Tech Final Blog Post #3

I finished the final paper by 11:30pm. I was happy with the way it turned out. I analyzed the book the best as I could and thought I was able to come up with a pretty good argument. I really enjoyed this book and felt that it had a lot of good points. All the books we read in the class shaped my outlook on the way technology affects our culture. I really have learned a lot in this class and enjoyed the discussions we had in our class. It allowed me to examine the many different viewpoints and perspectives that society has on our culture.  The media truly does have a dramatic effect on the way we live our lives and we all must decided what type of media is beneficial and what is just for the purpose of entertainment.

Websites

One website that I have visited that has been extremely useful for me was www.cookingbynumbers.com. I am a sophomore this semester and living off campus on my own has created many obstacles. One in particular is cooking for myself each day. I got a minimal meal plan this year and needed to be able to prepare a meal with what I had in my refrigerator. Being away from home and not having the constant support from my parents I was forced to buy my own food and didn't have every ingredient at all times. This is where this website came in handy. The website allowed you to plug in everything you had in your food cabinet and it would come back with recipes that you had all the ingredients for. This helped me out on many occasions and provided many delicious meals. Unfortunately this website is no longer online, there are many other website that were inspired by it.

Tech Final Blog Post #2

I am in the middle of writing my paper now. Everything is coming together nicely and I am finding that writing about this topic is quite enjoyable. The main idea of my paper is that our society is conditioned to buy products based on convenience instead of extended, long time use. Every product is now designed around its ease as opposed to its durability. Basically we have became extremely lazy as a society and if something is not made to be easy we are often reluctant to do it. This is why many of our products have become disposable to decrease the amount of care and upkeep we need to maintain them. Although this is convenient for us, it does create a lot of waste putting a strain on our environment. There are many attempts to "Go Green", but many of its practices require some effort, which is a turn off to many people. The only way the "Go Green" initiative will catch on is if due to advanced technology, green alternatives become more convenient. I will write my final post once I am done with the entire paper.

Tech Final Blog Post #1

I chose to write my essay based on Made to Break by Giles Slade. I based this decision on the fact that I enjoyed this book much more than Technopoly and the author's writing style was much easier to follow than the writing of Neil Postman.  In order to complete this assignment I decided to re-read over the important topics in Made to Break to create my argument. I did research on our "disposable society" and "going Green" and used specific examples in Made to Break to support my argument. I outlined my thoughts and now I am ready to start putting everything together and writing my paper. I will write a follow-up blog once I am done with the whole essay.

The Facebook Effect Analysis Pages 215-325

Facebook had blown up far beyond anyone had ever expected in its early stages. Facebook was now being valued at over a billion dollars. Zuckerberg continually tried to come up with new and innovative ideas to expand Facebooks social connection. His next endeavor was to create a platform for third party developers to create applications that would expand Facebook’s features. It was announced at the f8 convention and was an immediate success. Entire companies were based around creating applications for Facebook and made enough money to survive. Today, it is its own industry.

Facebook’s “social” applications had an automatic advantage over similar applications that were on external sites, a huge built in user base. As Kirpatrick writes of an interview with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “ Our photo site lacks features that anyone would built,” Zuckerberg told me in early May 2007, “ We don’t store high resolution photos. The printing function is down right bad. And until recently you couldn’t even change the order of photos in an album. And yet somehow, this application became the most trafficked photo site on the Internet by far,” (216). They also had created an online invitation application called Events, that developers put almost no effort into and yet, it became much larger than similar website Evite.com. They even allowed you to log into other site with your Facebook account log-in, which many of the executives advised against, but Zuckerberg pushed it through to create a greater social experiene. Finally, Zuckerberg didn’t want to make it the site like a cable TV commercial, so they devised a way to integrate information from the user’s profile to target the advertisements towards their interests.

Facebook has become one of the most highly visited websites on the Internet. Mark Zuckerberg started the site out of his dorm room and now it has become a billion dollar company. Much of Facebook’s success could be attributed to Zuckerberg’s continued involvement in decision-making and new developments. He was quoted as saying that he would not sell Facebook unless he could stay involved with the company. Facebook will continue to grow and expand with the ever changing society.