Paper or The Screen?

            There really is no other feeling like reading a good book. Sometimes I miss the times where I could just sit back and relax with a good book, but nowadays with so many distractions it's hard to find a long enough period of time to actually spend enough time reading any book. In this increasingly digital age, the pleasures of reading books are lost on the internet and its articles.

            Although distractions from books were present before in the form of magazines, comic books and graphic novels, they don't even compare to the distractions that the internet brings. Reading magazines and comic books weren't considered really "reading" because you usually just flipped through the pages as will, there was really no concentration or thinking involved because you were mostly looking at images and skimming through words. In the case of books, you really need to pay attention, and for a long period of time. You need to read every word, imagine every scenario and it really requires you to interact with the piece of writing instead of just flipping through the pages.

            The internet has become just like the comic books and magazines, it requires no real attention span, you can just flip through websites and pictures, skimming through words, and creates the illusion of reading. In the New York Times Article by Rich, he mentions that "reading in print and on the internet are different" because readers can just skim through articles, perusing through sites that have no correlation to one another and they can start and stop their session whenever they want, while books have a certain path the reader has to follow and they cannot just turn pages at will as they need to start at the beginning and work their way to the end. A book requires a long attention span and plenty of imagination which the internet has eliminated in the most recent generations because we are able to read whatever and how much ever we want and change topics with just a click of a button.

The Status

Personally I do understand what the big deal is about accepting your mom or your dad on Facebook will do. Although I don’t care about the social implications of being known to have friended one or both of my parents, it’s the security issue that could be potentially problematic. Today’s blog is about the Facebook Status. This is probably what I changed the most about my Facebook use once I friended my parents. I act a certain way at home and I act a certain way around my friends and those I am friends with on Facbeook and they are not similar. I don’t voice my every thought at home and I don’t swear at home. Those are the two things that help me communicate to my friends my “status” at any particular moment. 99% of these statuses are not suitable for my parents because it’s either about them because they wouldn’t let me do something and I didn’t want my parents to know my every thought.

The article in the Washington post talks about kids who are having similar problems and people vent by communicating through “No parents on facebook” groups. I eventually learned to live with the change and never really panicked or acted out by writing on such groups to vent my frustration, I exclude my parents from any incriminating photos because I have an image to uphold to their standards and that is basically the only thing people are worried about. I became a more decent human being on my statuses and stopped reporting useless things, so actually it made my behavior improve! I think its just an age barrier that one has to cross before they become friends with their parents, before Facebook it was an emotional barrier that had to be crossed, and now it is an electronic barrier where you can literally “friend” your parents. The status on Facebook was really the only thing that was affected in my usage, and it was affected for the better so I have no complaints to adding my parents on facebook.

The Professional Photographer

So what is the difference between a photographer and a the average Joe with a multifunction point and shoot camera which takes great pictures? According to croteau and hoynes the basic answer is talent, but we can’t stop there because how do we decide who gets the status of photographer nowadays when everybody has a camera, which can do everything. Today’s topic is about cameras, being quite a large tech buff I absolutely love cameras. Cameras allow us to capture moments in time and save them for however long we want, it allows us to capture a moment in time in specific light, angle and position we want to remember it in. Whenever we travel, one of the main things we carry is a camera because we want to document these trips. In essence, it also allows us to share with our family and friends these points in time when we travelled and allow them to experience second hand what we experienced (through photos).

With that being said, because of the progression of technology through the years and better and better cameras being released into the consumer market, I believe the gap between a photographer and an average Joe with a camera keeps getting wider, and not narrowing. The average Joe will probably take an excessive amount of pictures to try and capture that one moment or try to capture that one moment multiple times to have different views but a photographer is able to take just one picture and capture the moment because he has a vision, he knows exactly what he wanted and he did not have to experiment with multiple shots, instead just waits for the perfect moment.