Final Post

My Relationship with Technology

When you think about your day and look at what you did, a huge majority of people will mention something about using technology. The technology available today is way different then what was available when we were younger. When I think of my relationship with technology I realize how much of my day is consumed in technology. According to a Penn State article, Americans spend up to 10 hours a day using electronics and it is growing. In general, I use technology in three different ways, my personal use, my podcast, and school. All of these require me using some sort of technology especially the podcast part. 

The most important thing about my podcast is keeping up with social media and posting and reacting to comments constantly to keeping fans involved. This requires me to be on my phone and computer a lot working on this and could take up to hours a day. Besides the time limit there are other things I have to worry about when using our social media. Anything I say or do reflects the podcast or our digital footprint, which means I need to be careful with whatever I post, comment, say on live, etc.  

My parents have always told me that anything you send, post, or say on the internet is out there somewhere which is why I like to my online footprint/digital footprint clean. I always think twice about posting something on snapchat or instagram because one day it could come around to bite me. My mom is a recruiter for Nike and always tells me that the first thing she does is look up the applicant which is why I like to keep my online profiles clean. When I look myself up my linkedin, twitter, instagram, and hockey websites that contain stats such as Elite Prospects pop up. I make sure that everything I can control has only good things about me and nothing negative. 

In my opinion there is no appropriate amount of time spent on technology, some people have jobs that require a certain amount of time on/using technology which is understandable. In terms of myself there are obviously some things I could cut down on such as scrolling through instagram and other social media apps aimlessly. Everything revolves around technology nowadays so it is tough to completely block out technology but it is possible to slightly cut it down and overall I am happy with the amount of time that I spend on technology. 

For an example, my Mom works from home instead of going into an office which means that all of her work is done online using technology. The entire day she is at her desk she is using technology, now this is acceptable in this day and age because of COVID and what that did to the work place and schools. I would definitely say that it plays a positive role because it is currently paying for me to come to school. 

Overall, I feel as if my relationship with technology is both unhealthy and healthy. It is healthy when I am being proactive, such as doing my work or working on my podcast which I consider to be a healthy thing. The time wasters such as going on youtube or social media I consider to be unhealthy and probably don't need to constantly be scrolling or viewing it. Technology has so many options to help cut down by showing me my screen time and trying to lower it every week by a few minutes helps me not constantly going on my phone to check social media.

Social media is one of the biggest time wasters in my life and life in general for the majority of people who use it. One of the scariest things social media can do is influence you in the wrong way. Media companies know this and target audiences directly by social media for political gain, to scare us, or anything you can think of. I think that the media can both inform me in good ways but also in bad ways. For an example, back in December of 2012 the media scared everybody into thinking that the world was going to end, but in fact, I am here writing this final post in December of 2022. This is proof of how the media can mislead us. But on the flip side of things, while I am writing this paragraph I just found out that Chris Bassitt, just signed with the Toronto Blue Jays. This shows that the media can inform us in good ways also and can sometimes be overlooked by the bad ways. 

Lastly, I believe that society has just accepted the internet and all of its lies. I talked to my friend and asked him about whether or not he cares about what he reads or puts on the internet and he said that it doesn't matter to him. I think that a lot of people feel the same way in terms of how they feel about the internet and their digital footprint. I also think they just don't know how dangerous technology can be and if they did even the slightest bit of reading into it they would be shocked of how posting whatever can have a negative impact down the line. People need to be more careful about how they go about in the internet because this is just the start of what the internet will reveal as we have seen from whistleblowers and more. 

Privacy

 

    After watching the four videos my initial reaction was that my electronics aren't tapped and nobody has ever listened to any of my phone calls. But the more I think about it, how would I know? I was thinking about what I was going to write about and I could relate this to how it impacts me. The first thing that came to my mind was the fact that I get ads on instagram that are oddly the same thing I could have been talking about earlier with friends. The other day I was talking on the phone with my friend about possibly going to the Yankees playoff game over October break. After I hang up the phone I get an add on instagram of ticketmaster advertising the the Yankees games. Social media platforms will eavesdrop on us and then put ads of what we were talking about on our social media feeds.

