2008

Tonight's Christmas Eve service was bare, but my family and a few other families we knew attended. I enjoyed singing the Christmas carols that I had memorized from years of tradition though. There is an aspect of reflection that comes with church, forcing you to think quietly. So I recalled the year 2008.

A lot happened this year. As usual I boomeranged into adulthood and grew up and out of my home.
To get some perspective of how far I've come and how I've returned, I'll start with the beginning of the year. Winter Quarter 2008, I was the new president of the American Sign Language club at South Puget Sound Community College. Jobless, but I had a place in the academic world. Finishing High School and Community College. The spring led into summer with graduating. Flying to Washington D.C. Taking Oceanography and Piano. Getting a job at Kmart. So here we are August.
I turn 18, smoke cigars, work a 8 hour shift at Kmart and go to dinner with my boyfriend, my family and a girlfriend of mine at Red Robin. It is not until August 1st that I learn I am accepted to the University of Washington in Tacoma. I attempt to move out into Court 17. Sudden Change of plans I move in with my brother in the apartments down from Court 17. Fall rolls around. I move out and start school at the University of Washington.

Amazing. One thing after another happens in my life. I graduated from high school, from Community College, moved out, turned 18, found my soul mate aka boyfriend and became the Editor of a Literary Arts Magazine. Huzzah for the Tahoma West!!

So now I am home in Olympia. I come home every weekend practically and came home for the holidays this year. I have two lives. One in the city with my brother, fast paced with freinds and college. One in Olympia with best freinds and family. All the while keeping my grades up and stacking on the college credits

Wow. I am quite the person. Still with now job and no money. I feel like I have nothing sometimes.

Take back the City tonight.

Riding away from my apartment, I passed the giant residential home for Asian
Elders. Across from it is the Bicentennial Pavilion with a park nestled in the corner. Well fed
trees are lit up for Christmas time adding to the always burning city of lights. Turning right on 13th Avenue of Market street, the pleasantry deteriorates as I go uphill. With my brand new apartment complex in the background, I see a half torn down building in front of me. Next to it is Tacoma’s history in graffiti on bricks. National Rent a Fence has blocked it off, but the windows and doors are broke through, making it susceptible to vandalism. Stairs once leading up through a building now ascend into thin air.
Where this building once stood is now a graveyard and vandalized and littered. How come the city hasn’t reconstructed this block but has built new apartments? As I continued to ride west on my white bike, I noticed green, pink and other off color odd looking houses. Riding down Fawcett Avenue I reached Abbey’s ballroom. Again with the lights bright those are forever on. The miniature houses and the small ballroom didn’t look housed by the rich, rather original. I was filled with an unsurpassable amount of jealousy. Because I lived in a box prison as my dad calls it. The ugly apartment housing disgusts me when I see these unique houses with green fenced in yards that are a street away from where I live. I didn’t there was green grass in the city, let alone antique houses.
Learning about the history of Tacoma meant I further uphill to the hilltop area. A place I thought it’d be safer to avoid. So I zigzagged down the streets while passing an occasional salon. The high buildings which are unique to the city kept my attention though. I felt like a magnet being drawn to downtown where everything happens. The further I went towards the skyscrapers and the light, the more stores I passed. They were the “city breed” of shops though, which is a whole other type of vendor than those you see in rural towns.
The glamour and darkening sunset behind me illuminated the colors of the lighted shops as I rode through Broadway Street. I want to live on Broadway now. My eyes are widening and a million and one thoughts are rushing through my head. There are dazzling spaces that people occupy that I’ve never seen before. I see art galleries, grand restaurants and fancy grills. This is what brings me to the city. The life and flashes of excitement that I get when I ride around buildings that have ten different purposes. Broadway is where you should go to eat foreign food, buy expensive art and get your hair done by city hipsters; unfortunately you’ll consequently go broke.
Well that is unless you have a high paying fancy job in the city. You might work at a useless looking company who’ve tacked their logos on sharply designed offices and put you in a cubicle. Staffing group. What an awful name for a business, what can all those great looking people possibly be accomplishing? Giant windows act as magnifying glass for the cubicles on Broadway Avenue. I smile as one woman munches on a chocolate bar while looking over post it notes pasted on typed up reports. Looking over to do lists? Next to her is a large computer. These office cubicles and business are everywhere down here. I can’t imagine working in a cubicle forty hours a week. These people must be out of their minds. Luckily I made it passed the cubicles without catching any flies in my mouth.
Sitting in the Subway inches away from the Theater district of Tacoma, I notice a brightly lit Christmas tree. It’s taller than the glittering Pantages sign. Dare I continue into this theater district? Mass Transportation roars behind me as a man runs to catch it. Do I go to the transit station on Commerce Street at night? Or do I follow my irrational fears and return home? I’ll return home and keep this positive image of the city as a place to work, eat and live the party life. I’ll keep the city of lights as an image in my mind. I’ll continue to be drawn like a magnet by the sky scrapers as place to live and work. Obviously my fears and imagination shifts as I travel through the city. From the fear of hilltop and going too far into downtown to the silly fascinations I have with all the brightly lit art galleries and foreign restaurants. These are the affects that city imagery has on us though. Their powerful and can change behaviors.

