My feed

Here is a glimpse of what my feed might look like.

I love Nike. This is an ad for Nike Women, and I am sure it would pop up on my feed quite a bit. I am addicted to their shoes, and athletic wear. I am sure my feed would pick up on this pretty quickly and bombard me with these type of advertisements. 

I love to wear make-up, so I am sure advertisements, like this one, would show up on my feed a lot. I can't quite afford Dior make-up, but the advertisement looks cool.

I know soda is not good for you, but I LOVE Mountain Dew. If I have to stay up late to study or do homework, I always drink one to give me a bit of energy. I also think it is very refreshing at times. I am sure my feed would realize how obsessed I am, and throw advertisements like this one at me all the time.

I love watching football, and especially if the Giants are playing. This is an advertisement I would definitely see on my feed.

Feed

Thoreau’s Walden, was very fascinating to read. The idea behind Thoreau’s experiment, I think, was a great idea, but would be hard to give up your life, as you know it for an entire year. Honestly, I do not think someone could do that now. As a whole society, we have become so reliant on technology. To give up even one type of technology seems mind boggling to most people. I know that I would have a hard time even giving up just my cell phone.

            At first, Feed seemed very extreme to me, but the more comparisons I made to society today, I realized it is not quite as far fetched as I first thought. We are not as reliant on our technology as the characters in Feed, but I do think that we are headed down that path. We do not have actual Feeds in our brains, but I do believe that we are very much controlled by the media and popular culture. There is so much money spent on researching us all to shape advertisements to appeal to us, just like the Feed’s do to the characters in Feed. Whether we all choose to believe it or not, we like what we are told to like, and do what we are told is cool to do. Even those who consider themselves “non-conformists” have things made just for them by the media. I do not believe that any one of us is entirely unique. I just wonder who is to blame for this.

Dumbest Generation

            The article, The Dumbest Generation, was quite shocking. One of the opening quotes says, “two thirds of high-school seniors, in 2006, could not explain an old photo of a sign over a theater reading COLORED ENTRANCE.” Speaking for myself, I would be very much capable of explaining the meaning and significance of the sign. Therefore, it is hard for me to swallow this statistic.  In the clip we viewed in class, Mark Bauerlein says that no one should trust anyone under the age of 30, due to our ignorance. Bauerlein places the majority of the blame on our generation. However, if we are unaware of such major past events whose fault is that really? I think it has a lot to do with the education system in America. I do not think that the educators are bad, I think they are told what they must teach, and teach so that their students will do well on state tests, so that they can keep their jobs. We may not know everything there is to know, but I do not think we are dumb, or even close to it.

Furthermore, the article discusses multitasking. It says, “multitasking forces the brain to share processing resources, so even if the tasks don’t use the same regions, there is some shared infrastructure that gets overloaded. Chronic multitasking—texting and listening to your iPod and updating your Facebook page while studying for your exam on the Italian Renaissance—might also impair learning.” I think older generations are very critical of all the multitasking our generation attempts to do. I think we grew up in a very different time. We have grown up with constant noise around us, bombarded with advertisements, that we have had to become good at processing what is important to us, what is not, and how to handle all of this being thrown at us at once. Therefore, I believe this has made us more capable of multitasking, and I do not think it is necessarily a bad thing, or taking away from our education.