Monday, November 14, 2011

Next year... Election time...

   Just under a year till the next presidential elections. This is exciting for me because it will the first presedential election in which I vote in. For most of my life so far I have sit by and watched my family discuss who to or not to vote for, and waved bye as they drove of to mark a ballot. However, after looking over the candidates I am not entirely sure who I should vote for myself. The Republicans talk of how the Democrats are ruining America and the Democrats respond with the same message. Who do you believe? Both sides have done great good, but also great evil. Both parties have their dirty secrets and the Republican candidate Herman Cain is in the middle of fighting for his reputation as women have come forward saying they were sexually abused and assaulted by Cain. It seems no one is clean in the world of politics no matter how nice they may seem. Personally, I do not agree with everything Obama has done over the past few years, but compared to who is running I would rather handle a known evil than an unkown evil. True, the other candidates maybe better than our current president, and many would agree with that, but the risk of the unknown is simply to large to gamble on political and religious ideology.

Thoughts on Syria

So it would seem peace has finally come to the Middle East. Syria has called a cease fire and al-Assad, President-Dictator of Syria, has agreed to step down. This is what some would like to see in the news. What has actually happened is that the Arab League has agreed to suspend Syria’s membership on the grounds that the Syrian government did not stop the violence as they had promised. I do not know what this means for the people of Syria or how this will affect the nation as a whole. What I do know is that this is at least a step in the right direction. A sort of foundation with which the people of Syria can start from in order to make a more ideal country for them to live in. Will this transition be simple and painless? Not by a long shot. Two countries that had similar situations, Libya and Egypt, had to go through violent protests followed by full on revolutions , in which hundreds of people lost their lives, in order make the changes they wanted. This process that the people of Syria have initiated is a long and painful process. A process filled with violence, bloodshed, death, and tears; a process that sadly could have been avoided, if things had been more diplomatic. Another tragedy is that the peaceful, diplomatic talks will not happen as their too much tension between the two parties. The people want freedom and change, and the president wants stability and to keep his position through any means. Whether or not the result of the people of Syria’s hardships is something worth the lives lost and the suffering caused is up to the people left after the smoke clears.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/14/world/meast/syria-unrest/index.html?hpt=wo_c2

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Krost Symposium

After having attended Dr. Sherry Turkle’s presentation, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other” I find that I agree with her on how  technology has reshaped how people interact with each other and that the changes made need to be reworked for the better. The reason is, as Dr. Turkle said, people have become so linked and attached to phones, computers, and various social programs and websites  that countless hours are spent tailoring and remodeling online selfs in order to make them perfect and escape from the real world. For example, Dr. Turkle talked about a man that spent hours on SecondLife talking to another user, so far as to convince her not to committ suicide. It was later revealed that the other user the man had been talking to was an older man from Florida. This made up world the first man had been living in was pulled out from under him. Everything he thought he know about himself had been taken away and brought into question. Adults  are not the only ones with problems concerning technology and social media.  Dr. Turkle said, during the presentation, that many kids and teenagers find it difficult to talk to their parents because their parents’s attention is not on the kids, but on computers and cell phones. What this is teaching kids, Dr. Turkle said, is not how to be alone, but how to be lonely. However, like Turkle, I belive there is hope still left in this digital world. People just need to find that balance between their lives and their technology that works for them. If they ever get the feeling that they are addicted to any of these thigns then they should simply put it down and back away from it for awhile and see how they feel about it afterwards. In the end the matter of whether or not any of theses problems are problems for anyone lies with the user. It is the user’s choice to bring these thigns into their lives and reshape how they live it.