Someone Searched my name!!!

Alright so this should be a short blog. *hold your applause haha*. I was searching through my google analytics report....Which is a site that tracks the trafficking sources, who is on your site, how many people go on it etc. There's a bunch of graphs and tables and percentages which are confusing to try to figure out... and I found that someone had googled my name and found my blog. It makes perfect sense, my name is all over the Internet. Someone had actually googled it though! My name which when you google it, isn' that rare! Someone googled my name, Monica Jonen.

About this time, I could feel a strong sensation of fear twisting in my gut. I was so scared and freaked out by the thought of someone actually finding my blog by searching my name that I desperatley tried to find out who it was. At first, I was like oh it has to be my best friend. Well after checking, it turns out they had no interest in finding me on the web! This scared me even more.

Some stranger out in the giant world of the web was trying to find me! Creeeepy. So after walking around for a couple of days with this reoccuring fear that some odd man was trying to find me on the Internet. I found out my mom had googled me to see what I had on the Internet. She was looking for saftey reasons and was dissapointed by how much I had on the Internet. I own up to it though, I guess I feel once it's out there, I can't do much of anything to get it back.

I dont know, what do you think about getting your information from sites back? Impossible right?

The Tacoma Art Museum

This blog should share the space of my writing class and Tacoma, not just my Internet Class. In that writing class we took a trip to the Tacoma Art Museum. I was told to practice my descriptive writing and thoughts about the affects of public space. Here's what I got, its pretty much prose too so don't expect context.

Lack of focus, unable to slow down. Ignorance, nerves unending. Suddenly boom.
The woman. She's struggling, hurting, hurting more and more as I watch her. I found him staring at her which originally peaked my interest. The more I got to know her though, the more the scared fear and emotions were evoked. Death, digging nails, a dead plump baby. Her eyes evoked, cried out to me. Asking me to engage with the murders. Asking why they killed her family. The should take her too. Put her out of her misery. She won't stop crying out to me. I stand in awe at this painting by a man and suddenly become fearful, is he a murderer too? I shiver, squirm, shudder and flee. Not before I read though. Pshh they say it's erotic. It's not. Her breasts are up in the air, her body bent back, her nipples exposed to the death seekers. There's nothing erotic about this painting. There's everything powerful instead.

This room is big and the giant walls have a high elevation ceiling. White with big spot lights. Giant posters with bold colors that talk of trade. Between countries and discoveries. People from India are on the walls. Weddings are on hold. There's tall ships and cine a mon plasted up on the galleria wall. What is trade? You have so much space to answer this question. Room to conceptualize, worlds, countries, people. This giant room invites global thinking. I like it, I think big and travel. I sail and visit India. I wander the positive and negative affects of trade all in this big room. Cargo ships of blue and black to elepahnts of transport. What do we give other countries. Anything?

What I've learned today so far.

In class, there were two nicely done in depth presentations. They weren't simple and quite lengthily, but I suppose that is the point when it comes to academia. New Technologies, technologies in Toyko (who are five years ahead of us techwise arg), the lone Communications professor critic of the Internet (what can I say writers are cynics sometimes), the attack on the blogosphere and the tracking of buses and UPS Trucks (*drifts off to the MIA song*) and smart mobs.

What I thought was interesting, but not surprising was the text gang. At first I laughed at the idea of it until the presenter said an incident happened where a girl wanted the leave the gang so she got beat up. This is an example of technology at it's worst just like the youtube video of the girl being beaten by a bunch of cheerleader preppies. *shivers* I am so glad I am out of high school.

Wifi was also presented as a new form of changing technology. It is positively cheaper and gives more access to people, but there is a huge threat and negative side to that the presenter failed to present. So I am going to use an example of my own life here about this. I was at a friend's house and she lives in a an apartment complex, well the party was going great and than a computer techy decided he wanted to hack the other people's wireless Internet in the apartments. This made me feel a little uneasy, nothing too tragic happened, but it made me think of my own wifi in my apartment. Is it secure enough, can someone hack into it use it up, run up our bill, get into my computer because of this drifting unsecured network??? Luckily my brother and I have a password you have to use to get on it. Still, there is the immense chance of hacking with wireless Internet.

