Final Assignment Blog #3

I've found a wonderful New york Times article that I will definitely use in my paper. It pretty much confirms my beliefs of how and why people are being "Green" these days. To them, its not about genuinely trying to save the planet; instead it's just another trend that people to choose to follow in order to fit in with others:

HERE’S one popular vision for saving the planet: Roll out from under the sumptuous hemp-fiber sheets on your bed in the morning and pull on a pair of $245 organic cotton Levi’s and an Armani biodegradable knit shirt.
Stroll from the bedroom in your eco-McMansion, with its photovoltaic solar panels, into the kitchen remodeled with reclaimed lumber. Enter the three-car garage lighted by energy-sipping fluorescent bulbs and slip behind the wheel of your $104,000 Lexus hybrid.

Clearly, even when it comes to being green and the whole notion of conserving, people are just trying to buy their way out of it! THe term going green should be changed to green consumerism. With articles that have titles like "55 great ways to look eco-sexy,’ being green is like the owning crocs so that you look cool at school.

As i've posted in my previous blog, it takes a lot of work to actually dedicate yourself to becoming green. Everyone's just jumping on the bandwagon, and doing it on a very superficial level. Of course, there are those that conduct scholarly work on it.

"We turn toward the consumption part because that’s where the money is,” Mr. Hawken said. “We tend not to look at the ‘less’ part. So you get these anomalies like 10,000-foot ‘green’ homes being built by a hedge fund manager in Aspen. Or ‘green’ fashion shows. Fashion is the deliberate inculcation of obsolescence.”

He added: “The fruit at Whole Foods in winter, flown in from Chile on a 747 — it’s a complete joke. The idea that we should have raspberries in January, it doesn’t matter if they’re organic. It’s diabolically stupid.”

I think that sums up how people act and feel about the environmental movement pretty well.

Final Assignment blog # 2

As I am working on this paper, delving into the serious issued of why disposability of products is a way of life for Americans, it hits me that the environmental movement of being Green is just as popular. It makes me wonder, how is it that everyone is so obsessed with being green, when statistic of consumption show otherwise. After sifting through a few articles and websites, I come across this global warming campaign that discusses ways to save energy and be more green.

http://globalwarming-facts.info/50-tips.html

It takes a lot of work to be more green! and this is just the job of one person. How are we supposed to get an entire nation to do this?!

One of the suggestions was to buy used furniture. Who the heck wants to buy used furniture? I mean, i'll buy a used car if I have to because my wallet looks a little sparse, or even taking a hand me down bed from my brother when he moved out to California, but to go out and buy something like a used couch from a stranger...it doesn't really make much sense, and frankly is kind of disgusting.
Obviously these suggestions are not all very practical. They go directly against what most people desire with their accessories: To have the brand spankin new ones before anyone else can get their hand on them.

Final Assignment Blog #1

In first choosing which topic I wanted to tackle, I thought about the social implications that I am more familiar with and would be better able to describe. Choosing Made to Break was an easy choice for me as I am very familiar with the disposable society that surrounds us. For instance, in my town there is a very stupid rule that a household is not allowed to have a clothes line in their backyard since it is not aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Having a clothes line though, would save so much money on the strained energy bill that many families have trouble coping with. Rarely does my family wait for the laundry baket to be filled up to the brim befoe we turn on a the washing machine and consequently the dryer. If we were to have a clothes line, we would save plenty in electricity. This type of narrow thinking is not limited to municipalities of small New Jersey towns. Producers and consumers alike are conditioned to dispose of their products when before they have been fully worn and torn. People love to stay on top of the latest trends and technology actually makes it that much easier to do this. With the advent of the internet, everyone knows the latest trends and fashions. Websites like twitter, for instance, can inform one how cool the new iPhone is and how much better is even though this may not be the case. Someone very impressionable like a child as a result, can beg their parents to get them the new phone, and the parents are forced to toss the old one before its lifespan has been completed.

