Snow Angels Indoors!?

The flash mob on Thursday was an experience I have never witnessed before in my life. Being that I video taped the flash mob happening, I was able to see from an "outside" perspective. When the whistle blew and automatically everybody fell to the floor doing snow angels while "Let it Snow!" was playing, people who weren't involved in the Flash Mob were so incredibly confused. As everybody first fell to the floor, the people left standing, just stood there looking around, trying to figure out if they missed something. After looking around for a few seconds, they continued to walk through the maze of bodies on the ground doing snow angels and continued about their day. The people walking in to the mob of snow angels, walked through everybody and shook their heads as if they were saying to themselves, "oh my god, what is going on NOW at Kutztown". The best part of the entire flash mob, was immediately after the music ended and the whistle blew, when everybody got up and walked away as if nothing at all happened. The looks on everybody who wasn't involved face's was pure confusion.

The flash mob was so different than something I've ever witnessed because now a days everybody is so used to everything being online, and people conforming to groups (like our snow angels group) all online, while having a sense of acceptance. The flash mob was out of everybody's comfort zone because it was a real life performance, where people's physical bodies were in a group, doing the exact same thing, at the exact same time. Putting people in a real life, physical situation (instead of online where they can hide from people's reactions), where they aren't completely aware of what is going on, puts people totally out of their comfort zone.

Put Down the Phone!

When being assigned this week's blog, I initially became very nervous. I find myself very quickly and easily becoming uncomfortable and nervous when talking to complete strangers, alone. I just figured that I would be too nervous, and just stay in my own world, on my phone, and wait until the very last minute. Little did I know, it happened almost right away.

I have a, very large, golden retriever, who I take for walks around my apartment complex very frequently. I always bring my cell phone with and just talk on my phone or text, while my dog is walking. This time, I decided not to use my phone and just walk and see what happened. I almost always pass people walking their dogs and just smile and continue walking by, but this time I think my dog was the one who initiated conversation.
A guy, about my age, was also walking his dog at the same time. I had seen this guy around many times, with his dog, and around the neighborhood, but never once had a conversation. Of course, my dog wanted to play with his dog, so they were sniffing each other, and doing the usual "dog greeting", and I introduced myself to the guy. We chatted for about ten-fifteen minutes about where we are from and how we like the area.
It was nice to get to know someone, that way I have a friendly face around the neighborhood.
It is interesting how sucked in to my phone I get, without even realizing what so ever. People all across the world do this on a daily basis, just sticking to the people we know and never branching out to people we pass on a daily basis.

Twitter

My experience with Twitter is mixed. When I first made the account, I was so confused! I'm a frequent "Facebook-er" and I was expecting them to be somewhat the same, but Twitter is so different. I have to have my Facebook page look organized on my wall, so Twitter seems so unorganized with how things are posted and re-tweeted.  After some time I did get used to searching around, using hash-tags, using the @ sign, and uploading pictures. I found out that I have an obsession with following celebrities, news sites, and sports teams; via my Twitter account. This brings up an important issue, journalism's future.
With so many news sites, radio stations, and other corporations giving live updates of real-life news going on; it makes it so easy to just log in to Twitter and get everything you need right there, without having to watch the news, or read a newspaper. More often than not, Twitter gets live up to date events going on, whereas if you are a newspaper buyer, you have to wait until the next day to get the news; or if you watch the news, you have to wait until the news plays and wait for the particular story to play for 30 seconds. Twitter makes it possible to get live updates, all of the time.
This is an absolutely huge tool for journalists, depending n how they look at it. A journalist can look at it from the point as, Twitter is taking their news from them and giving it out for free. Or they could look at it as the opportunity to get endless research and use Twitter as a useful tool to see step by step of what is going on somewhere, for their news stories.
Twitter can be looked at either negatively or positively for journalists, but overall I see it as twitter taking over what journalists work so hard for, and doing it SO easily in 140 characters.

Privacy

Mark Zuckerberg has recently let out a statement saying, "Privacy is no longer a social norm". This is becoming global and people all across the world are posting their lives online, which is only making it that much easier to know everything about everybody. Many people complain about the privacy issues online and are facing serious matters because of things they post, but yet signing up for accounts such as Facebook, you basically are agreeing to these terms.
I see it as, if you are going to post online a nasty argument between you and an ex friend or ex boy/girlfriend, you are asking for everybody in the world to see it and possibly have a debate over. When I post online, I am extremely cautious as to what I post, what I comment on, and how I word things; knowing that all 452 of my friends, plus anybody who comments on the same post is then accessing all of their friends to see it, and so on.
People now a days have the mind set that being online you are entitled to the same privacy you have in real life, but that is where everybody is in mistake. I think in order for everybody to be online and have a successful "relationship" with the internet and social networking, you absolutely have to understand what anything you post at all, can and most likely will be viewed by people you don't even realize.

Second Life Experience

My experience through second life was interesting. I still am not sure how to take it. I can admit, I started playing the Sims Social game through facebook when it came out a couple of months ago. Second life is very similar to Sims in a way because it is along the lines of controlling your "person" and making a life all on a computer game. Although I like to play the Sims game, i'd say about once a week when I have free time, I can't think of myself as a second life player. The game seems too "real-life" and complicated for me. I was having a hard time figuring out what the purpose was, or how to even change what my avatar looked like. It is amazing to me that people are able to have businesses through second life and make actual real U.S. dollars off of graphic designs used in second life. I guess if I spent enough time on second life, mastering how to get around and do specific things, it would be a fun thing to do if I was bored and didn't have anything else to do. But as for spending hours upon hours each day on second life; that to me is crazy.

HTML Experience

When I heard the assignment for this week I automatically got excited. When I was younger I used to love using codes and designing my myspace account. I used to make layouts for people and It was my thing when I was younger. Then my senior year in high school I took a course called Webpage Design. At first I absolutely loved this class, but then after I would get assignments about making webpages that were not relevant to me what so ever, I started to hate the class. This class turned me completely against webpage designing and made me over think it. I hadn't even thought to get back in to designing since then, until getting this assignment. 

Since it has been years since I have even looked at codes, I could not for the life of me remember how to even get started or what codes meant what. After some serious "google-ing" I was able to find some of the codes I needed and I starting having the "OH YEAH!!" moments. Although, my webpage is very simple, it got me pretty excited and start thinking to myself that I could start back in to that for fun to see what I could make. Overall, this assignment was awesome for me because it brought back memories of coding.

Google Takeover

Google is one of the most well known WebPages to just about everybody. Because of Google’s ability to basically take over the web it brings concern to other search engines because they believe that Google is favoring its own search products over those from other companies. Since Google is a business they use their strongest commodity, information on the user, to place specific advertisements, making them money. To Google, it is a business, and they are succeeding greatly.

During the podcast Danny Sullivan mentioned that nobody can ultimately provide proof that Google is strong arming its competitors, which is what keeps Google in the “game” and Google uses it to its advantage.  Google competitors continue to argue the idea of net neutrality, which is the basic idea that they are saying Google is playing favorites with those who pay more, or are supported by them. Google knows exactly what they are doing by collecting information on all users because then they can use that information to help them decide what advertisements to post to which users.

I honestly don’t think that Google has done anything wrong because in the end, the internet is all a business. It is all about getting information out to users and making money, which Google has clearly conquered that. I think eventually other search engines will slowly disappear and become less and less popular because of the take over of Google and nobody being able to specifically prove that Google is doing anything wrong, so the internet and users will be taken over by Google eventually. Google is a quick and easy way to search information on anything possible and having that at just about everybody’s fingertips, which will lead to the take over of Google.