Class Reflection Week 1

Social media is the center of our reality right now. It was really amazing to see just how influential social media really is. In a video we watched, some interesting statistics were shared. We were told that about 61% of Facebook users log in daily. The average Facebook user spends just under an hour a day on Facebook. Almost 80 percent of people do not trust traditional advertisements. This means that online advertising is the new way to go. This is all very interesting to consider.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/5mid8p4A6Eg

What really stood out to me is what Dr. Kinghorn said about not believing everything in the course. He said that this is all new and experimental, so nothing is really set in stone yet. This made a lot of sense to me, but it also caused me to think about the field of psychology in general. Is anything really set in stone? What about biology, or chemistry? Nothing seems to be able to make it past a theory... even laws are debatable in one aspect or another.

The following video is another thing we discussed in class.

https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html

This is interesting to me because of the perspective Dr. Turkle took. She seemed to believe that an increasingly digital world is a bad thing. This made me ponder a lot... is it bad to not have face-to-face human contact, or is it just different? Surely it's unnatural to us, but we do things that were unnatural to the people in the past. What about other cultures? Some families do not eat together. A traditional American household may find that fact appalling, but to some people it is not right for men and women to eat at the same table or even in the same room. Is there really a "right" way to do things?

We also discussed the idea of how social media is very young. People my age (21) have grown up with it, so it masquerades and old and experienced, but this is false. I can recall when my mom got her first email address, the day we got wifi, and even (gasp) myspace. I had my top friends and everything on myspace.

I am very excited to try out some new social media for this class!