Facebook Effect Part III

In the final part of the book, Kirkpatrick discusses the integration of platforms into facebook which allowed for users to use applications on the website. This was a part of a growing need for Facebook to generate revenue via external factors. Other companies would pay Facebook to have applications such as games installed on Facebook. More importantly, the use of advertising on facebook allowed other companies to directly target their exact audience. It is not uncommon to for a 20 year old male Facebook user to see an advertisement that read" Are you a 20 year old male looking to become a police officer?" or something to that extent. With the applications, it was a win-win situation for facebook as well as the application companies. "There are more than 500,000 applications operating on Facebook, created by over 1 million registered developers from 180 countries" (pg. 232) The rapid growth of facebook demanded more income streamed into maintaining its servers and advertising was a tremendous source of revenue.
Clearly though, the use of private information by companies to create advertisements can be seen as an invasion of privacy. What can look like a fun game at first glance is actually a data mining technique by corporations. For instance there is this application on FB that lets you determine how much of the world you have traveled to, percentage-wise. This information can be used by tourist, airline, and travel agency companies to lure you into visiting countries that you have not yet visited. Every app on facebook has its purpose in terms of collecting information. The dangerous part is that on the surface, it looks completely innocuous.
Once again a seemingly unresistable offer to buy facebook from Google for $15 Billion was put into place, but Zuckerberg refused. He had bigger goals to tackle. Just as their is no offer that has satisfied Zuckerberg, there seems to be no end to Facebook's growth internationally. Countries with incredibly low GDP's are beginning to sign into facebook.

Facebook Effect Part II

In the second third of the book, Kirkpatrick begins to discuss how "TheFacebook" really begins to pick up, and starts to draw the attention of financial investors. It seems like one of the main things that the investors liked about facebook was how much of the market it had penetrated and how interactive the website was with its users. No social networking platform had allowed for such a great amount of interaction before. It had began to grow to other demographics such as high schools. "Facebook was no longer just a college phenomenon" (pg. 150) I think this was the point at which it had begun the process of "selling out." Others may see it as one step closer to bringing the whole world together on the internet.
The news feed feature was added in the year 2006, which allows users to see their friends' facebook activity with other people. This was a monumental change in the website's interface, because now not only can you communicate with others, but you can also monitor and follow their socialization activity. As Kirkpatrick states, "The News Feed would be a radical change. It's not a new feature, it's a major a product evolution...It would remake Facebook" (pg 180). Slowly but surely, all the information put up on the Facebook was becoming more and more accessible. A great tool for many, but at the cost of privacy.
I think the addition of the news feed feature kind of changed the purpose of facebook. It became a way to peer into your friends lives, and even acquaintances, to see what everybody is up to. Whereas before it was mostly about staying intimately in touch with your close friends instead of having to resort to a phone, email etc. It may have at first been an issue, but now "we are more comfortable sharing our lives and thoughts instantly to thousands of people, close friends and strangers alike. "
I find it interesting that when facebook had begun to make a name for itself, it was stealing highly intellectual employees from corporate giants such as Amazon. I think the hardest part of being a successful company, is not getting there, but maintaining it. Zuckerberg did a good job with working to hire talent that could add substantial growth to the website.

Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect; part 1

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick feels like Kirkpatrick's confession to his love for the social networking giant. In the first half of the book, the author begins to tell the story of facebook from its humble beginnings that began as a website to rate girls. Of course, as we all know, Facebook ran into some legal trouble where Zuckerberg was being sued because he allegedly stole someone's idea. Zuckerberg is painted as an overachiever, who is hard to work with, but is extremely ambitious. Facebook starts out small, first just at Harvard, then Ivy League schools, and then more and more colleges are included. To Zuckerberg, facebook wasn't about making money. After all he did refuse an $10 Million offer for the company.
The book has somewhat of a skewed tone towards facebook, in the sense that Kirkpatrick seems to hail Zuckerberg and his accomplishments, and fails to describe them in an unbiased manner.
From the beginning, Kirkpatrik speak of the creator of Facebook in an extremely positive light. "He was captain and most valuable player on the fencing team...on his application to Harvard, he could barely fit all the honors and awards he won in high school. " (pg.20)
Unfortunately not everybody used facebook in the way the Zuckerberg had intended it to be. Many people, even to this day, use it as a way to accumulate the most amount of friends rather than to communicate and gather useful information.
I think much of Facebook's success has to do with luck. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg was in college,at Harvard no less, where social networks are the densest, definitely helped to position him in a way that made it so lucrative.