Comments of the Social Media Articles

Positive

• I definitely agree that social media can be a great way keep up or find people that you know, or can be a good way to meet new people.
• I thought it was interesting how social media can reduce stereotyping as many people feel safe to share their stories with the public.
• The way that new channels provide news through social media sites, providing another way for news to reach audiences. It feels like more people are looking to social media to find out their news.

Negative

• Spelling and grammar is a negative effect that I strongly agree with. It seems like people just create their own ways to spell words. Just because it's the Internet, doesn't mean that you can't spell properly. 
• Social media can be a huge distraction, especially when you're trying to get your work done.
• Privacy is becoming a big problem with social media sites. It's hard when policies always change for no reason, and also when the advertisements follow you after you get off the social media sites. 

Oh, Internet How You've Changed!

It was such a long time ago since I first used the Internet. Now I feel old…very old.

 I remember when we finally got the Internet at my house.  

We were the family that was pretty late in getting a computer; it was horrible to say the least. It felt like I was the only one who didn’t have a computer or the Internet at home. I bugged my parents constantly about getting a computer, until they caved in and finally bought one.

We had the computer down in the family room and at the time, we didn’t have a computer desk then, so the computer was on the floor. Oh, and I should mention that our first computer was a Gateway computer (you don’t really see or hear those mentioned nowadays).

Anyways, our Internet provider was AOL at the time. I remember that we had to use the discs and install it into the disc drive to start up the process. It was pretty self explanatory, you just followed the directions and voila there was the Internet on our computer! It was kind of weird because I really didn’t know what to do first! I would type in a whole bunch of stuff just to see if the Internet could even find it. It was kind of like I was challenging it to a game or something. But, I couldn’t beat it as many times as I tried. It was just absolutely amazing that all this information could be obtained with just going into a search engine and typing in whatever you wanted, even though the Internet was a small place back then.

Thinking back on it now, it was really annoying to use the Internet at my house. It wasn’t that fast like it is now. We started out using dial up (ugh!). It was the most annoying thing ever. When someone called our house, if I was on the computer I always had to unplug the cord and then wait until they were off the phone, which would sometimes take hours for them. Another thing was the speed, which I couldn’t stand at all. It was super slow and took forever just to get to one site. I would wait for at least 30 minutes until the site fully loaded. I don’t know how I got through the dial up stage without beating my computer into a pile a scrap.

As far as using the Internet, all I did was play a bunch of games, AIM messenger, and email. Those were the most popular things to do then.

Games were a big part of my Internet experience. I would play them for hours on end. My parents literally had to pry me away from the computer because of the games and I would spend the day playing them.

There wasn’t really much that you could do with the Internet back then. It’s kind of cool to look back on the Internet then and compare it to now.