Phone Addiction

The other day I was in a car with a friend of mine when I reached for my pocket. I didn't feel any vibration and I didn't hear any rings but I reached for my phone anyways. The funny thing was that I didn't even have my phone with me, it was in a backpack in the trunk. I found myself with a slight feeling of anxiety.

There are 2 problems here.
1. I reactively went for my phone once I was in a quiet, unstimulating situation.
2. I was getting anxious when I realized I wasn't in direct contact with it.

I feel like this happens a lot. Not just to me, but also my friends, it seems all too common. Why are we addicted to our phones and go through slight degrees of withdrawal when we don't have it? I believe it is because we see our phones as a piece of us.

The cell phone is no longer just a tool to get into contact but instead it IS the only way that we seem to communicate. Our phones are essentially our voices in this media ridden, social networking plagued society and being disconnected is a cardinal sin.

I wish I didn't NEED my phone but how else will I be able to know when people text me or when I get a comment on a photo posted to Facebook or Twitter?!

Memes

I am constantly on an image sharing website known as Imgur. This site is a wonderful online community where people attempt to not only share their funny pictures and art work but also to share both heart wrenching and grotesque stories; All through different interesting images. Among these images are things known as memes which come from the Greek-Latin root that means repetition.

These repeated images include favorites like "success kid," "overly attached girlfriend," and "confession bear." These memes effectively work as a symbolic meaning through image. The interesting thing about these memes are that all the while that they are common and repeated by nature the captions and creative spins that users can place on them generates a whole new meaning.

The use of memes are not just limited to imgur, reddit or 9gag. These memes are more or less what defines internet humor because of their reproducibility and easy creation. Memes are not limited to the digital medium but are more or less what makes the internet unique.

Online Piracy

Everything is posted to the internet! Music, movies, research articles, books and even your paper on Abraham Lincoln. The way we share files and information is so expedient that we hardly think about where they come from. However, there are rules in place to make sure that people aren't profitting on the work of others.

The number one example that I wanted to talk about is music. The honest and ethical people will use sites like iTunes, Spotify or Pandora to get their music. As for the rest of us with more blurred principles will download music with software to rip the sound off of youtube videos or visit The Pirate Bay.

The access to music is virtually limitless. With "Fair Use" laws and copyright protection it may seem risky to be downloading things off of various sites. I am not here to talk legalities but instead ethics.

I have always operated under the values that music is an artistic expression and as a musical artist the aim is not to make money but to get their music out. Therefore it is actually a benefit in a way to the artist to download their music, whether legal or not, because it provides exposure! If a band is good enough and gets enough notoriety it should prompt people to go to their concerts to see them live.

Cyber-Bullying

Cyber-bullying has taken up a huge part of the social critique of internet interactions. There is an increasing concern that youth are being harassed and bullied by one another. The most extreme concern appears to be derived from the Amanda Todd case.

If you don't know about Amanda Todd check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej7afkypUsc

The cases of teen suicide and self-harm as a result of cyber-bullying have been blown way out of proportion to make it appear as if these violent endings are the result of every instance of cyber-bullying. There is no doubt that there is the potential for the harmful effects but they make up a very small percentage in the grand scheme.

I side with the idea that the actions seen as cyber-bullying are more or less "meanness" than oppression. Bullying requires a higher and lower social standing but online people are all on a relatively equal plane.

No doubt there are some pretty negative consequences of cyber-bullying but in the long run it falls in place with any other teenage "meanness" that has been shown through out time. Over the years people have found a way to poke fun and make life hard on one another, in this day and age where a lot of communication is done via internet, it is just the way teens have found to be mean to each other.

Champions of YouTube

YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the internet where you can watch anything from music videos to dumb homemade stunt videos. I myself have even gone to YouTube for school work; the site offers a multitude of "how-to" and "so-and-so explains" type videos. However, one thing is sought out by these people placing videos on the web.

Views. Views. Views.

The more views a video has helps it pop up closer to the top of the search results. The more time your video is viewed the immediate result is general popularity. There are a handful of music artist that have found stardom because of their cover, or original work, that are posted. The other benefits, ones that viewers tend to get impatient with, are advertisements.

When you come upon a video with millions of views on YouTube; say the classic "Charlie bit my finger" video. The 30 sec long video shows two very young children, one a toddler and an infant, and the infant bites the toddlers finger. That's it. No special effects. No entrancing dialogue. The family received more than $100,000 for the simple video. The advertisements give the publisher such a small amount of money per view but when you multiple how ever much the royalty is by millions and millions, there is some money involved.

Outside of the financial gain possibility YouTube offers a visual encyclopedia of cultures. It is a wonderful place to go view whatever you want to see. It is where people can act on any impulse; to go from "how to cook a pot roast" to "double back flip motorcross" or where ever your mind is wandering. Much like Google, YouTube offers people a unique place to access visual information and entertainment of any and every type.

Friend Count

There's some interesting trends among Facebook user's that I've noticed over the past couple years. From high school to college, Facebook's utility seems to change. I can vividly remember for the early years it was my goal to obtain as many "friends" as I could on Facebook. The number grew and grew. People I met at camps or went to school with, everyone was getting friended. There was no discrimination. 

As time passed and I got to college I realized how dense my newsfeed was getting. I was getting updates about people I either hardly talked to in the real world or people I had no interest in knowing what their weekend plans were. With nearly 1000 friends, I wanted to start thining the herd so to speak. My goal was to whittle down the "friends" to people I actually cared about, or had some practical reason for a connection.

I sat down at my computer and started a mass purge. If I hadn't talked to a person or cared to talk to a person within the last year, they were getting "defriended." It got tedious clicking on each individual profile. I devised a new method. When their birthday notifications would pop up on my newsfeed, I would decide if they were going to stay or would be gone. 

How'd you like that? Happy birthday! You're not my friend anymore. 

I've found this method to work because it does not require a whole lot of thought and achieves what I wanted with a more "pure" Facebook. I found that by purging old aquatences that bothered my newsfeed I enjoyed my experience on Facebook even more. 

When I would go to scan my feed, I started to notice myself actually engaging in what I was seeing. Instead of seeing pictures of some guys family I had met once, I started seeing a lot more of my real-world friends and their activities. I feel that I lost a good chunk of aquatences but gained a better scope of my real friends and classmates.

Googlizing Our Lives

There is no doubt that Google is an integral part of the mainstream internet experience! It does everything from search engines to communication through google docs and google hangouts. However, does this technology juggernaut have too much power??

I think that there is a clear power imbalance on the web. Google runs more than half of the online advertisements and is one of the most poplar search engines. Google seems to be a part of every web page, whether it was the engine we used to find the page or the customized search bar in the top corner, or even the advertisements you see on the page that magically know what you want to buy.

All this being said I love Google, it provides a somewhat streamlined internet experience and their seemingly good natured intentions to provide the most relative and accurate search results makes it a valuable web resource. Though there is a huge company that knows what you look at on the internet, and may save some of your private information, there are few companies that provide the service that Google does.

There is an argument that states that Google is making us stupid, but I disagree. Though the company makes relevant information more accessible, we have adapted as a culture to learn how to find precisely what we are looking for. Though the machine does a lot of work for us, there is still the necessity on the human end to know what you are looking for. I would say Google is making us smarter in that it offers us the opportunity to discover more about whatever we are curious about.