Today's reading was about technology. The first story was about a group of people who use the popular social media site known as Myspace. It discussed an incident where Myspace shut down for a period of time. Within this time, people's reactions and feelings truly were affected. People felt lost, and didn't know how to function. I think it's pretty crazy that someone can be so attached to something so fake. The second reading was about a man who has a serious problem when it comes to technology. He wakes up, and before even brushing his teeth, he turns on his computer and checks every social media site available. After that, he checks his phone, and the various things he keeps on that. He goes on to talk about how he uses his media sites, and the different strategies that he goes through to make his opinions on different people. I think that its ridiculous that people have lost communication with each other in person. The way we act is totally different with the invention of social media.

The reading from pages 119-124 were about different groups of people within a larger community. In this case, they were talking about a college or university. It discussed how people are perceived differently and act differently just because they go to different schools. The reading then goes on to talk about how the groups within a college or university act different from each other as well. The second half of the reading was on Jon Stewart's Commencement Address to the college of William and Mary. He took a totally different approach from a normal commencement speech. Most are long, boring and very tedious. Stewart used a lot of comedy, yet his message was sincere. He talked a lot about real life situations, and gave it to the audience straight forward, and maybe even a little "blunt". Overall, I feel it was an effective job because it definitely kept the audience's attention.

Today in class we were told to blog about our progress with our poster project. The assignment is for us to make a digital poster of a topic that helps identify who we are. I chose to base my project on my hometown of Milton, Mass. I'm going to work on a few different sub topics such as childhood sports, friends, school, and family. These sub topics are definitely main contributors to the person that I have become. Experiences with all of them have given me knowledge, and opinions on things in the world, and I can truly say that each of them have molded me into who I am today. I also chose to do my project on an online program called Glogster. I've never used it before, but I feel that I can play around with the different settings and options and make a very creative project.

-The reading in class this week was about people in different situations within society. Whether it was relationships in school between different cliques, online avatars, or people's Facebook profiles. The reading that I chose to write about was the one about the avatars in the online video games. Many people play online games, where you create a model person/character which is known as an "avatar". These are figures within the game that you personally control. Not only do you make them walk around and live a life online, you decide what they look like. It's up to you to decide what their gender, hair color, build, and even clothing looks like. In many cases these avatars don't directly look like the person behind the screen. Many people make them into what they want to be, rather than what they actually are. It's a place where people can escape the real world, and not have to feel self conscious about their identity. Personally, I've never played these games and I'm not sure why you would want to be anything that you're not in real life. I find that it would be more entertaining to make the avatar as close to yourself as possible. I do however understand that people have their own feelings and interests when it comes to this topic, and they are going to do what makes them comfortable within the game that they can control.