Pop Culture?

Pop culture is largely defined as something liked by a mainstream audience, perhaps with the help of mass media. Many aspects of this thought are true, such a music, fashion, and ideas. Mass media shows what they want to be or can make popular; it's as if the audience can't decide what we like anymore.

Owned by big corporation with their own prosperity in mind, mass media has truly become a part of our lives in any way possible, but the internet has given us the choice to to once again decide what we like.

A great example is YouTube. Originally a way to upload user content, it has some what been taken over by mass media corporations such as Vevo, but it has also been a great tool to share information, and normal people to share their thoughts and creativeness.

It does offer everyone a means to share their thought, though sometimes it'd be better for those people to not share anything, such as the case of Alexandra Wallace, a stupid girl who attended UCLA and made some racist comment on YouTube against Asians. While that's not good, many people replied to her video with their own opinions. A very funny and creative reply was by an aspiring comedian David So. A very funny individual who was given the opportunity to make people laugh through YouTube.

While pop culture is not always a bad thing, we can't let it decide our thoughts, we have to be the ones to decide it.

Convenience As We Thought

I wake up every morning and the first thing I do, like many others, isto reach for my iPhone or Macbook. With no exceptional thought behind it, I'm simply curious as to whether I'd received an email from my family in Brazil and America, or maybe a comment on Facebook from a friend in Japan. The convenience made possible by the internet has truly become a habitual activity, so unappreciated by us who grew up with it, and so easily accessible that we don't realize how much we depend on the internet in this modern era. We don't know what it feels like to write a letter and have to wait days, weeks, maybe even months, for a reply. Only on those rare occasions where we can't access the internet for a day, or maybe a week, do we truly remember its worth. After reading The History of the Internet in a Nutshell by Cameron Chapman, I realize how it became more and more convenient with each historical breakthrough.

In 1969, Stanford and UCLA connected their computers to relay simple messages using the ARPANET network. It marks the beginning of the internet, thought I wonder if they imagined it would be accessed worldwide within a few decades. It has allowed access an unlimited amount of information to someone who might otherwise not have have had the opportunity. I was dumbfounded, yet not surprised, when my one of my business teachers said that because of the internet, we read 4 times the amount of words we used to read a few decades ago,  but we also retain much less than we used to. Perhaps we find memorize less because we thing we can easily access it again later, or it's because we read more useless information instead of academic works. Either way, I realized the internet is truly great, but also something we need to use use more wisely.

Oh you mad cuz I'm stylin on ya!

Hello CIS world!

Here is my mandatory introductory first post.

じゃー！