dear world wide web,

Today in class we were talking about how it is easier to pretend to care about things than to actually care about things. Now, I do actually care about things, however, I don't act upon it as much as I used to. This difference happened when I went from high school to college.

In high school, I was an extremely active student. I was in a ton of clubs, I played three sports, and I was constantly doing community service. I worked four days a week and loved every second of it. I was a complete overachiever and enjoyed every second of it. I want to be involved in everything and I really wanted to make a difference.

I achieved a lot in high school, I went on leadership conferences, model united nation conferences, I worked to pass a proposal for my school to shut all the lights off for a full day to conserve energy and spread awareness about sustainable development.

I even started a student organization called S.U.P.E.R. (Student for Understanding, Peace, and Establishing Reform)and it was successful. We raised over $1000 for both the crisis in Darfur and Doctors Without Borders.

In any case, I did stuff. I cared, and it was well known that I cared.

Then I came to college. What happened?

Now, I volunteer for Big Brothers Big Sisters, I volunteer for organizations when I go home, and I am in a sorority. I work two jobs and am currently taking 19 credits.

It's not that I don't care anymore; because I truly personally do not believe that it is easier to pretend to care. I think the reason that I am not as involved anymore is because I have a lot less time and a lot more responsibility.

I see posters on campus and I talk to people in my classes who are in clubs. A lot of people claim they have a hard time getting people to show up for meetings regularly. It got me thinking that everyone's busy. This lead me to think about Hamlet's Blackberry.

Although some people are busy with important things, I am sure there are people who make themselves busy. I think the people who think that it is easier to pretend to care than to actually care and act upon it are the people who make themselves busy.

There are some people who's daily routine is to go to class or work, go on facebook, watch movies, sleep all day, and then go out get drunk, wake up hungover, and repeat the cycle. These are the people who we have to worry about.

Thee good thing is that I have hope! This class, although at first it scared the hell out of me, has taught me that there is hope. So once again, I am going to set a goal. This goal is more of a long-term goal because like I said, I am very busy.

My goal is to eventually be able to write and motivate people through my writing to stop pretending to care and instead to care enough that they want to and actually do act upon it.

I have faith.

Kiersten

in other news....

dear world wide web,

At some point in the semester, my Press in America class talked about today's society and the fact that nothing is relevant to anything else. Everything we do is segmented; nothing is continuous. I began to think about this and realize that it is not just the media that does this. The media has affected my brain so much that I have trouble continuing a thought process as I leave one classroom and go to another.

I find myself thinking about all of these wonderful things in class; and I really get it and for the time being, I am thinking really deeply. I am making connections and thoroughly enjoy what I am hearing and thinking about. This is when I started to write down what I was thinking while I was in class.

Because as soon as the class is over, the thought process comes to a halt. I leave the classroom and it is like the hour and fifteen minutes I spent contemplating my life and role in society, the direction society is moving in general, never happened.

I will make a list of things to do. The list may include e-mailing a professor about an assignment, or asking what time a club I want to join meets. And so I sit down at the computer to do it because at that moment, my thought process consists of my to do list and only my to do list.

When I walk away from the computer, I forget what I literally typed five minutes ago. I may get a reply the same day, and I will sit down and read it. After I read it, I don't act upon what I just read because I am so used to segmenting everything. I am reading a reply. But then I'll walk away from the computer and not act upon what I just read.

This really and truly is crazy and probably the most unproductive thing ever. I am lucky that I took a class that revealed this to me because if it happens to me, it most likely is happening to other people to. However, I am aware of it now, so I can take the time to concentrate on what I am doing and get my brain to function the way it is supposed to. But what happens to everyone else?

Kiersten

a conversation with myself

dear world wide web,

I want to start this entry by saying that when I first started this blog, I decided to call it dear world wide web sort of as a joke. What I came to realize today is that this blog sort of is like a diary real or journal. More so, is my Press in America notebook. I was looking through my notebook at the beginning of class today. Functions of media, social responsibility theory, libertarian theory, attention economy, positive and negative freedom. All of these terms are laid out neatly in my notebook. Yet this notebook is not like my notebooks for other classes.