Another unconnected point to wifi lol, that I'd like to point is the ridiculous argument against the blogosphere. Yes there are no limitations of what people can write, sure rumors turn into fact, and ya it's personal opinion. I however think that blogging is the conceptualizing of our world around us. If information is merely, data and knowledge is understanding. Than why don't we encourage blogging as the development of thoughts and personal opinion which helps us understand not only ourselves but all the data we get on a day to day basis. For example, this blog is me saying that yes I not only attended today's lecture, but understood and am intellectually thinking about what was presented in class. *lol I am not a suck up...noo lol* Seriously though, the lone critic was out of line in lambasting blogs. It's just a form of journaling, but only it develops community and while it has it's negative side affects. It's used for good by most of the people on the Internet.

Alright before I type a bazillion words and you get bored of reading this, I want to talk about something I am really excited about. Digitally tracking buss es and UPS packages. How cool is that! The fact that these are realistic things that are happening makes me squirm. Okay, let my explain my silly excitability. I ride the bus occasionally, because my bike is the only form of transportation I have right now, which is fine. But there was this one time..lol *not in band camp* that I was in the middle of Lakewood at night in the dark and standing at a bus stop. It gets better too, I had no idea if that bus was coming, if that bus was out of service, if I was going haft to find a new way home etc. It was the scariest moment in my life. There was no time schedule or anything. I know I am irresponsible, not the point. All I knew was it said 57 to downtown Tacoma and that's where I wanted to go. If I could see where the bus was somehow, I would have been much more at ease knowing it was coming to pick me up which it eventually did.

I could use another example of when I was waiting for a bus to go down to Olympia and it was an hour late! What! That's crazy you say! Well it was because it broke down and had to be repaired. Can you imagine the benefits of being able to let people know who are relying on that bus that it's going to be late and it's a 10 miles away waiting for a tire change. That would be amazingly helpful to the people. Just amazingly. I would love it if that technology was in place a few years from now. The transit system would be updated to the 21st century which it desperately needs.

Well those are my thoughts on today's presentations in class. Any questions? CommentS?

Thea's Park

Tacoma Culture

Today was a long interesting day that seemed eventually centralize around a theme. To be chronological, I started out making an amazing egg sandwich with salsa, cheese and scrambled eggs. Than I buckled down on my Internet Class homework for a few hours. After deciding I had ADD and could not focus since the Internet was just a click away. I went to a movie. I watched The Secret Life of Bees in the Grand Cinema of downtown Tacoma.

After walking through the cold, but interesting Fawcett Ave, I arrived to the small theater that only has I believe four or five screens. There was a bunch of retired old folk that were there too because it was the middle of the day on a Friday. Normally young college students are preoccupied with class, work, homework, etc. Not me though, I had become restless so here I found myself walking through a small volunteer run theater to see a movie I'd randomly decided to go see.

What ended up happening was me watching an emotionally heart wrenching movie that moved me to tears. I don't want to give away the story line, but lets just say it had to do with abusive situations between family, African Americans, racism, death and life. All set within a beautiful pink house in South Carolina and the 60's. I didn't expect the movie to be so powerful or intense. Either way, I am glad I went and saw it because it was amazing.

After coming back to the apartment and having dinner. I persuaded my neighbor who is a good Friend to walk with me to the Art Slam at the Rialto Theater. Which I found through FeedTacoma.com. I think we were both pretty impressed. For me, the art was wonderful, but the poets and spoken word that I found interesting. Just to clarify, the Art Slam was a bunch of artists putting together a short slide show of their work and than having 50 artists slide shows being shown. Anyways, the spoken word was composed of three African Americans and two Caucasians. Topics like hilltop being displaced and the minorities being discriminated against in the city were presented through spoken word. Slavery and the history of African Americans in this country were also put out there through poems. I was really moved by all of the art through film, paintings, poems I witnessed tonight. Tacoma for me has a lot of culture as for tonight. Overall, a night well spent.

Cyber Crime

I have to do a presentation in my Internet class next week on the book I read (World Without Secrets). Since we divided the chapters in the book between team members. I actually only read chapters 10 and 11 that talk about music pirates and data mining or Internet crime. I found these two chapters interesting and relevant what goes on today.

