Final Blorg: AJ Vela and the State of Humanity as he knows it

 

All Pictures Involve original Archived Highschool Online Tomfoolery To Give Example of its Everyday use

    The brand new era is upon humanity. That may very well be a stretch, but as far as I am concerned I have gone through 20% of what I will experience in life. I remember finishing off 5th grade in 2010 at my 10% point thinking that I had so much wisdom living through all 5 years of school. So now I find it funny that I am currently in a similar mindset as the decade is finishing again. Now, this blog isn't going to be about me, it's about humanity and how it's been shaped over the past recent decades. I think the key to really understanding the changes in humanity is through the way I experience the most humanity. That would be through myself and through the community that is our society how I perceive it. 

    Anyone who is living as an active member of our communities and society will know that we have developed so much of our recent culture by way of a major planetary technological upheaval the likes of which humanity has never seen. The internet and social media have changed the landscape of human civilization. The ability to connect to the outside world is so simple yet so impactful for humankind it has changed the entire landscape of interaction and perception among families strangers and friends. 100 years ago nobody could've imagined what we could've achieved. Humanity wanted to aim high and what they accomplished lead to a new era of human ingenuity and lifestyle.

    Now that we have made it to this point as a species. Where have we ended up through 20 years of a new frontier of technology? Well, we have discovered through this class, and through experiencing our daily lives, that a lot of good has come from having the world's knowledge at your fingertips. However, we can also safely say that a lot of negativity and struggle has come through the level of connectivity everyone has with each other. My goal is for the people reading to understand how I perceive the good and the bad of our technological era and how I think society perceives it.

    As I take this class I speak from a perspective of turmoil. Currently, I have very severe chronic health disorders that have made my reality warped in many ways. Somethings I understand more clearly to a fault like hearing and seeing, and other things confuse me like understanding placement or social interaction. Now while this may seem strange I think it's important to share this part of my life as a part of something that should be personal to me, which is what I think the essence of a blog should be. Since we are focusing on such a big question, I'd like my perspective to be fleshed out as I also will soon flesh out humanity's response. 

AJ and the Technology of the World Growing up Together Hand in Hand

    My relationship with technology has been very gradual like many of my peers growing up in the 2000s. Being the first 2000 generation I noticed more advanced utilities continuing to be implemented in my everyday life. The main two changes happening within my home and within my school.  By high school, less and less of my classes involved actual writing implementation from what I had learned in my early elementary school years. It was at that point I realized my elementary school teachers were right, and less than ten years later we were all operating on an entirely new medium. I would have assumed that my phone would have been the first step into a larger world. However, the first online communities are I joined were that of the online gaming community. I have done a fun blorg regarding video gaming and my relationship with them, but that was the first time I was connected beyond my suburbia. You asked your friends for their program names and skype was the original voice call, but before that, we used our house phones and sat next to the computer. Those times were so very innocent. Even ignoring my first communities of actual personal friends, modern technology had first reached me in second grade. A revolutionary item before the IPhones was mainstream called the Nintendo DS. It was the Nintendos companies 3rd iteration of a portable device for classic fun to play and interactive video games. Before looking at my phone all car ride. I would look at my Pokemon collections, and that was the talk of the school. After we'd gotten our first taste of the local online community among the friends I had known, things began to expand. We pretty much all had access to google by the time we were able to remember, but when we got our phones in 7th-grade social media began. There were good things to enjoy. So much, the app games didn't compare to Xbox and Nintendo so the appeal hadn't reached my demographic yet, however as my friends matured into highschool we began forming more stable and truer relationships. This was the beginning. What my peers did was supplement the real friendships that we developed in school with Instagram.  Instagram was where our social media journeys began. We used it among each other we didn't connect through it, and the kids that weren't among the social groups simply didn't have the programs. Those groups of kids continued to enjoy their own friends, and we enjoyed our social circles in person and enhanced them, in a way, through these new apps. The text was especially important for easy and unending chitchat, and Snapchat was great for fostering communication as well with its cute features that made what was basically texting a little more interesting. I think the way we handled our relationships with the new forms of technology was actually very healthy. In ways it didn't restrict us at all in fact it was liberating. This all took place at my high school, but like all things (I'm learning) it came to an end.  Our age group and social circles disperse. We stay connected through Instagram to reach large quantities of people, and we texted and stayed together socially through texts, not to mention Snapchat again for casting wide nets of friends to continue communication through.  We also have video games, but that's not important to the journey anymore. Now it's these corporations like Instagram and even Snapchat have taken center stage. To wrap up this paragraph's worth of my long experience I want to address anything negative regarding our development alongside the development of social media. It would be naive of me to say that no type of bullying occurred in the platforms we used. It could've been a good place to exchange hurtful things behind other peoples backs, but I think that bullying has been around for as long as humans have been around, and if people are going to be mean, they will use whatever methods they have at there disposal to accomplish that type of behavior. I come from a school with typically less bullying than normal, but it existed and technology supplemented it just as I explained it supplemented the good things growing up alongside my peers.

