Response to Digital Nation

            Honestly without a doubt, I believe that the more popular Facebook becomes, the more people feel the need to want to be part of the Facebook community, and I cannot blame them and I know it isn’t going to stop any time during this decade.  I believe that social networks, especially Facebook and Myspace bring both positives and negative to society, making it difficult for me to make a decision on whether they are good or bad for us. Some of the negatives of social networking are the amount of hours people spent on these websites, easily allowing themselves to become distracted. This mostly affects students, and I imagine young graduates. I have so many friends that would get into this mode where they are ready to get homework/projects started and completed but the minute they sit in front of a laptop, boom, that’s it. They log into their Facebook accounts and end up looking at a thousand photos of uselessness and end up commenting on everyone’s status and walls, in the end, wasting their own time. These same people tend to be the ones that “need” to have 24/7 access to their accounts.

            The worst thing about these social networks is that it, in some cases, it forces people to change who they are on these profiles. For instance, students who are looking for careers, or even just jobs tend to change their whole account/profile because of this conspiracy that employers research possible candidates’ Facebook profile and decide thru it whether to hire the person or not. So as a result students, go on these hunts where they attempt to locate ALL photos and videos of them (whether tagged in or not) and delete them by asking the owners of it or simply un-tagging themselves. Things that they look for are liquor/beer containers, red/blue cups, smoking/smoke, nudity, doing “stupid stuff”, people that are blacked out, especially if they are that person, even just simply dancing “provocatively”, at a bar or club, etc the list goes on because so many things are down looked upon by corporations and employers. Next the step is that they change a lot of their interest, likes, activity, and clubs etc, in the end, leaving the “perfect” possible employee, not the friend you added on Facebook, well in a way because it’s more like the censored version of your friend.

            A few positives that social networking brings are that they allow friends and families to maintain communication when living far distances from one another. I know a mother with five kids living in the Bronx whose only way of staying in contact with her mother and grandmother (the people who raised her, till she decided to move on) is thru Facebook because both sides are able to easily navigate the website. It personally allows me to stay in contact with old friends from high school, and colleagues that graduated with me last May, so on and so forth.

            In the Digital Nation video they went and visited my old junior high school in the South Bronx, CIS 339, it was cool to see how technology was helping the education of the students as opposed to making it worst. Technology in my opinion affects the young minds of kids today in a negative way if the parents or guardians of that child aren’t constantly monitoring the amount of television, computer/web surfing, game playing (PS3/Xbox360 etc), and even cell phone texting/chatting that their child is doing. When I was younger, I barely watched television, but ask any of my friends I KNOW ALL MY THROWBACK CARTOONS and video games. I believe my parents found a way to balance that out or, the fact that we didn’t have cable helped me out a lot. All I had were the basic channels, so once the shows that interested me were over, I found other stuff to do. Nowadays parents allow their kids to watch marathons of annoying nickelodeon kid shows instead of taking time to play and educate their kids like my momz did (it’s a blog I’m allowed to type momz). I say this because I see it a lot when I work with kids. During this period where my mom would educate and play with me, she’d be teaching how to sound out Spanish words, hence teaching me how to properly speak Spanish. Nowadays not a lot of Latino kids know Spanish, this includes my sisters unfortunately. I feel that many other kids of today’s generation (including my sisters who I love very much) lack a lot of education (not just language, Math, English, History etc) because they are too distracted by all the technology they have instant access to.

Oh!, and the whole little kids owning cell phone thing is over rated. I’ve been in charge of 7 and 8 year olds who owned better cell phones then I did. And also, I didn’t get my first cell phone till I was a Sophomore in high school, ANNNND it was prepaid.