To go back in history though, the author, Richard Hunter, predicts the downfall of major record label companies will fall because of cheaper venues legal and illegal ways to download music from the Internet. One of my classmates has already written about the threat of illegal downloading in his blog about Illegal File Sharing. The itunes a dollar a song make less money than selling whole albums. However, downloading music from itunes by buying it only lasts for so long. Hunger tells us that, "If fewer CDs are sold in favor of single-song purchases, or if pricing pressure from digital downloads caused CD prices to drop, or if consumers don't really want all those songs anyway, growth turns negative (172)." The example used of music pirating in this book is Napster. Who was caught and convicted of illegal music downloading. His predictions about the music industry struggling because single song downloading was correct.

Buying music online through downloading does however benefit independent artists who are trying to get their music out there and who are unable to become partners with major record companies. Andrew fry talks about these independent artists in his blog, Support Independent Musicians with SongSlide.

In the other chapter, the issue of cyber crime is brought up. "The most important cyber-crimes, the most deadly cyber-attacks, are all about stealing information (Hunter 196)." Stealing credit card numbers, passwords, account numbers, and other information about you is easily sold for lots of money by cyber-criminals. How do we avoid viruses that steal our information and software that attack our computers? Well the author gives us a couple of tips to protect ourselves. " In particular, be careful with passwords, put a firewall on any Internet-connected machine, and don't accept e-mail from anyone you don't know, especially if it's got an attachment (Hunter 201)."

I am hoping I will be able to present these two topics to my class in the following week when I give my oral presentation. I think giving tips to my audience on how to avoid being attacked by a cyber criminals and raising awareness on how single song illegal downloading affects artists and major record companies is a good goal.

The Five Senses versus the Gorgeous Avatars.

There are five senses that keep me from becoming thrilled about a virtual vacation. Scent which ties things to memory. The aroma of foreign restaurants when you walk down the sidewalks of a down town. Touch, the feel of sand in your toes at the beach. Sound, the combination of people's random conversations and traffic or the sound of silence while waves crashing or birds chirping as your background. Taste, oh this is important, the taste of exotic foods or fresh salmon from the Pike Place Market. Sight, the massive scale of giant old trees towering over you and filling your vision with green and all the colors of fall. Sight, sound, smell, touch and taste will keep me traveling to new places and physically soaking in the feeling of freedom from home and the newness of a brand new landscape.
For this class assignment though, I will take a look at how people like to escape reality using the internet and avatars (which are extensions of their own identities) to go on a virtual vacation versus flying somewhere and exploring this earth. Utilizing the internet for a virtual vacation is a relativley new concept for me if you couldn't tell. I love traveling and going on vacations, so this virtual network will be interesting for me to grapple with.
I have a small guess that the idea of social virtual worlds came from interactive video games. I was talking to an avid World of Warcraft gamer recently and I asked, "So what is the purpose of the game?" and he replied without two seconds of thought, "It's a social network." I was kind of suprised, becuase of the intense point system and quests in the game. I thought he would have gone into a speech about killing zombies and defeating the enemy, etc. Nope, to him the main purpose of WOW was to be social with other gamers. Therefore creating a subculture that goes beyond chat rooms and forums. A couple of geniouses figured this out I think and decided to make worlds where people can become avatars and make freinds online! Two examples are IMVU and the Second Life. IMVU is a 3d virtual chatroom basically and is purley designed for socializing, while the residents in Second life are able to go shopping, visit places, buy land (with Linden dollars) and dance in clubs. In other words take a vacation from reality while entering into another dimension.
I have had an avatar on IMVU before a long time ago and it added a 3 dimensional aspect to an otherwise one on one chat on IM. I took a daring leap into World of Warcraft this weekend just to see what all the hype was about and I found that this third dimension that is added to relationships gives socializing an exciting new purpose. The people I was interacting with and vacationing with were killing zombies, wolves, flying dragons and going into all sorts of weird places. On the Second Life, people can shop for things they can't afford, create images of themselves that they wish were true and talk to people they don't know but consider freinds.
If I were to take a virtual trip, I'd gather all my freinds on facebook and myspace tell them to go on Second Life or IMVU or WOW all at the same time, so we could add another dimension of fun and creativity to our freindships. Build on what is already true in reality, instead of start to base my life off of the life within my computer. That's just me though, the real world will always call me and I will think my face to face foosball games with freinds will always bring more joy and excitement into my life than typing up virtual interactions.

The City

While I was out to dinner with a Friend of mine tonight, she mentioned over Chinese food in downtown Olympia that your safety is compromised in big cities and if I lived in downtown Tacoma or downtown Seattle, I had better watch my back. I wasn't offended by her comment as much as I didn't know how to respond to it in the way that expressed my opinion of people's misconceptions of cities. So that is why I am writing this blog on a sleepless Friday night so I can examine my views on their views of the city. Make sense?

