Final Blog Post: Our Relationship With Technology

    If I were to ask every single student at High Point University what the first thing they do in the morning is, an astounding majority of people would answer that they check their phones. It seems reasonable, does it not? I mean, how else would you know what time it is? It is just convenient to check our phones for the time. Of course you would check your phone first. You need to make sure no one is trying to get in contact with you, in other words, you need to be available all the time. I find myself wondering about the person who when cell phones first came around, did not want one, because maybe they did not want the burden of always being reachable. For privacy reasons, that makes a lot of sense. However in today's society, that is simply unacceptable. That is just one of the many downsides to our relationship with not just our phones, but modern technology as a whole.

    When I think of my relationship with modern technology, I would describe it as a love-hate relationship. I love being able to keep in contact with my friends back home in New Hampshire and I do enjoy seeing the fun things they are doing while I am away at school. I love the funny memes I come across on a daily basis, and I love the new music I am able to find from aspiring artists trying to get their name out there. What I hate is the culture surrounding our main method of communication, that being social media. 

    Back in December, I had decided I had had enough. I had thought about it for a long time, how toxic I thought social media was, specifically Instagram. Leading up to early December, I had done exactly what I said I would not; I got caught up. There was a pattern that was starting to form every day and night. Scroll through my Instagram feed, see someone who was clearly doing better than me, looking better than me, and having more fun than me. By that time, I had decided to call it quits. I finally pulled the plug on the Instagram account I had had since eighth grade because my mind needed a cleanse. I really only felt that way towards Instagram because I used it the most, and was starting to notice what everyone was trying to do. I hardly ever use Facebook, only really use Snapchat as a substitute for IMessage, and thought Twitter and TikTok housed the funniest stuff on the internet (I still think that, by the way). 

 

 

 

    I have said numerous times to friends, family, and colleagues that in today's world, your Instagram page was your first impression. For instance, let us say that you start a new class and you have eyes for the person who sits across the room. Why would you go up and talk to them to try and get to know them if you could just look up their name on Instagram and make all the assumptions you want? It saves you time, and potential embarrassment. That being said, everyone wants to make it look like they live a fun life, definitely more fun than yours, so they will be sure to make their Instagram feed look as cool as possible. Edited pictures, tagging all the people they hang around with making sure that you know you are being left out. When I got to the point that that was getting to be too much, I had to call it quits. 

    According to McLean Hospital, 69% of adults and 81% of teenagers are users of some form of social media, and because of that are at risk for things like depression and anxiety. I would not say that social media made me so depressed that I could no longer go about my daily life, but I definitely noticed that it was bringing down my mood. I would ask myself why someone would want to associate with me, who only gets sixty to seventy likes on my posts, and only has around two hundred and fifty followers, when they could associate themselves with the likes of seemingly everyone else who got hundreds of likes and who have thousands of followers. 

    I have even noticed that technology today has had an interesting effect on my family dynamic back home. Seemingly every night at dinner, my dad has his phone or tablet out at the table and is watching some kind of YouTube video, usually on something political or whatever is the biggest news story. He does this, much to my mother's dismay, every night and it started happening sort of out of nowhere. While it is not like he is so encapsulated with his video he is not present with us at the dinner table, but there are a few extra moments of repeating his name until he looks away so you can speak to him. My family is a very loving one, so there are no issues with us there, but I could imagine what someone else's household might look like (Check out this PSA about phones at the dinner table, starring the legend himself, Will Ferrell).

    When I think of that, I think of the family who does not say a word at the table, the only noises being little scoffs and giggles warranted from the funny cat video they just scrolled past. That thought almost makes me sick. Even worse, the family who does not eat together, where everyone is in a separate room completely fixed on their screen. While I am glad that does not describe my family, I truly feel bad for the person who's family it does describe.

    Back to my experience with Instagram, many of my friends asked me what happened to my account. They would say they tried to send me something or tag me in a post, but my name never popped up. "Cam, did you block me? Did you unfollow me?", they would ask. When I would tell them that I had gotten rid of my account entirely, I would receive one of two responses, either "I respect that", or "Why did you?". I would tell them the exact reasoning I wrote above, and many people would say that they see where I am coming from, but they just did not think of it that way. This is another reason why I hate Instagram being used as a first impression, because some people view it as fun, and others as toxic. In early March, I decided I wanted back in. I swallowed my pride and made a new account, but this time it is different. I do not find myself mindlessly scrolling anymore, nor do I find myself getting jealous of others. This is because it took me all that time away from that fake world to see how much better the real world is. After coming to that realization, I could finally make a healthy return to Instagram, because I now know that it is not the same world that I am physically living in and experiencing.

EOTO #2 - Vertical Integration

     It is a well accepted fact that running a business is not easy. While it is nice to be in charge, it also has its demands. You have to make sure you are hiring the right people, doing background checks, have an sufficient inventory, and other things of that nature. People create businesses so they can make money, but more often than not, you will have to spend some money if you want to make money. Managing your budget and spending is a crucial aspect of being a business owner, so it would be wise to only pay for the things you absolutely need.

    The concept of vertical integration is a great method to reduce spending, and also to up production, creating a total win-win scenario. Let us pretend for a moment that you, the reader, are the owner of a coffee shop. First, we must analyze the supply chain. 