Humanity and the Internet and how AJ Views them Both Hand in Hand

    Humanity at this stage of the century has been completely overtaken by a digital landscape that supposedly supports people in every conceivable helpful way. Whether somebody wants information, or to get in touch with a person, or to write a thesis, or to write a blog, or to do anything imaginable. There is a larger would within your connection to the Wifi than the physical world we stand on. It would probably be impossible to quantify the entirety of what the internet is. I would put it on the same scale as something like the Universe. I think it not a stretch to think a little existentially about this concept as the entire idea has engulfed our whole way of life. The "Mad World" video you presented in your prompt for this final blog was really accurate in a lot of ways. It shows through imagery the wide scope of how we are consuming today's resources. That being things like cellphones/Iphones, Media, social media, and other various things that technology as all wrapped into singular devices. However, I would like to mention that I don't fully agree with everything the video is trying to say, and I will return to the concept. I would like to speak generally about today's applications and what kind of an endless rabbit hole the Online landscape really is and how we can enter it anywhere, any day, anytime (except when sleeping). Cellphones access every type of thing to ever exist on the internet. Every program that people use today can be accessed through anyone's phone now. People have different things and have different goals, but we can all do the exact same thing. What is so insane is that the exact same thing is anything. Whether it be to consume or create you can do it. Nothing to it. This is freedom on scales that nobody could've dreamt of. In ways the possibilities are endless, and I can't really think of a refutation to that statement. The concept of endless possibilities is however grandiose, and every human has the power to operate through that "canvas" The big questions we ask in our class is how good of a thing is that. Through class we have learned that specific things are bad, some are worse, and some are good. To get a good footing in where those levels are we can start by looking at Social Media as the biggest horse in the landscape that is the Online world. It can reach anyone anywhere, and it all is based around current events, whether they be worldwide events or some single mothers status update. There are specific programs that really run the show. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are huge. I want to begin the idea of humanity's relationship with these programs to be one of innocence. Among our social circles, we can get a lot out of what each other are doing without actually being together. This was one of the reasons our social circles in my high school loved things like Instagram and such. However, our social circles aren't the only ones that access these sites. Corporations around the world are fighting for your attention. The best way to do that is through the ultimate connective application in the world the internet. This is where the bad starts to rear its ugly head. Companies will use the complexity of the internet to create algorithms to pander to your demographic. Social media companies are successful through the user selling away their time to take part in there world that they own. I hope I explained it well enough, but this is the kind of stuff you learn from trying to be aware of the motivations behind the companies running the show online. With so many parties at play and not many forms of tracking and pinpointing certain outlets, there is so much opportunity for foul play in different forms of the information you receive. In the fight for your attention for clicks, you will be sent hundreds of messages based on what's happening in the world. With so many outlets it's impossible to know what is true. Making the Internet and specifically, social media have issues where it can act like a cesspool of information all trying to get your attention different. A concept that is supported by these companies that they only want your clicks. Through knowing that they have the motivation you can know the issues. So while we are innocent to these things we still can enjoy supplemental internet relationships, and use the features they are designed to be fun and collaborative. These last few sentences have been the points I wanted to get to refer back to the video. This video in the prompt depicts people as zombies consumed by the entire Internet. While the internet truly, in my opinion, has the capacity to do that. People are still free thinkers. I think of myself as one. We come to our own conclusions and many people are competent enough to not damage their identities through online conjecture and interaction. I do think it is important to note that there are people out there that have formed identities based on social media, but those people still came to their own conclusions and represent themselves as such in the physical world around them. There are people I can't fathom that life on our earth, but I come to realize all too often is that humanity is so flawed and the internet is no different. It has engulfed society and the flawed aspects have a big impact. But the people who respect technology have just as big of an impact, and it's through human resilience that we will overcome any detrimental flaw the factor of the internet will throw humanity's way. Finally, I want to finish up by acknowledging that even the resilient people have been tricked by the internet, everyone that uses it has, but I look at the communities around me. My friends, their families, strangers, and I see that there is still an unbreakable community between each and every person. And I don't see how being apart of something so influential could ever break us because we haven't changed, and we are blessed to live in a safe and mostly secure society. Some people are less fortunate this true, and some are busy looking at their cellphones, but we will always have human connections. So my message to humanity is that maybe the lady that you didn't speak to on the subway wasn't going to be the love of your life and that the lady you met on tinder will be. That is how I perceive humanity, something that is stable but still connected. Things may get worse, but they may get better. We'll just have to see.

The AntiSocial Network on Netflix

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