden's Burial

3. Daily Mail - Revealed: Military emails show that NO U.S. sailors witnessed Osama Bin Laden's secret burial at sea

The Associated Press were able to successfully invoke the Freedom of Information Act to obtain e-mails about the burial of Osama Bin Laden. These e-mails detailed the delivery of Bin Laden's body as well as the process of the burial such as the fact that they followed Islamic burial practices in preparing his body.

One thing that all three articles pointed out was the fact that while the Obama administration has made the promise to be transparent and open with the public, this is has been one of the most secretive operations in recent history. No photographs or video have been released and even the burial was done secretly. The articles all point out that while it was done on a Navy ship, no naval/military personal that were not high ranking were in attendance or knew about it. The Daily News article even pointed out that the Pentagon has said they have no records of DNA results, a death certificate, or autopsy report.

The differences are few and far between. Stylistically they were all very similar and I felt they seemed fairly balanced and free of much political or social bias, but I did notice that the article from the NY Daily News focused a bit more on the actual capture and killing of Bin Laden, even going so far as ending the article with a fairly graphic quip about his death - "Their target ducked into his bedroom, where SEALs chased and plugged him with one shot to the chest and one to the head." It seems like a fairly strange way to end the article but maybe because it is American, and specifically it is from New York, they know that their demographic likely has a much more personal connection with the story.

As far as where the stories were located, it was fairly easy to find them. For Al Jazeera I simply clicked on the "Americas" link and it was one of the top stories. For NY Daily News, it was listed under News and World. For Daily Mail it was under News and Headlines. So all were fairly visible, but on Al Jazeera it was the easiest to find.

Ultimately I found myself surprised by how similar each of the articles were. I imagine this is due to the fact that the information was (from what I gathered) originally released by the Associated Press and so these journalists were all working from the same source material. I found the Daily Mail article to be slightly more interesting due to the extra photos and a few extra facts given and the Daily News article to the be the least due to the unnecessary inclusion of graphic details about Bin Laden's death, but ultimately they were all pretty similar and reflected the same information.