“Meet” The new Motorola DEXT. Slogan: "Take Your Entire Social Life With You". Or "The first phone with social skills". Go to the homepage, and you will see a very encouraging promotional blurb: "Meet the fully customisable home screen that's as unique as you are. Your Facebook™, MySpace and Twitter happenings are right there, along with your emails, messages, news and favorite apps, and widgets. All just the way you like them." If a phone screen can be just as unique as you are, how unique are you?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1CDZ408rzM
The protagonists entire social life is racing to get to him through this phone, but the one that really matters to him appears at the end. His “girlfriend” sends him a text and all of a sudden she appears. The consumer can do everything that in other instances he would do in person, miraculously on his phone! The world of technology is providing another world where we can do everything we want on our phones. There would be no more awkward conversations, because you will never actually be in a face-to-face conversation. This technological life that people are living is not a life. It works for you, it thinks for you. It is your entire social life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsE0g-8CDQo
In an HP computer commercial, in which the person advertising it is Jay-Z, a famous rapper, the commercial ironically provides revealing social commentary. Jay-Z states that his "whole life is on this thing". As stupid as that may sound, I can't help but agree. What would we really do without our computers? Our Phones? Our Facebooks? We would be out of the loop. Our social life… Gone. Until of course we get a new one the next day or two. People have lost the ability to live without these things. Facebook has just reached 350 million users. If Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. It would be larger than the United States. That’s scary.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article763859.ece
A kid’s relationship to their parents is one of the most fundamental and important things in a person’s life. One’s parents are the closest people to them. You're supposed to be able to talk to them, and tell them things. They should know about your life -- they created it! So when things like Myspace, and Facebook came out, you can see how our generation went downhill. Kids stopped talking to their parents, and started social networking as a way of therapy. Telling basically complete strangers (people you have met maybe once) about all of your problems (a Status), and seeing what people have to say about it.
Patrick White interviews 3 parents whose kids all have Facebook. All three of families said that their relationships with their kids have changed. Two of the three families said that their relationships are worse. One mother even says she thinks that her daughter's generation is losing the ability to socialize in person.
Feed
The book Feed by M.T. Anderson is a novel about a world in which a tiny chip called “The Feed” is stored into people’s brains. “The Feed” had features like “M-Chat”, which was basically texting/Iming from the brain. You never had to talk out loud, you just needed to M-chat someone. I kept making these parallels and connections. The feed itself was the Internet. You could look things up, buy things, and even get high or drunk, from the comfort of your own brain, never having to go anywhere
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