Twitter Blog

While I watched the first video of her blog, I felt a variety of emotions including confusion, awe, uncertainty and fear. The combination of the exciting music and constant stream of shocking information caused me to get caught up in the video and instead of processing each bit of information as it was presented, the facts combined together (I actually just realized that I've already forgotten nearly all the facts in the video because they were all thrown out so quickly and in succession) to make me feel overwhelmed by the rapid advancement of technology in our world. However, after I finished watching the video I began to think about where these facts came from and if they were taken out of context. The information in the video is certainly disturbing in itself, but it honestly does not worry me all that much. Our world and society may be changing faster than it ever has before, but it doesn't really directly affect me and my life. Of course the technological aspect of it has changed--whenever I need to know a piece of information, the first thing I do is Google it, and my friends and I text message all the time. But despite the rapid introduction of new technology, people's day to day lives, relationships, and emotions in general remain the same. The inherent characteristics that make us human are no different than they were thousands of years ago despite the fact that we use Microsoft word instead of stone tablets to record information. I guess in my mind, there's no use worrying about the facts brought up in the video because society is going to naturally progress regardless--there's nothing we can do about it. Humans are always going to try to advance our race and create a better world for ourselves.

I was more concerned with the second video. People's ideas of beauty and what we should look like is being totally distorted by the media. Advertisers know that the better the models they are using for their products look, the more likely it is people will buy it because they want to achieve this look that is, in reality, impossible in a real person. I applaud Dove's efforts to return to the idea of real beauty. People are not perfect and trying to become so will only drive us crazy.

5 New People

I enjoyed this challenge to reach out to people I might not normally talk to. I never really thought about it, but a lot of the time when I’m on my way to class listening to my Ipod or sitting in a big lecture I’m in my own little world and not really paying attention to what’s going on around me. This doesn’t usually bother me because I figure I’m not going to form deep, lasting relationships with people I probably won’t see again but it was actually nice just to chat with people, learn about them, and see what we did or didn’t have in common. The first person I talked to was sitting next to me in my big history lecture. We just chatted about the class and where we were from and it turned out that her Dad was an alumnus of the college my Dad just started working for, The Citadel in South Carolina. I also talked to a guy in my history discussion while we were waiting outside for class. He was a transfer student from American University and since he doesn’t have a car, he said he bikes for an hour every morning to get to class, which astounded me. I also chatted with a guy in my history class who lives off campus as well. He told me about recently wrecking his car and how he often gets pulled over because he speeds way too much. I told him that I’ve never been pulled over for speeding because my car is so old it won’t go fast enough. The speedometer numbers don’t even go past 85. The fifth person I talked to was a girl in my lecture and we talked about the midterm we had coming up in that class and discussed our study habits for it and what we thought it might cover. This challenge made me realize how much technology has changed society and limited our interactions with other people.