Blog Post 8

Class discussion this week centered on the negative aspects of social media. Has social media ironically made us anti-social? Many people would argue that users are too consumed with their virtual friends that they don’t speak enough in person with their real friends. I confess that I am guilty of this too, but not with social media as the culprit, but video games. I play video games several hours each day and talk online to my “friends” through text or my voice via a mic. The friends I have on Xbox are a lot like the friends I have on social media; several of them I know really well in person and the others are people I rarely communicate with and have never met in person. With this being said, I don’t think it’s just social media that has stripped society of the natural, in-person experiences with the environment and people that used to dictate norm in previous generations. I believe technology at large is to blame for people being too invested in the virtual world. How do we change this when we as a society have spent the last several decades building up these gadgets to facilitate daily life and work in the 21st century? I don’t have an answer for this, but the first step would be to bring attention to this growing problem of time/life consumption by technology.


The other topic mentioned in class was the dark web. I had no clue that the deep web was hundreds of times larger than that of the surface web we regularly browse. The dark web is just a portion of the deep web where you are anonymous and nobody can track your activity. I was astounded to find that this technology was created by the U.S Navy. I have never been on the dark web before and I thought that this lesson would reinforce that abstinence, but it has had quite the opposite effect. I am now intrigued by its mysterious nature and ease of accessibility, and am left debating whether or not I should explore more of it. 

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