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I've been watching this documentary on kids who grow up in the digital age and surprisingly; it is a fairly accurate depiction of these kids as we are somewhat like them. I can't really write about the whole thing in one go so I thought I would go through some of the more “important” segments in the story from my perspective.

SEGMENT 2 - Internet's role in education
I found these parts about the "sparknotes" and using other internet references interesting, as even though some old fashioned people are against it, it is only because they feel that it isn't a useful reference because of it's possible invalidity albeit the many references on the internet that are very, very valid. Sparknotes, maybe. (I admit i do use it at times).

The documentary narrows down to the social networking aspect of current internet culture, which I feel is a important thing to document because almost all of the people that I know that use the internet on a 'casual' basis usually almost always or even only use just social networking sites and emails. There's an interesting cartoon that Current's Supernews did on myspace (when it was still cool) that made the whole ordeal quite funny, as:



It is about people who "stalk" on myspace, but just to an extreme -- honestly, it's kinda weird when people do this, or look at your pictures on Facebook (which isn't really the same because I've seen a lot of people do that.)

SEGMENT 3 - Social networking, cont.d
On the side description thing, it describes this as "teens very public private lives today", but they're really just talking about slutty girls on the internet. I remember seeing some of the people that would do this back in high school -- they got the "anglez".

As far as secret internet identities go, I'm glad I never ran into people who do that. You know you spend too much time on the internet when you get up to that point.

SEGMENT 4 - Pedobear alert.
They talk about the "predator" aspect of the internet, a bunch of middle aged men, usually with bad hygiene going after girls.. I don't feel that it really happens as much in contemporary internet culture, but that's just from the perspective of the way that I (personally) the internet. If you are often on ChatRoulette, then you can still witness this when you run into some very weird things.
I am also starting to see that parents are trying to get passwords to their kids networks, but I'm against them on that. We know that our parents are trying to keep us safe, but come on. We need some privacy, yanno?

Overall, I feel that even though there are a ton of bad things done on the internet, they happen in the underlying sites that aren’t seen by the masses, so if you aren’t looking for it, you aren’t going to find it. However, the internet isn’t really like this today – I haven’t really seen any “cyberbullying” happen in a while or people who meet/become boyfriends or girlfriends online. On that note, in current web 2.0 culture there has been more meeting online as part of the internet becoming a social movement, such as flashmob or facebook based events (i.e. Improv Anywhere events), Craigslist meetups in order to sell things and Tweetups. I’m pretty sure that if the documentary were made in say, 2010, it would be a bit different. Also, why did I have to listen to that Soulja Boy song like 10 times in this documentary? Yeah we know, you are aware of "hip music".

Regarding the article on Obama, it is really quite obvious to see how he garnered so much money in such a little amount of time, as the internet is a faster platform to send donations through compared to a more analog way. Politicians have been making their way towards the internet in recent months and it will be exciting to see the way that they utilize these tools, although I am pretty sure that it won’t be nearly as good as the way Obama did it because most politicians are usually a old bunch of people who aren’t very clever when it comes to things like this (I say this from an objective standpoint.)

This other article that also fits into the “usage of contemporary internet” topic being discussed right now involves Second Life, a ‘major’ MMO (massively online multiplayer) which projects a regular society compared to an altered one (such as the dwarves and dragons in World of Warcraft.) I only say ‘major’ is because as far as I know, there are other MMO’s with a larger user base (i.e. WOW, CS) and I don’t know anyone who actually uses second life – perhaps it’s just not popular here in NYC. Ironically, the only other time I’ve heard of Second Life was from a humorous segment from The Office, an NBC (originially BBC) show. Other than helping with disabilities, I feel that Second Life has a possibility to give off similar problems that using the internet in general gives off, such as non-genuine human interaction and contact.

When kids grow up in the future surrounded by technology, I am afraid that their social skills might not be as good because they would just be interacting behind computers all day. The innovations of the internet are still very new things and because of this, we must always be wary of what we are doing.

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