Technology has come a long way since Al Gore invented the internet. Niftystaples of technology like Netscape Navigator, dial-up internet connection, andexcite.com search engine have all been cleanly swept away by newer, better technologicanchors like FireFox, WiFi, and Google. What’s more interesting than the technologyitself, is the effect it has on daily life. Search engines, websites, cell phones, and morehave left their mark on society. Let’s examine five different fixtures of moderntechnology and evaluate how useful and beneficial they are to life in 2009.The first and most glaring technologic epiphany to look at is everyone’s favoritenetworking site famous for turning a bratty Harvard student into a bratty Harvard alum— Facebook! Sociologists and anthropologists are already having a field day discovering just how similar middle and upper class white kids are. Other than providing a platformfor college kids to collect photos of their best drunken moments, Facebook has donesome interesting things in its lifetime. For example, the status feature on facebook helped pave the way toward real-time updates. Finally facebook users can alert their friends as totheir choice of breakfast cereal in real time. As ridiculous as this seems, look no further than Twitter to see the popularity behind letting the world know which pair of socksyou’ve chosen for the day. In essence, status updates have served to further an alreadyexisting anxiety about society’s dwindling attention spans. Blogs took the belief thatquality writing exists only in works magazine article-length and longer, and opened thedoor for nerds to stake interesting, controversial claims in their blogs such as “Barack Obama is popular”, “gasoline is expensive”, and “LeBron and Kobe are athletic.” Maybemy sarcasm is a little harsh; but my point is that blogs have taken a pen which was oncemightier than the sword and dulled it down to the point freelance writing’s been given a bad name. To be fair, Lord Zuckerberg and Facebook deserve a good evaluation.Facebook is free, it provides as efficient a networking program as you’ll find now-a-days,it requires only a email address and a computer, and it’s already reflected buy-in interest(if it can be called that) by students and teachers alike. Hip hip hurray for Facebook!As harsh as I’ve been on blogs and their users, blogs merit a pretty decentevaluation. They’re free, they don’t require any out-of-the-ordinary software, and theyhave the potential to improve learning. As a high school student, the best advice Ireceived about becoming a good writer came my junior year when my english teacher explained, “writing is just like any other skill, it requires practice. The more you write,the better you’ll get at it.” If I was an english teacher, I would adopt this theory quicklyand have my students write blog-length assignments frequently, rather than paper-lengthassignments infrequently. Students get nervous and flustered over three to five page papers. But asking a sixteen-year-old to write two paragraphs in his blog appears muchless daunting than a five page paper, and it still provides the student the opportunity towork on his writing skills. Not to mention it saves paper. A- for student blogs.Twitter, however, does not earn as high a mark as blogs do. Reducing the lengthof student papers from five pages to three paragraphs is reasonable, but two sentencethoughts is just not enough of a mental stretch for students. If someone wishes to followShaquille O’Neal’s twitter to read what intellectual thoughts Mr. O’Neal has about the NBA finals, that’s fine. But there’s just no place for tweeting in an academic arena. Thisone gets a C- in my book.
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