    Issues like these affect us and our family, friends, etc. more than we think. The second video talked about how phone companies or governments listens to our phone calls and texts/emails everyday. This is definitely an invasion of privacy because of how often we send texts and go on our phones. Nothing is private and anything we send is stored and saved somewhere out in the world. It affects me personally because I'm sure there are texts and emails that I have sent that I regret sending that our somewhere out there and there is nothing that I can do about it. 

    I feel like the government knows what is going on but refuses to do anything about it, instead they are doing more of it. The first video talks about the police getting scanners that scans our license plate and then information about us pops up. This is an example of how the government will keep doing things like this to improve our safety but also giving up our privacy. The question asked should be: Is it worth it? 

    We could to several things to protect ourselves but the biggest one is knowing what you are doing and what you are putting out there. Before I post something or send a text I always think about what could happen if I were to post or send the text, because no matter what it will be out there somewhere. 

What I Learned

 

    One thing I learned from the majority of the presentations was how much the government looks and retains our information. We know the majority of this information thanks too whistleblowers. The government has all our information stored on computers as well as more information than we would like to. We were given this information because of a whistleblower named Edward Snowden. Snowden leaked information about texts, emails, and a lot more private information being stored by the government. Snowden released information and is now wanted by the US government. I have seen in the news that Russia has offered him citizenship to protect him from the American courts/prisons, because what he did is clearly against government protocol. 

    I found the idea of whistleblowers interesting because I would love be inside the mind of somebody who makes that choice and how they are going to sacrifice their career in order to leak information. We would never of known that the government keeps our messages stored away without the leak from Snowden. When I was younger my friends and I used to make jokes saying the government was watching us, now it is a reality that the government is really storing our stuff. At what point do they snap and make that choice that could potentially bring riots to the country? There have been many whistleblowers over the years in the US and with the current way the US is going I predict that there will be more that will come forward with classified information that could divide or split this country even more from where it is currently. 

    The idea of whistleblowers falls under five eyes and how they monitor citizens and I learned a lot from about how the government takes our "private" information and stores it. Even the joke about an FBI agent in the laptop camera being a joke maybe a reality, the truth for the public is, we will never know when or if the government is watching and/or listening. 

 

Diffusion Theory

 

    The Diffusion Theory is based on technology and how quickly people adapt to it and use it throughout their everyday life. For an example, back in 2019 tiktok was just starting to get popular and not everybody had it at the beginning of the school year. But by the end of the school year maybe 85% of the school had tiktok downloaded and was using it. The tiktok trend started (at least at my school) in the fall of 2019. At the time only one of my friends had the app downloaded. I wouldn't consider him an innovator because it had been around that summer but was definitely an early adaptor. In maybe November my friends and I finally listened and downloaded the app, similarly a decent amount of people which at the time was the early majority. Almost everybody had it by the spring of 2020, mainly because of COVID and tiktok was a good social media platform to be on for up to hours at a time. 

    This example has its positives and negatives. The positives being it was a social media app and it gave people a place for entertainment and be social with others especially since the COVID pandemic started in the spring and people needed a place for entertainment because of the lockdown. The negatives of social media go hand in hand as bullying, cyberbullying, and countless hours spent on the app aren't good for your mental and physical health. 

    Overall, I feel like the positive would outweigh the negative in getting a social media app. In the fall of 2019, I would've had no idea that I would go on tiktok everyday. Even for a company like facebook that is declining, it would still be a good idea to download the app and be connected because everything is on social media nowadays. 

False Flag

False Flags  

                                                                                  

    There have been many wars throughout humanity that have been started because of false flags. Some of these wars have shaped the world into what it is today. False Flags have been around since the early 1500s when pirates would put a "false flag" or the flag of a merchant ships ally so the ship would come closer to the pirates and they could easily raid it. Most recently false flag attacks were used by Russia to justify their invasion of Ukraine. Leading up to the Ukraine invasion there have been tons of false flag attacks by countries trying to justify attacks, one of the most famous attacks occurred in 1939 which started WWII. 