If a random person went through my notebook, they would think I was nuts. I have random comments, phrases, and even paragraphs that I have written down while we were having discussions. I am not very good at organizing my thoughts for speech. When I begin to speak in front of people, it comes out in a stream of nothingness. However, I can write clearly and in some kind of order.

My notebook is proof of this. In a sense, it is like a conversation with myself. This is something that does not happen in other classes and I think it is because I have a lot to think about in this class. So, even though the semester is over, I think I am going to post some blogs about some of the conversations I sort of had with myself in my notebook. A lot of them are from out most recent discussions.

I know that Professor Good is probably the only person who reads this, and most likely only for another week, if that, but I think that I have learned a lot about myself from this class and from the discussions and I want to post them because I think that it is sort of a way for me to continue thinking about the issues we raised in class.

So thank you, and I'm sorry if there are a lot of random blogs in the next few hours/days.

Kiersten

call the police

dear world wide web,

In our last class, we were talking about how people become worried, scared, and pissed off when you don't answer a phone call or text message right away. It had me thinking of a day that I had last year. It was two days after my 20th birthday and I was in a terrible mood for many different reasons. I decided I was going to shut my phone off and just watch movies all day with my two best friends so that I wasn't worrying about everything else going on in my world (or in my phone I guess you could say. I had been fighting with two of my friends from home (through text message, obviously) and just wanted it to end. I wanted a break, a huge gap, between myself and the conflict occuring with my friends via my phone.

I ended up sleeping over my friend's apartment that night because we ended up watching Back to the Future 1, 2, and 3. When I got back to me room in the morning I turned on my computer. I had over 20 IMs from my mother. These messages included: where are you? why arent you answering the phone? i havent heard from you in days (which wasn't true), why dont i have any of your friends phone numbers? if i dont hear from you by 1 p.m. im calling the police!

I quickly looked at the time at the bottom of the screen; it was 2:15. I frantically plugged in my phone to call my mom. She answered the phone in a fit of rage. I don't even remember the words she was saying because I think I blacked out from the screaming. Two minutes later, the resident director of my dorm at the time came to my door. She told me that the entire resident directory and residence life had been looking for me for over an hour and that I had to call my mom.

My mom had called the school, university police, new paltz police, and then in turn were going to have state troopers look for me.

All because I didn't answer a phone. This specific incident is the one that makes me so crazy about having my phone on me at all times. I get really anxious when I do not have a phone because I am afraid that a family member is trying to get in touch with me and I don't want them to be worried because I am not picking up a phone.

But WHY are they getting worried? When my mom was growing up she didn't have a cell phone. She was on the streets of Brooklyn, wandering around on subways and buses at a crazy young age and her mom never called the police because she couldn't get in touch with her.

I tried to explain this to my mom. Last weekend I went home for my cousin's bridal shower and a similiar incident happenned between my mom and my younger sister. I then explained to my mom, in Powers' words, hoping it would stick with her because it was a professional saying it, not me. I told her that sometimes we all, including my sisters and I, need a break from the phone. If we are hanging out with friends, we should be able to leave our phones alone in order to experience, and I mean REALLY experience, the time we have with our friends.

She seemed to agree a little bit, yet as I got in my car to drive back to New Paltz she yelled to me "Kiersten (in a staten island accent..Keeysten) don't forget to call ya motha once in a while." At least, we're making progress.

Kiersten

black friday shopping!

dear world wide web,

Every year, my older cousin Kaitlin and I go shopping the day after Thanksgiving (although not necessarily at 3 a.m.). This tradition is part of what keeps the two of us close. We don't get to see each other very often and this is one of the times that we are guaranteed to be able to talk and catch up. This year, I had a very different experience than my other years.

A week before Thanksgiving, I began reading William Powers' Hamlet's Blackberry. In the first chapter, Powers talks about the life of the American being "busy". He talks about how even when we aren't busy, we make ourselves become busy by either taking up a hobby we enjoy, or simply carrying out empty actions. We seem to have lost the ability to live "deeply". Powers compares two different interactions: 1) with a stop sign, 2) with your dog. When we perceive the sign, we react automatically without much thought. When we perceive our dog, we think on a much deeper level and spend more time with the dog. These two experiences are completely different.