She along with my family and other Friends that live in suburbia like to keep me informed of the dangers of the "City". In my Urban Studies class, "Images of the City", we are learning about the different representations people get through media, literature, art, film etc. Negative images of crime, poverty, gang violence, drugs and immorality, more specifically race and minorities.

In sharp contrast to popular media are Tacoma's positive community building blogs. Exit133 and FeedTacoma, both put out happenings in the area that aren't related to crime or violence or race. Instead they focus on positive change, change people want in the city, local stores and local events. Of course they aren't mainstream enough where my Friend down in Oly will know of Tacoma's community nor will my mom's view of Tacoma will drastically be changed. But what if they were aware though of these blogs? What if these blogs were as big as king5 news? Well for one thing, the suicide rates would go down. I swear I get so discouraged and sick by watching the news because it so full of crime, murder and death, it depresses me to no end. That's another problem for another blog though.

Seriously though, if these news broadcasts picked up some of the stories that these local Tacoma blogs pick up, people's views would start to change. I think people would start to see it on their own level instead of as a place they can easily look down upon. Cities are a beautiful place to visit and explore, but the idea of living in one repulses people. I don't blame them, the constant noise pollution sucks, but I don't feel that cities are all crime and violence as they are portrayed to outsiders. I have lived in Tacoma for two months now and while my inner fears sometimes take over, my trips to Stadium Thrift way are pleasant. The Sunday service at the Presbyterian church was full of welcoming people who weren't out to pick my pocket for offering. lol.

What I am trying to say is that it's extremely shallow to label a place a certain thing until you have gathered enough of your own experience there to gain enough evidence to support your claim of that place. In other words, don't be judging unless you've walked a mile in your own shoes in the city.

Feed Me Tacoma!!!!!!

On Monday, Kevin Freitas came to my Internet class and talked about feedtacoma.com. What is it you ask? Well a farely simple news feed from Tacoma's bloggers, personal and built up websites that relate to Tacoma. The overall purpose? Develop community and bring people together which casts a positive light on Tacoma's community. Unlike exit133.com, there are no ads, moderators or financial profit.

Who keeps comments moderated? Kevin told us that since Tacoma has a relatively small town feel, the fear of becoming known in public keeps people from flaming. The site is also self moderated by the site's users.

How come there are no ads and business profit? Well you have to a brain scan on Mr.Freitas to answer that question. No, I think it's because community is the most important thing. The creator didn't need site profit and the site is like a "Utopia". Just like a park, there are no billboards, commercial greed or signs of advertising. feedtacoma.com is a place for people to mingle, gossip, stay updated with the community happenings and than connect in the real world.

While Kevin says, this site acts as an equalizer for citizens. I would like to argue that point. While this is a public feed, it's condensed to bloggers, commenters, Tacoma business etc. People who are avid Internet users. Which you could say is just about everyone nowadays. Except for the poor that actually live in the city who don't own laptops. I see feed Tacoma's contributers as urban professionals educated or middle class. Deep within the heart of the city, Tacoma has many poor citizens that are excluded from this virtual community.

However the positive aspect of this is that when virtual community seeps into the physical community, everyone benefits. I was impressed with the chalk off Friday community that began from feed Tacoma. Anyone can join in on that and it happened in downtown Tacoma, not on a particular website.

This is all of course through my critical lense that I am seeing this, but it's defiantly something worth talking about.

A CyberPunk's opinion on the financial world of CyberSpace.

I'd like to start my collective thoughts on e-financing with the topic of age. In my humble opinion, adults I believe are more interested in buying stock and have a greater need for managing multiple accounts than younger adults/teenagers do. Parents tend to have more loans, bills, accounts, stock and savings plans in general.

Now lets look at who uses the internet in general. I would say that I am more in touch with blogging, efinance, social networks, etc than my 25 year old brother is and I am a few years younger than him. So not only from my own expereince, but I think the general consesus is the younger you are, the more internet savvy you are going to be. Are young people more careless than older people though? Who has a greater need for banking and buying stock? Why is everyone willing to put their financial status on the internet.

Well let's look at the tremendous benefits of banking, buying stock and doing credit transactions online. If you bank online, all your transactions are automatically updated or shown as processing unlike a once a month checking statement. You can transfer money from different accounts with a click of a button. You dont have to memorize an account number, but merely a pesonal password. It's easily accessible from your computer which means not waiting in line or getting out of your pajamas. I think that is the best advantage to online banking, not having to go to a bank to do my banking. Of course, online banking has reduced the cost of real estate for banks which is also a positive.

