Vlog #1

Digital Nations Blog

Relationships, the ongoing battle, which is larger over the Internet and social networking involving, parents than actual love relationships. The Internet battle of relationships mainly involves the “commenting war”. Commenting has brought up so many conflicts. There are so many people out there on the Internet that don’t take commenting serious. These people comment just to start a ruckus and get more people to look at whatever they are commenting on. Some people’s only purpose of commenting is to draw attention to the post, which is a good philosophy if the comments that draw the attention are positive. But if they are negative comments they can lead to worse things with bigger consequences. For example, one of the videos I watched actually told a story about commenting on Myspace. These girls posted negative comments just to start a fight. There was absolutely no reason for the rude comments, but in the end it actually lead to a physical fight at there school. After the fight and everything was out, seven girls were suspended for the fight. It is interesting what people will say if they are anonymous and there name is not right next to there comment. Some people turn into a total different person if their name is not out there. Some people care what is next to their name on the intranet and some people don’t. In this case these girls didn’t care, they were just doing it to start a fight.

In addition to commenting, the growing password conflict is a growing trend that mothers want their kids’ personal passwords to get onto their Facebook accounts. There were a lot of mothers that said they would just get on there if it was an emergency, but who isn’t tempted by something that could open them up to something so large? My personal feelings about this are that it all comes back to the original parenting. It is how the parents raised their kids and how much honesty and trust they built into their relationships with their kids. I think that parents should trust their kid to do what they think is right. There is a point in time when parent have to let their kids go and live there own life under their own personal control. Facebook is the beginning, letting the kids have a little freedom of judgment and grow to feel comfortable with control. This might actually help kids adjust sooner once they are out on their own.

Moving on to the correct main point of this blog, I am supposed to tell you about three other presentations given by my fellow classmates.

First I thought Reece and Chris's War Tech Presentation was very interesting. They explained how the military has a recruitment center in Pennsylvania that had 60 PCs and 19 XBox's and 3 simulators that were all free for the use of kids 13 years old and older. This is a place for kids to go and play war like video games and even be involved with simulators. This is a place for kids to learn about war and have the ability to ask any questions from recruiters at any time. This was very interesting to hear about this facility and hear about the conflicts that parents have with this facility. Second was the Virtual World by Willie, Cody, and Kinsey, was interesting to hear about all the different virtual worlds that any one person could be involved in. Kinsey specifically talked about second life and how you could live a whole different virtual life online. It gives people a second opportunity to live a life as a different person with a different personality. Willie and Cody finalized there presentation with the conflict of violent video games. This brought up a conflict in our class of how these video games affect kids in the long run. My personal opinion is that these video games actually teach you a lesson of what you don't actually do in real life on the streets. Finally, Learning by Cassie and Shane, this topic talked about how teachers have to start keeping up with the technology to be on top of the teaching "wave". Video games are a big way of teaching in this day and are in a way always at the top of the "wave" . It has come down to the fact that teachers have to compete with technology/video games to have the best teaching style. Overall this Digital Nation section was a very interesting section and it really opened my eyes to see even more things that technology has an affect on.