    Germany in 1939 was attempting to expand their empire, but in order to justify their attacks they used false flag attacks to justify their invasion. Germany's invasion of Poland we all know started WWII and caused on of the greatest conflicts in human history. The night before the invasion of Poland, 7 Nazi soldiers dressed up as Polish troops and attacked the Gleiwitz Radio Tower. The tower was on Germany's side of the border and the soldiers sent a broadcast throughout the country that the Polish had taken control of the tower. The next day, Hitler presented a speech saying how it was an act of war, therefore justifying his invasion of Poland. After the invasion of Poland, WWII broke out across Europe and the world. 

    Another instance in which a false flag was used was actually used by the United States. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was what started the Vietnam War for the United States. On August 5th, 1964 two unprovoked attacks by North Vietnam caused the US to be more militarily involved in Vietnam. After a second attack the US government believed that the North Vietnamese were targeting their vessels and decided to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution  this allowed the US and Johnson at the time to take all the measures they needed to repel the North Vietnamese and "further aggression."

    Following the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the US was involved in the Vietnam War for more than a decade, which killed millions of people. All of this resulted from a false flag attack. This isn't the first time this has happened for the US. Back in 1898 the US tried to rally support for a war against Spain when The Maine blew up. This was debunked later as a false flag attack as the US claimed that a Spanish torpedo off the coast of Cuba hit the Maine causing the death of over 300 Americans. 

    False Flag attacks continue to plague our world today as Russia and Ukraine use false flag attacks everyday and then report it to mainstream media which broadcasts it to the world. We will never truly know who or what is going on in that war because of what each side is telling their reporters. Each side wants to gain supporters to justify their side of the war. False Flag attacks have only continued to go up and with the world on the brink of nuclear war, it is only a matter of time until the next big false flag attack. 

 

Blog #6

 

What I Learned

I learned a lot about the history of social media that I didn’t know before. I thought that social media came in the early 2000’s with the computer but from what I learned from the power points and presentations, I learned that it started back in 1844. Social media in 1844 seems impossible but it does make sense because a telegram being sent is like a direct message on a social media platform. The impacts of social media to me are pretty clear in how communication is spread. In my opinion there are a lot more positive effects that come out of social media than negative. Deleting social media altogether could solve so many problems that people deal with. I know it sounds like what is the best way to ski, don’t ski but it is a realistic thing in which they could delete it and the majority of their problems go away. 

What I also heard was that there are about 4.7 billion social media users in the world today. I think that number is probably correct because people have multiple instagram accounts, multiple twitters, etc. All of these are counted as users and the numbers keep adding up. For example, I have my personal account for myself, a business account for my podcast, and when I was in high school I ran my hockey team's instagram. Already there are three users for one person in myself and that’s not counting other people who have the same.
Overall I learned a lot about these presentations that I previously did not know about technology and social media we have today. I had no clue the Abraham Lincoln used an emoji for an example. 

Blog #5

 Anti-War

From what I have learned on the news, social media, and class, the government loves war. It is a time where they can tell you what to do, get more money, and almost have full control over the citizens. We have to access these websites because the government will shutdown and block it if it goes on mainstream news. They don’t want us to see all the talk about antiwar because they are scared of what the population would do if a war broke out and stuff like this was written on mainstream news. The government manipulates us so that we see what they want us to see and our opinions are totally on what they think. Which is against what our founding fathers once said and wrote down. We should have the freedom of speech and it should be on mainstream news whether the government likes it or not. War is terrible and not a good thing for the world. If WWIII breaks out in a Nuclear War, the next world war will be fought with sticks and stones (paraphrased from Albert Einstein). The government still thinks that promoting all this news about war is going to scare us into thinking we need to go and step in in Europe. 

These websites that we have scratch and claw to get to are there for a reason, so we don’t see what the government knows is true, but is too scared to find out what happens if we find out the truth.