So these are some of the reasons why some people are so willing to do online banking despite the risks of identity theft. Maybe I am not scared enough, but online banking seems safer to me. Mainly because my account number cannot accidently drop on the floor and my debit cards/purse can't physically become lost or stolen if I am doing everything virtually.

Back to my beginning argument though that younger people are more interent savvy, but older adults need more financial organization. While mature adults are picking up on all the benefits of internet financing, young people are picking up on the accessibility to better stock options and loans i.e the responsibilities of being an adult. Buying stock online is cheaper than going through a broker, it's easily updated by the minute and anyone can trade. In other words, it's instant, almost free and unbiased. Now, no wander why people are so quick to do finances online.

Virtual murder deserves..five years in prison?

Yahoo news which is a ridiculous source of simple attention getting headlines posted something kind of interesing. I don't know how relevant this is to the academic world or protocols, but my last post certainly wasn't either so here goes nothing.

Online Divorcee Jailed
A woman who was divorced by her husband without warning became angry, hacked unto his online video game and killed his avatar. How crazy is that! It gets better though, the man reported this to the police after learning his character was dead and she is now facing five years in prison and a $5,000 dollar fine.

Theres two ways you can look at this. One is completley hysterically and consider the story just
another weird yahoo news story. Another is that she murdered someone online which is like making a threat in real life and she hacked into someone's account. I remember making a non-serious threat to someone on a myspace blog in high school once and they took it to the principal's office. The principal didn't know how to handle it exactly because one it was outside of school and two I was young so the writing was prosey and ridiculous sounding. I was told not to do that again and watch what I post on blogs. Probably a good lesson to learn early.

In this story, however is an adult taking their anger out on another adult by being violent online in a game. Than again, there is so much violence in games that don't people regularly injure or kill each other's characters in games like Socom or Call of duty?
I could see the police convicting her of stolen identity online. The murdering of his avator not so much though. If it was flamming or nasty attacks made through email maybe.

People these days.

An Artificial status

I love facebook honestly, but the concept that things such as relathionship status and one lin-er status headlines are ridiculous. I recently changed my relationship status on facebook and five people commented on it. None of them heard the situation from me and none of them knew the context in which it happened.

The assumptions and interest made me think of how artifcial and clueless social networks make us. Instead of details, emotions and a real life context in which things happen. We are condensed into "Monica is......"what are you doing here". Her relationship status is either, "Single, married, in a relationship or it's complicated." That's it there are no other options. Even if we were given chance to explain our relationships or our statuses, our status in this world as it relates to others and how we feel about ourselves, is still percieved in their own way by others on msypace or facebook.

Of course that is the purpose of social networks to give an impression of oursleves to our freinds. It's condensed, artifical and out of context though! We have to gather the pieces and base our opinions off of assumptions. Not face to face communication or first hand expereinces with that person.

Than theres the other purpose of social networks is to network and communicate with each other. In other words, commenting equals endorphans and feelings of acceptance. These comments are usually one lin-ers or within hours of each other. Instead of calling up a freind and asking how are you? How are you feeling? It's a reply to your status which is unexplained and usually misinterpereted.
Yea, I am a little frustrated, but I dont blame my freinds. It's the social network technology that makes everything so non-emotional and artificial in our social lives.

Virtual Shopping

Since the Internet and I are so closely connected, its no wander I like to buy and sell online. My brother is worse than me, books and cds are constantly showing up on the doorstep. He doesn't order much of anything else online though. I think I may have bought a piece of jewelry once, but other than that I've pretty much kept to text books. Selling my old ones to pay for my new ones.

I think the public hasn't quite gotten comfortable with buying personable items through amazon or retail store websites. Which is ironic because through craigslist there willing to meet a perfect stranger to look at goods. Still clothes, shoes, food, appliances, I think these things will always be kept in our stores. For one if your in an apartment, you can't order anything too too large and a lot of people live in the city. The feel of shoes and clothes are never the same because one size doesn't always mean the same thing with different brands.

For me, I think I want to try out ordering shoes or maybe a jacket just to see if things actually fit. I bought two shirts online once and the sizing was so completely wrong. Of course I am too lazy to ship it back to them so my money is spent and I am left with two shirts that don't fit. So I am not comfortable ordering anything with a size associated with it because I don't want to waste my money.

