History in the Making

I was sitting around the other night, just thinking about when people will be learning about history of our day now. When we learn about history there are so many artifacts, physical items, and other random objects we find to put together to figure out history. There have been many diaries found in the past to help us figure out the history of many people and their time periods. Now days, not as many people keep diaries, especially in little journals or notebooks. More people post their feelings or what they are doing online.
What I was thinking was that, maybe someday someone who is a historian will be searching the web and going back to Xanga, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and all those social networking sites to research people from different time eras. From the comments and posts they would be able to figure out what the popular trends were, such as clothing, concerts, foods, movies, music, and much more. Also, sites such as Facebook will have an extreme amount of pictures for evidence and a clearer understanding of what it was like “back in our day”.
I am not a history buff by any means, but I do find it interesting to see how much information people will be able to pull from these sites in the future. Who knows, maybe you could be in your grandkids text book someday from what you said or pictures from a social networking site you were on.
Speaking of pictures on these types of sites, and all the pictures parents posts of their kids these days, it would be interesting to see the kids’ reactions when they grow up and see all the embarrassing pictures of themselves online. Also, for them to read the comments that their parent’s friends post on pictures of them.
There is definitely a lot of communicating through these sites and will continue to be as there will become more and more out there in the near future. History is being made each and every day on these sites! So for all of your friends that are the ones who update their status every two hours, they will be the ones that help historians figure out what out time was really like.

Therapy Blogging

It seems as though many people are stressed out more than ever in today’s society; whether it is because of the economy, parenting, marriage, or many other reasons. Blogging has become more popular over the past few years than ever before and can be used for therapy. Tons of people use blogging as a kind of therapy for themselves. In a sense this can be a good thing and it can also not be.
Blogging your feelings can be a great way to get stressful thoughts off your mind. Sometimes people just need to get their thoughts out and not keep them bottled up and blogging is the best way for them to do it. Especially, for those who do not like to share their feelings verbally or have a hard time sharing what they are feeling with others. This way they can just type away their feelings on their blogs. In addition receiving comments from others, even if they do not know them they still make them feel a sense of acceptance.
The part that scares me about blogging for therapy is that sometimes people may share way too much information at the time of blogging and not realize it until later when it comes back and haunts them. It may have been a good idea at the time to type it in their blog, but after they cleared their mind and are stress free they may forget about everything they put out for the world to see. Some people share their whole life stories in their blogs and that is one thing you do not want to do on the internet.
In this article, Blogging as Therapy it shares how blogging can be helpful therapy to some. Blogging is not just complaining about how one’s life is so horrible or writing day to day activities, but something more sometimes. When reading some people’s blogs it seems that way sometimes, that they are just seeking attention. When really maybe they are seeking help and trying to get some stress off their chest in a way of getting their feelings out by posting blogs.

Social Networking Taking Over Communication Skills

Social networking is taking over the world. Before Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and many other social networking sites came out, we as a society would gather for block parties and get together with friends that we had not seen for awhile more. Now, we feel more connected to those people through social networking sites, such as the ones listed above. It is not a bad thing that we have the advantage to instantly talk with them more often, but that does put an effect on us getting together with them more often. The fact that we have the advantage at the tip of our fingertips to keep in touch with friends and loved ones is amazing how far we have come with technology, but we need to make sure it does not put a damper on our communication skills.
It is so easy to just post a quick memo on someone’s Facebook wall or send them a message when you need to let them know something or you have a question for them, instead of calling them. In a message or post you are more likely to just get to the point and ask what you want instead of like on the phone. On the phone it is very easy to rack up an hour conversation with someone, when you called to ask one simple question. I feel that on social networking sites, people sometimes do not communicate as much as they did before all these sites came out.
There is a flip side, though I believe too. Such sites as Facebook and others is not always a bad thing. They do let people find long lost friends and relatives and keep in touch with them, which is a great thing. I am guilty of using social networking sites more often than calling people as much. An example would be telling someone happy birthday. I used to call people to tell them that, now I just write it and maybe a little message on their wall. Social networking is great to use as long as it is used in moderation.

Webcams Influence in Communication

Have you ever thought about how the world’s communication skills and ways are changing ever so quickly, everyday?! Webcams are just one way to make communicating easier and more effective with the live video picture. They already have classes via webcams in some schools, called itv classrooms. I have never taken a class like this, but know people who have and I would think it would be hard for me to concentrate in a class like this.
Skype is used by so many people today to keep in touch with loved ones and to also meet new people. It is a great way to keep in touch with people who live across the country or even world. I have friends who are overseas for the guard and being able to see and talk with them just makes the whole situation a little better. Talking with my sister and 2 year old niece who just live in St. Paul, MN is very nice, because even though the cities is not that far away I do not get there every weekend and my little niece is constantly growing and learning new things. The only problem I have with communicating over webcams is that after having access to communicate like that with people who live far from us, will it effect how much we really get to see them? For instance, I get to see my 2 year old little niece on the webcam; I could easily just keep pushing off going to visit because I can constantly see her and talk to her whenever on the webcam.
Another interesting fact about webcams I found was more and more people are doing job interviews on them. Inovahire.com is just one of many sites that offer this. They offer recorded interviews, in which you can prerecord yourself answering the questions they give you ahead of time and send it to whatever company you are applying to. There are also, live interviews, in which you meet at a certain time with someone from the company who will conduct a live interview with you via webcam.

Text Messaging

First, cell phones were the new big thing and after calling people on cell phones was not good enough, then came texting. Millions of people use texting today, more than calling people. I am guilty of texting a lot more now than ever before. Texting has its positives and negatives just like everything else in the world.
Starting with some advantages of texting, it is a silent way of communicating. Therefore, you can be at a basketball game and instead of screaming into the phone to try and get the other person to hear you, you can just send them a quick text with no noise problems. The privacy of text messages is pretty safe for the most part, unless people are going through your phone and looking at your text messages. Another advantage is you can send out mass messages of texts, instead of calling each person individually, Depending on the conversation, texting can be an easy and quick way to communicate. Obviously, if you are going to be asking a bunch of questions and making a lot of decisions then, you might just want to call the person.

As with everything there are disadvantages it seems. Some disadvantages of texting is when the person sitting next to you in class or at a movie is texting away the whole time, it is annoying and rude. Text messages can be totally misunderstood. Some people may understand some words to have different meanings than what you are implying. Also, you do not get the full effect of what emotion or tone the person is using in their message like you do if you are on the phone or face to face with them. Texting while driving is the worst I feel. It is scary to think of how many people are texting while driving when you are driving on those same roads as them and they are not paying attention to driving because they are texting. Texting while driving can lead to serious accidents and possibly even death sometimes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDlYSPVro0Q Here is a link with a story of a girl who has only had her license for a few months and it shares the damages she has already done while texting and driving.