Clay Wilder

I decided to "unplug" for a little over a half a day last Saturday, and it felt great. I honestly don't feel like I use technology all that much, but then again I certainly rely on it more than I'd like to admit. I am not on my phone as much as my peers, but I realized the technology I prefer using the most is television and video games. It was pretty easy to avoid these temptations as I decided to leave my dorm and get outdoors. I went to my sister's house in Shelby County and spent time with my nephews, we went fishing, frog gigging, and played several different sports with them. I found staying away from technology fairly easy, even though we finished the night watching the NBA playoffs together. My nephews are young and don't have phones yet, and not a whole bunch of access to technology so I wasn't "phubbed" by them. I try to not "phub" others, and my friends and we typically agree to put our phones away when we hang out. I hate wh...

Social media is something I used to be very into, I was constantly trying to get more friends/followers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, you name it I was hooked. I put way too much stock into it, and I believed these nameless "followers" were the key to happiness, and that they actually cared about my life. It was a conversation in middle and high school, we would all compare followers and likes, and act like it actually meant something if we had more than our friends, or enemies. As I've gotten older I've deleted the majority of my social media, and the pages I still do have are private and can only be seen by people I choose to let "follow" me. Social media definitely has it's positives, but I believe some of those positives were created by negatives. Looking at it from a technological determinist perspective social media is undoubtedly a "get on the train or get off the tracks" phenomenon. The reason my grandparents and the majority of my f...

I, personally, am mixed on concern when it comes to privacy. I think national security is more important than the comfortability of the individual, but businesses and online companies should not have access to people without them knowing. It also makes me uncomfortable that if I'm looking at particular website or product on my phone, the next few weeks I will get constant advertisements popping up on my phone that are from that same website I visited. It's one thing to protect our country from terrorist attacks through the PATRIOT Act, but another for random corporations to have access to our personal information. I have never really done much to protect my privacy, as far as digitally I'm not completely sure how I would go about doing so, but I plan on researching new ways to to protect myself virally. Some people are very into social media, and just want as many "followers" as possible, often not caring whether they've ever met those people they are followed...