However shopping online whether it's on ebay, amazon or any other retail site has it's advantages that physical shopping does. I like the fact that you can search for something and add it to my shopping cart. I am the kind of person that only goes into a store if I need one thing and I usually come out with maybe two things. So direct shopping online is nice. Of course the websites have their ways of trying to lure you into buying more than you need. Just like a regular store, but its much more personable. For instance, they wont just recommend things on special, but they'll look at what you've boughten or looked at recently and make the recommendations based of that data. Which is pretty irritating for me since related textbooks aren't usually going to be of interest to me.

I do however like that at the end, they add up the subtotals before everything is "rang up". You can return things without having the cashier call it a void and than have to embarrassingly as for a manager's signature on the void. So I worked retail for a while lol.

So like a very direct person like me, I like the advantage of shopping online, but there will always be things I will have to go the store for like groceries and shoes.

Where's Waldo

So in proving that I obviously don't do a good enough job protecting my privacy, I looked and found myself on the public internet. So when I googled Monica Jonen. The first result was my amazon profile, which shows what I've browsed before and what I am interested in buying. I wrote a review for a teapot that I bought too, which it shows. Oh wow, not very exciting since I mainly order my textbooks online.

The next result is my blogger page! Yup, my profile that I have on this site. Which only gives out my location (a computer in Tacoma) and my general interests (movies/t.v/interests). So far not too scary. Although my picture is up on my profile, so that kind of gives away what I look like. Which has a link to my myspace page which is set to private thank you very much!

My favorite is the result after that, it's a company's (If you can call it that) website that sells salsa mix. I wrote a review for them and they me over in the testimonial's side.

Okay so so far, I like to buy things on the Internet and blog! The search results for me are pretty accurate actually! Mainly because I use my name and am pretty active on the Internet.

I am excited about the next few results because they are my published articales in the online version of The Ledger! The meet and greet and husky voices have my name under them because I wrote them! That's pretty cool.

There is also the letter to the editor in The Olympian and the mention of me in the Evergreen Echos.

My blog post about Steve Jobs is on there as a result, which is neat as well. Than a Friend of mine on facebook comes up, as well as my own facebook picture and tidbit. I love it though because they have the location of Olympia and I've moved! So they no longer have the location, nanner, nanner!! Well actually I could change that, but I dont want to because I feel like I am living the live of a ghost lol.

Myspace and Facebook give out my age and a picture of me and the state in which I live. Other than that, they are private profiles. I only accept freind requests from people I know physically.

Zillow.com I located my home in Olympia which was hardly visible since its in a bunch of trees.

My new home you can locate exactly since it's in the city. That is kind of creepy, becuase it's the actual location of someone's residence.

On intellius.com, my mom, dad and brother are on there, but my age is not! Surprisingly, I am the only Monica Jonen on intellius.

When I searched my commonly used user name. I found a lot more of my profiles. Diigo profile, youtube videos I added and my profile, a ton of progressiveU blogs I posted, twitter updates and my live journal blog. So I got a lot of results with my username.

Overall it was kind of weird to be able to see my profiles, my blogs and things I've been published in. Any random stranger is able to find out a lot of my own personal thoughts and daily happenings. I realized how much I do on the internet and that was kind of a bad thing. I am so out there, that there is no way of going back and becoming anonymous. Once my profiles and blogs are on the web, a trail is created and there is no way of completly deleting your identity.

I am sort of okay with this since I willingly put my thoughts out there, perhaps I'll say less about my location and day to day going ons. With livejournal, progressiveu, twitter, blogger, myspace blogs and facebook..I realize I have a lot on the internet about me.

Where do you get your news?

The future of newspapers is a grim one. News and journalisim will remain the same, but the way in which it happens will change. Online articales give jobs to reporters, but their news reports will be more accessible to more people on the web. The internet has taken down the newspaper business with two assults. Advertisements and Classifieds, the two money makers of newspapers. Craigslist defers people from looking at the small pictureless classifieds in the newspaper and draws people to an online ad with pictures and it's free!
Newspapers do have local news though which big news websites aren't as concerned with.


I think when the millenium generation makes its way in society, newspapers will only continue to suffer because we are so technologically savvy. Like in the EPIC movie, newspapers will only be for the elderly. I can't however imagine newspapers going extinct though, because of the demand from people in areas less city and more rural.

I work on the Student Newspaper, The Ledger, our adviser Niki works at the TNT (Tacoma News Tribune). At one of our meetings, she came in stressed because her coworkers were being offered buyouts and being layed off. She told us that the newspaper's classifieds couldn't compete with craigslist. They were losing money from classifieds ads. My future goals required some rethinking. Will I be able to be a journalist and work for a newspaper? Maybe I could work for newsource online. Publishing news through a online newsource.

