Week 5

        In class today we watched an interesting video of a man taking pictures with his girlfriend only to spend most of his time uploading his photos and interacting digitally with the social media platforms available. His girlfriend took a picture of him with a camera that printed out a physical photo and gave it to him and walked away. At this time the digital technology malfunctioned and all he was left with was himself and a physical copy of a photo of himself. This story brought up the question: What would I have left without the digital resources available to me today? Pondering this question would make me think that it would suck because so many memories in photos are in hard drives and servers, and digital era makes possible to easily interact with so many more people who are far from me. But I would not be so drastically destroyed as would some people be becasue I don't think I'm as active on social media platforms as many other people are.

        We also watched a TED talk about how our society is using mobile divices and social media as an activity to divert their attention for the purpose of numbing our problems. This becomes a problem because if we as a society keep doing this our problems in life will never get solved. She made the point that we need to walk through the crappy feeling to get rid of the crappy feelings which I think is true. We need to talk about and realize our problems in order to solve them. Problems don't get solved by ignoring them.

        There was also an interesting video that brought the idea that binge watching makes people more social. I do agree with this in a sense that because someone binged watched, they would then know more about that series and then have something more to talk about with someone who also watched it. But I wouldn't agree with that in the way that it's an effective way to build deep and meaningful social connections. Sure it's a superficial way to be social but anything deep and meaningful it is far from.