While walking around the mall, I noticed this same difference. Here I am, walking with my cousin, talking about what she is going to get her fiance for Christmas. We go into Things Remembered and start looking at money clips. She decides that is what she wants to get and then we spend a good 30 minutes looking at the different ones, imagining which one we could see coming out of his pocket. After laughing about different scenarios in which this would happen, we began thinking of what to get engraved on the item. This took another 15 minutes.

This entire time, I didn't even realize that I had left my phone in the car. I think it's because I was having real interactions with my cousin that I didn't realize I wasn't connected to my phone and 100 other people. I was connected to a person. On the way out of the store a teenage girl walked straight into me. She was on her iPhone, with her friend, who looked the same age, also on her iPhone. This is when Powers' words starting springing up in my head.

As I continued to walk around, I was looking at the people walking next to me, in front of me, behind me. I was awestruck. Almost everybody was either talking or texting on a phone. There was one family (outside the Disney store) that was talking and laughing with each other. This actually began to worry me a little bit.

All of these people were having the experience they have with a stop sign. They would look up occasionally, perceive the store they wanted to go into, look back down at their phones, and walk into the store. Then they would check out some of the prices on the signs, pick up some clothes, and quickly pay for it. I began to ponder what was going on in their brains, what were they thinking about.

For a large majority of the people I was passing, technology, mainly cell phones in this case had them connected to a bunch of other people to whom they were communicating instead of the people standing next to them. All of these people were having very shallow experiences, rather than being in the present.

An hour later, I was rushing my cousin out of the mall because I felt like I was going crazy. I got back into the car, grabbed my cell phone, turned it on silent, threw it in my bag, and did not look at it again until I got home that night.

I know that I do this also, but I am glad that I am beginning to see how extreme it can become and now I purposely lower my connectivity to the rest of my phone book.

I want to live deeply.

Kiersten

relevence.

dear world wide web,

I know that we don't have to post on our personal blogs anymore, but I really wanted to write about an encounter I had last night at work, where this class was never more relevant to real life.

I work at a restaurant/bar in town and I was getting off of work last night when a couple having drinks at the bar started a conversation with me. They asked me typical questions: where are you from? do you go to the college? what year are you? whats your major?

As I began to tell them my major, and some more detail about my academic career, they started telling me a little about themselves. The man went to college and ended up moving to California to work on movies. The woman lived in New York City her whole live and was an expert in Film Editing. She was telling me about how sad it was that print media was dying. She started saying how much of a generational gap there is because of technology and how many things she grew up with are disappearing.

We then started talking about her husbands old 35 mm camera with a thousand and one lens' and how much training it took to be able to work a camera like that, to create art in the form of photography. She then started complaining about how kids today have digital cameras and put their pictures on facebook and call it art.

I found myself involved in such an interesting conversation with this women, and somehow ended up quoting Andrew Keen. I told her all about the classes I am taking and what we say about the future of the media. I told her all about Andrew Keens theories and ideas and she found it incredibly interesting.

I ended up writing Andrew Keen's name and the name of his book on a piece of paper so that she could read it. It made me realize how relevant the conversations we have in class are to the real world. It was really rewarding to be able to have a conversation with this woman who along with her colleagues agree with a lot of what we say in class.

I hope to find some more people to whom I can speak with about issues such as these. Maybe there are enough people who feel the same way about media; and if we spread the message and discuss matters like this more regularly, maybe media can slow down on becoming old technology fast.

Kiersten

windows 7 phone to the rescue

Dear World Wide Web,

The video of the commercial for the new windows 7 phone that we watched in class amazed me. It is attractive to viewers because of the music and because it is funny and makes you realize how absurd society has gotten. It almost reminded me of Idiocracy, it almost seemed like some viewers are infantilizied by commercials. People watching this commercial, all happy because of the songs, laughing because its funny, yet at the same time it just seems stupid because that is what the majority of those viewers do on a daily basis. And then the fact that the phone is being advertised as "the phone to get you in, out, and back to life". Yet it is still a phone, the same technology that is the problem is the solution. It makes NO sense. I showed the video to another one of my teachers in the Communication and Media and I thought he was going to analyze it and say how crazy it was, but instead the professor talked about how funny it was.

I don't know what we have come to but it seems that nothing makes sense anymore.

Kiersten