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.

The Facebook Effect Analysis Pages 107-214

Thefacebook was expanding at an extraordinary rate. Zuckerberg befriended Sean Parker and the two of them began to create this internet sensation into a thriving business. They began talking to many companies all interested in investing in Thefacebook. Parker was the main negotiator and he put in a hard bargain. Parker and Zuckerberg were very interested in working with the Post and Zuckerberg developed a great admiration its CEO Donald Graham. The Post offered a very large investment in the company, but there was many other competitors. One in particular were the partners at Accel. Kevin Efrusy was a venture capitalist in training and he was directed by Jim Breyer, a partner at Accel, to find an up and coming social networking website in which they could invest. Efrusy put a tremendous amount of work into convincing Zuckerberg and Parker to take his deal. At this time they were much more interested in the offer by the Post, but Efrusy did not give up. He did whatever he could to help convince the two to take his offer. As Parker continually turned down Accel, the offers kept coming, each one considerably higher. Finally, Accel came down to an offer that Thefacebook could not refuse. Parker and Zuckerberg were extremely happy with the offer, but Mark was worried about his moral agreement with Graham. With Graham's blessing Zuckerberg decided to go with Accel as long as they agreed to a few minor changes. They wanted Breyer to join the board at Thefacebook and although Efrusy was somewhat offended since he did all the work, he understood. Accel and Thefacebook came to a final agreement and the company was able to expand with all the money Accel had invested. 

Now Thefacebook was in need of better equipment and a larger staff. They invested millions of dollars in servers to make the network run smoother and they needed to find engineers and other workers. Initially they had a very difficult time finding employees. Not many people were willing to work for a company that was run by a bunch of twenty-something year olds and especially with Sean Parker's reputation many people were hesitant. They even tried to convince people to drop out of school to come work for Thefacebook full time. Finally they found people interested in working with the popular and extremely successful company and the eventually had to move from their original location into a bigger space. 

Now they paid specific attention to the features of Thefacebook. They wanted to make it easy to upload new photos and share them with the rest of your social network. Finally they created a platform that was suitable for what they wanted it to do. Photo sharing was a major feature of Thefacebook website. Zuckerberg continually came up with new ideas that he wanted to add to the website and he wrote them all down in a small notebook. He wanted to create a Newsfeed and allow others to add applications to the site for others to use. The employees at Thefacebook were always adding new features and options to the site. They changed the website depending on the new trends of the world in order for it to not become obsolete. Thefacebook showed no signs of slowing down. 

It is incredible that in a few short years the company had expanded into a multi-million dollar enterprise. It  shows how anything is possible if a twenty year old drop-out can create such a successful business. None of this success came to them without a considerable amount of work. They were responsible in their work ethic and every moment was put to creating a better social network and business. Facebook continues to grow and as society changes so do the features of the website. Today, Facebook is just as popular as it was when it first started out and it shows no signs of becoming obsolete any time soon.  

Midterm Presentation Evaluation

Through our evaluations and analysis of the Cloning Wikipedia article we came to realize that this entry was not a very scholarly source. When we researched the information on our own the majority of it seemed to be accurate, but there is no way that this information could hold up in a college research paper or something along those lines. There is too much information that is missing or inaccurate and cannot fully be trusted without outside research. It may be a good idea to browse the citations on the article because they may lead you in the right direction. It can certainly be a good jumping off point.

Wikipedia though is very convenient and it is no wonder that it is the first resource many people view when looking up information. If you just want general knowledge for your own benefit then this is the perfect site to choose, but for all scholarly purposes it is quite flawed. I use Wikipedia for quick facts and information. I constantly use Wikipedia to catch up on Reality TV shows in case I missed them to find out who was eliminated.

Technology has a tremendous effect on our culture. Everything is made so convenient for us that now we have trouble going out of our way to do something. Everyone wants to use Wikipedia as a scholarly source even though we all know it is not, because it is the quickest and easiest tool to find information on whatever we are searching for. It is also amazing how there are so many people who are willing to continually update the material so we are constantly informed with recent news.

I learned that although Wikipedia is always my first stop when it comes to finding information, I must be wary about what I read on the site because I never know what is accurate or not. If I’m just looking for a basic knowledge of something, Wikipedia is a great resource. If the information I need is of grave importance, I might want to view some more scholarly material.