Online Reflection 3

Book Reflection

I've chosen to write a reflection on a particular book named 50 great short stories by multiple authors, some of the stories are by famous authors such as Hemingway,Woolf, Faulkner and lesser known writers like Robert Coates and John Collier. 

The first short story I read was  The Garden Party and is about a girl named Laura that has privilege life with very few problems but the day of a garden party she gets into a moral dilemma when a disaster happens, the point of the story was about how attach people are to material things and other stuff that in the end doesn't matter.

There are stories that are better than others but they are all great in their own way. The shortness of the stories made me as reader appreciate the authors imagination and the way they minimalism a tale. Most of the stories in the book could have been a entire book with 500 pages each but the way the authors choose words and select how a story starts and ends makes it fun to read. The English on some of the stories is harder to read than others but overall normal difficulty.  

The pocket book is perfect for a reader like me that has hard time finishing a book or that easily get bored, the book is also good for discovering lesser known authors with different styles that are really good.  

The genre of the stories is pretty diverse but most of them are classics meaning not very modern. Some of the stories have some deeper meaning like The Garden Party that relates to the everyday life and other stories are just difficult to understand, for example The Three-Day Blow by Hemingway is mostly about a couple of guys drinking scotch and because it was Hemingway I expected more so I read it twice in the belief that I missed something.

I bought the book at the airport waiting for my delayed flight and the stories made the time fly (pound intended). I have to admit that I didn't read all the stories but I read most of them and even though it was some time ago I still remember a couple of stories that I really liked: The Lottery by Shyley Jackson, The Garden party by Katherine Mansfield and The man who could work miracles by Wells.    

Online Reflection 2
"Are droids taking our jobs?" 

This blog entry is a reflection on a TED talk from Andrew McAfee, he raises the question about today's unemployment and how technology is affecting people's ability  to earn a living. The primary question is "Are droids taking our jobs"?

To summarize the TED talk  Andrews answer is yes, the droids are taking our jobs. But he can see a bright future because technology is evolving in a way that people can start focusing on more important things than just labor, like reduce poverty and drudgery around the world. He gives an example in the TED talk about the steam engine and how revolutionary it was to overcome the limitation of our muscles, now we are entering a era that we are overcoming the limitations of our individual brains. Andrew McAfee says that this is just the beginning. 

Well I agree that technology is giving the humans more time to pursue other things and maybe this freed time is going to help the worlds poverty, but for me this is a very positive ideal. The jobs that are being replace by robots are low and middle class jobs,  the only ones benefiting from this are the companies that don't need to pay salary to humans. 

Maybe in some distant future there will be some sort of positive result, when the big droid companies start helping the poor and create some sort of law between droid and human labor. But until that there will be an increasing unemployment rate. Andrew McAfee refers to Voltaire: "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need" which is pretty accurate, the result of unemployment is poverty and that leads to crime. Another negative result is that in some point humans will become expandable and this can lead to a human/droid war which sounds a little excessive but it is a possible result when 1% of the human population have all the power and control of the machines. This may be the most negative result of droids taking human jobs but it's something to consider. 

How will be our John Connor?

Link to TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs

Online reflection 1- Facebook.

Facebook has not changed the definition of friend, it just created another form of it. This new form of internet friend are just persons that we never meet but have friends or interest  in common .You can't really "unfriend" a person you have known for an x amount of years, you still need to have a real life confrontation. 

Robin Dunbar says “In the sandpit of life, when somebody kicks sand in your face, you can’t get out of the sandpit. You have to deal with it, learn, compromise,” well in the "viral sandpit" it's easier to confront a person that kicks sand in your face. Facebook has enable introverted people that in real life never dare to express them self's to have a voice and make them self's be heard.

Something that I agree with is the privacy problem that Facebook creates, the information that Facebook has is pretty much a person's whole life now a days. The consequences is that people can get targeted by corporations and other people who seek to harm another Facebook user. It is true that people can restrict their profiles by only allowing friends to see their information and photos, but it's easy to accept another person as your friend even if you are not sure that you know him/her. Kids can easily have over 1000 friends that they don't know but accept just because, they may think "What's the harm in accepting another friend" well this new friend has access to all your information and photos.

The way that facebook allows organizations to have an account is beneficial for both facebook and the company. I personal have experience how Facebook can help a small business market itself and get in touch with customers. It's a  simple way to create a homepage so customers can see the products and read information about prices and locations. A company can even get evaluated with a five star system which can be both good and bad.

Even clubs and bars are making a Facebook accounts, it's the perfect way to create an event and invite people to it. The event even marks its self in the calendar of the invited person and reminds the user that its getting close to that date.

Facebook has the power to make a news article world famous through shares and likes, it may not be big news or even important but a panda dancing video can get more attention than a terrorist attack. I don't think that Facebook should be anyone's news source and even worse is that journalist are customizing the news article for Facebook and its users so that a edited picture with a provocative title can get the attention of thousands.

Facebook is changing the world by uniting people all over the world and its adapting itself so that users never get bored or pushing people to create accounts by incorporating facebook in other products like Spotify or Instagram which they actually bought.

Original article:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/28/from-relationships-to-revolutions-seven-ways-facebook-has-changed-the-world