 

 

    It starts with the farmers who grow the coffee plants and then harvest the beans. Those beans are then packed and shipped by a shipping company, followed by the beans being roasted in a roasting machine. Finally, the coffee is to be brewed and served to the customer. In some instances, a different business is carrying out each of those individual tasks. Let us say that you as the manager want to cut out the middleman and roast the beans yourself, that would be an example of vertical integration. Similarly, two companies within the same supply chain can join themselves together, creating the same effect.

 

 

    This website here shows some real life examples of vertical integration. One company that it highlights is Amazon. Since Amazon sources, advertises, and sells products, they have effectively taken up three parts of the supply chain. Netflix is another great example. Netflix used to be a hub for your favorite movies, but only for the ones that had already been released in theaters. In 2013, Netflix began to produce its own original shows and movies, again proving an effective use of vertical integration.

    Santa Clara University does a good job of highlighting the disadvantages of vertical integration. The most glaring downside to me was the fact that it is not always in the best financial interest to vertically integrate. This is due to the fact that it could potentially take a very large investment to buy and/or build new assets for integration.

    In conclusion, to or to not vertically integrate is a choice that must be made by the business owner. If it is in your best interest to do so, meaning that it makes sense both practically and financially, then there is no reason to not do so. If that is not the case, and it would do your business more harm than good to vertically integrate, then I would recommend staying away from it. It's upsides are potentially very lucrative, but it's downsides are potentially the polar opposite

    

EOTO #2: Things I Learned From Other Groups

 Through the second round of our "Each One Teach One" presentations, I feel like I learned a whole lot. I was first really interested in the first group's slides on propaganda. I was not aware that the first propaganda dates all the way back to Ancient Greece, where people formed citizen groups to challenge the ideas that they don't like. Propaganda was also used very heavily in the efforts for World War 2, in terms of trying to get people to join the military and also buying war bonds. 

Another interesting bit from the presentations was the one about misinformation versus disinformation. Prior to this, I had always thought they were the same thing, but it turns out that is not the case. Misinformation is inaccurate information, but it is usually not intended to be that way. Disinformation on the other hand, is deliberately inaccurate information with the goal of deceiving people.

The most interesting thing that I learned about was the concept of an echo chamber. An echo chamber is an environment in which the same opinions are repeatedly voiced and promoted, thus people are not exposed to opposing views. When I think of an echo chamber, the first thing that comes to my head is social media. It is known that those apps have algorithms to cater the things we see to us, whether that be highlights of our favorite sports team, or our political agendas, so your social media feed is essentially an echo chamber in itself.

In The Age of A.I.

 Artificial Intelligence is currently taking the world by storm. We live in a world where efficiency is a top priority for most, especially businesses, so automation increases efficiency by a whole lot, and there is really no way to argue that fact. With that however, comes the decrease in available jobs. Factory jobs are getting thinner and thinner as technology gets more complex, there are some businesses out there that don't have a single soul in their factories, just robots that do exactly what a real person would do, only marginally faster. 

With Artificial Intelligence also comes the lack of privacy. When we sign up for an online service, such as Facebook or Instagram, we assume that what we do within the app is for us to know only. Sadly, that could not be further from the truth. These companies actually buy and sell our data in order to create algorithms that will generate advertisements on our feeds based on the things we look at the most. You're a huge basketball fan who follows the likes of Steph Curry and LeBron James? Well then you can almost guarantee their will be ads for basketball shoes on your homepage. 

From the video we watched in class, the thing that frightened me the most was the bit about how a face scanning application was not working for black people, and one police face scanning system was even wrongfully convicting them of crimes they did not commit. This shows that within the greatest technologies we have created, we have let racial bias slip in between the cracks and into the code. This obviously is a big issue, it does not need to be spelled out to be understood.

Blog #5 Anitwar

 War is truly an ugly thing, as it brings out the worst in all of us. The violence is uncanny, people dying left and right just to try to justify your own way of living/thinking. It saddens me even more to say that may not even be the worst of it. 

    The other big component of war is the media. When there is a war going on, it is obviously a huge talking point for everyone and their mother, and who loves to talk/write more than journalists and those in the media? No one really likes war, but it helps out those kinds of people because it is their job to write and report about the latest happenings. It is very easy to hear things about the ongoing war, so much so it seems as if we are pushing the pro-war agenda. That is kind of the case, because without the war, the media would not have as much interesting information to report. On the same hand, war is a time of stress, so it makes people easier to manipulate with fake news and false headlines. It also provokes people to say things that they do not really mean, which if that person is a political figure can really stir the pot and get even more people talking. 

With this, there are people who want to push the anti-war agenda. The thing is, you never really hear about them, do you? In fact, if you google any term having to do with the current events going on between Russia and Ukraine the only things you'll find are articles that detail whats going on, and what people think about it. You can't just search up the war on the internet and expect to see anti-war propaganda. I believe the reason for this is that as aforementioned, people love to talk about the war. As long as the war is still going on, there is a profit for those in the media, whether that be monetary or via agenda pushing.

Diffusion of Innovations

The technology I chose was cloud computing, which has become very prominent over the last two decades or so. Those that could be considered pioneers of Cloud Computing would be J.C.R Licklider, who originally came up with the idea, and John McCarthy, who made the prediction that computing would be able to be sold as a utility. The early adopter of cloud computing would be VMWare, who used it in a practical sense to hold the contents of virtual machines. Then, in the early 2000s, the early majority was made up of big corporations such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. The late majority would be the general public, as it was in the use of the corporations before being granted to the public. The laggards would be categorized as those who still want to store all their data on physical hard drives. For visualization purposes, it would look something like this.