MySpace/Social Networking

Oh boy, the wonderful MySpace scene! At first, it seemed like a great place to talk with your friends that are away at a 4 year college, leave comments to everyone giving them a smile for the day, and just being able to check on the ones you really cared about. But in reality, it was just building up to be the biggest soap opera on the Internet! I used to have an account, and I still do somewhere on there because when the drama began bubbling and people wanted to start fussing and running their mouth about what was on this ones page or that ones page, I just completely stopped trying to use it for communication purposes. I find that old school email works just great! As for the social networking aspect of it, I feel that it is great for people that want to communicate online fast and effectively but at the same time everyone can read what you post (unless you send it as a message) and sometimes it seems to me that keeping your personals away from anything public keeps you the farthest away from trouble. Myspace=Trouble in my experiences, perhaps it would be better if we didn't live in such a small no body town where everyone knew everyone within a 20 mile radius...or maybe it was just a bad experience for me!

The Web's Secret Stories

Jonathan Harris speaks of the never ending World Wide Web. Harris created a secret experiment called "We Feel Fine" that involves everyone blogging (not sure if it did private blogs or just public). Searching the blogs for statements that begin with "I feel, I believe...and so on". From those prefixes of statements, Harris pulled what the ending of the sentence would be, such as 'I feel beautiful' and from that he created a project that would calculate many different features. It pulled over 20,000 feelings a day which were all from people stating in their blogs how they felt. From it, I began wondering, if people are constantly doing experiments on you and you never know, than they always will get the true you. He stated that the experiment was set up as a "passive observation on people that had no clue they were being watched, therefore I got very honest information". It makes you wonder how many people search the web doing experiments like those. "We Feel Fine" was very detailed with the information that it could pull, it showed that more women blogged about their feelings than men, as well as the ages and location of the person blogging. With all the information that Harris covered in his experiment, he began another experiment called "Universe" which would be like a spider web in English class. From one word, you could spawn off it in every direction that the topic was brought up in. For instance, if you put in the word "Hawaii" you would come up with words and pictures of islands and palm trees. During his speech he asked the question, "In today's society, what would the constellations in the night sky look like if we could make up new ones?". It puzzled me throughout the rest of the conversation and got me thinking about what it would look like. Putting together the two experiments that Harris created, I realized that the most prominent thing would be situations that had emotion. For instance, the tragedies of September 11th were shocking and horrific to everyone, not just the ones involved therefore I feel that the Twin Towers and the Pentagon would be two of the constellations. Also, things such as importance's to most people like rings, which symbolized weddings and love. Throughout his talk, Harris spoke of the many feelings people have and share, it makes you realize just how hurt, happy, mad, etc. someone can be at a time when they show photos of themselves during their time of the sentence. Harris is a very smart and talented person to create "We Feel Fine" and "Universe" and I think he did it to show just how often people share their feelings and why they felt that way on that day at that particular time.

Surfing the Web

It seems like there is just not enough hours in the day to get everything done and then still have time to surf the web for odds and ends. Sometimes I catch a couple hours here and there (Like today, while I'm at home!) but for the most part I spend just enough time to get my school work done and hope off. I would estimate about 5 hours a week, if that. I try to do as little on the Internet as possible. If I had more free time, it would probably be dangerous..I'd spend more money online than the account would supply me! Since I don't have much time to just flip around on the net, I only have a few websites.

www.mycardstatement.com- check on my Visa card status

www.rcc.vccs.edu- of course, do my school work!

www.blogger.com- BLOG!

www.Ted.com- Listening to the TED talks!

www.autotrader.com- Attempting to find a fairly decent putt-putt car (Gas is extremely high these days you know!)

www.ebay.com- Just to search for whatever!

www.google.com- If I need to use a search engine!

Those are the sites that I use most often, but very rarely! I would have to say though, that at work, we use many work-related web sites on the Internet as tools to do research and what not.

TED Talk-Helen Fisher

Picking only one talk to blog on became more of a task than I had expected. There are many interesting talks available, but after looking through and reading about some of them I chose to listen to the entire talk of Helen Fisher about The Science of Love and the Future of Women. She had many key points in her talk, some I agreed with and some I did not.

The beginning of her talk was based on the question of what is romantic love. Many people would have different answers for this one question. Her answers seemed to be some of the most popular (focusing on a person, intense energy, craving them, obsessed). To me, I feel that romantic love is a lot of things put together to create the passion a person has for another. The main answer I would have to give would be that romantic love deals with someones feelings towards another, not necessarily their sex drive and energy. Fisher states that "romantic love is not an emotion-it's a drive." Perhaps she is right, but what pushes the drive, your emotions!

Fisher stated that women are moving forward in the modern time. I believe she is very right. There used to be a time when all the women of the household did were to clean, cook, and play house all day. In the modern day, the standard households have double incomes, which means that the man is working as well as the woman. Men used to have the right to say they were strong and could work on heavy and more extensive projects than women, but in the modern time it is nothing to see a woman working on a truck or helping out in the yard. As Ted Hughes (spelling?) says, "we are like two feet, we need each other to get ahead." I believe this statement is a perfect fit to describe how men and women work together. The man needs the woman, and the woman also needs the man. Neither should be considered better than the other because without one another there would be missing pieces.

During her talk, Fisher stated that people can have more than one romantic relationship, I believe that this is not so. If you have a deep attachment to one person, there should be no reason to lay in bed next to your loved one thinking about another person. To me, that seems to be false, because if that is so, you don't have a deep attachment to the one you say you do while looking at ours for the pleasure you are not receiving. Fisher made many great points but at the same time seemed very bias towards women. It is true we are moving up in the modern world, but at the same time it does not make us any better than when the men were high on their pedestals.

"A world without love is a deadly place."-Helen Fisher