The world wide web is capable of publishing updated news and providing it to you cost free with google news and MSNBC just to name a few. The cost a subscription to a newspaper is definatley less than the cost of getting news online. But you do have to own a computer with internet access or an iphone with internet access.


I am old fashioned in a lot of ways, just like I was in favor of the value of physical mail. I am also an advocate for physical newspapers. Not just for kindling which my family uses them for in the end. The newspaper is delivered once a day and therefore has more value to it since it's not at your command, like online news. Newspapers also mean day old news though, with google news or forbes.com, its updated every couple of minutes. All through the day you can read whats going on by the minute. Reading the morning newspaper is more like an event. Of course reading the school newspaper which comes out every two weeks is not as up to date, but more valuable because it is rarer.

Steve Job's worth more than 300 tons of gold.

On my weekly ride home with my dad, I was telling him about all that I had learned in my Internet class and he gladly told me his version of the personal computer history. Since of course he lived through it. We were talking about Steve Jobs and he kept emphasising that he is worth billions of dollars. I think because he could be a tad bit jealous. Just say'n.
I was surf'n around for news sites and got onto Forbes.com to read this articale. http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/03/steve-jobs-heart-tech-personal-cx_bc_1003jobs.html?partner=links appearently a citizen blogger reported that he had another heart attack and rushed to the hospital. This affected the apple stock. It went from $100 dollars a share to $90 some dollars a share which is supposadly 9 billion dollars. It went up again as soon as an apple spokesperson denied the faulty report. Wow.
Later in the articale, it goes on to say that Steve Jobs is worth more than the New York Yankee Stadium, 10 most valuable paintings on earth and the Space Shuttle Endeavor.
This all fascinated me because his income and worth is based off of something that was non-existant a hundred years ago. Its hard to imagine life without ipods, itunes, macs and personal computers. It existed though, strange huh. I just wander what new inventions will come about and how much their company's will be worth?

Email versus the Postal Service

Growing up, there was so much suspense waiting for the mailman to come to our street. It only comes once a day and than usually disappoints. It's more of a long waited for event and than a service for communication. For me, email has so much more to offer as a tool in our lives, than snail mail does. Email is at your command and works so much more efficiently. As Americans, we want things done as quickly as possible. So waiting three days for someone to receive your letter just seems absurd. There are a lot similarities though despite the few, but drastic differences.

Similarities

• The mail box, it's virtual of course, but it's an inbox none the less.


• You have a key to get into your P.O box and you also have a password to get into your account.


• Junk mail


• You can send and receive letters, e-invites, pictures and movies.


• Coupons


• Address and return address


• Envelopes that you open.


• Time and date

There are two big differences between the two services, they are cost and speed. While you pay for a computer and Internet service, you don't pay for each individual email. It also takes less than a minute for your email to reach the person your sending it to. Where as the postal service takes a couple of days to a week depending on where it goes. Plus the cost of shipping and stamps. So those are the two big differences, but there are some other differences that will keep the postal service up and running.

Differences

• Packages, you can't send care packages or Amazon purchases, through email.


• Company's use the postal service for bills.


• Weight, even though emails take up memory in your account, the cost does not depend on the weight of the mail.


• Cost


• Speed

There was an episode on South park once where the Internet stopped working and everyone started panicking. I think without the Internet or technology, people think communicating comes to a halt. That's true to a certain extent, but when I graduated from high school and sent out around 60 invitations, a lot of people sent money back with a congradulations. You can't do that with email. I also think that there is certain etiquette rules that apply with invitations and really important letters. There's a certain quality to real piece of paper versus an email. While we rely so much on email, it's amazing what the postal service can do for us despite the cost and time it takes.

Hello New Blogging world

So this isn't live journal or myspace, but I think it will suffice. Thankyou to my T'Inst Professor for hook'n me up! Today was my first day of school and despite the crazy times, I think I am adjusting to College life which is insane btw. The engergy drinks and slight hunger in my stomach are telling me to go back to my apartment and relax. I just can't leave the library computer though.
Anyways, I am sorry Mr.Fry if your out there, but I think your class may be interesting because a lot of it went over my head. The text book with pictures will help. I am just hoping and praying that I'll grasp unto it sooner or later. Despite that I will enjoy the challenge.
My writing class is intensive, yes but like I said a challenge I will enjoy facing. Oh good lord, not to mention my Ledger (Student Newspaper) responsibilities!!! Well all will be fine though because I have a new place to vent and post academic assignments lol.