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.