Earthblog

When I was a child (said with a gravelly weathered voice), we bullied with real fists, none of this high fluting technological stuff.

Note: I’m not an old man. I’m 29 years old. Part of the generation that saw the .com boom, the Y2K scare, a revolution drawn together via Twitter and Facebook. But the truth is, when I was a child my school was just getting a computer lab.

Kids, these days, are getting cellphones for Christmas or an iPod touch or some other device that in my child-mind, I’d envision one of The Jetsons owning. FaceTime – video conferencing with friends in real time still amazes me. Forgive me for sounding like a dinosaur.

If you have ever had the fortune of finding your parent’s childhood video game console, you can appreciate how spoiled we are. Games like pong and space invaders are laughed at by children today for their all around simplicity but in the early days of home consoles, that was it. Graphics? Yeah right. Special Controllers? A single joy-stick was as special as they came. As for sound effects, you’d be lucky to get a beep; forget about explosions, gunfire and actual words. It’s no secret that video games have advanced far beyond most entertainment sources but what do all these features and gadgets mean to society? Before we dive into the exploration of modern day consoles, here’s a little background information.

A part of growing up is finding yourself, creating your identity and expressing it. This process is one that past generations have experienced and one that future generations will continue to experience. The only difference is that in today’s world there are now many mediums available to mold the image you want to present. Tumblr, a website and microblogging platform, is one of these mediums that not only promotes self-expression but thrives of it.  

The world spends about 700 billion minutes on Facebook each month, and researchers are curious what people are doing while they are logged on to the popular social networking site. Surprisingly, studies reveal a large amount of time on Facebook is not spent connecting with others, cyber-stalking or playing Farmville – but on self-promotion through carefully crafted profile pages. And as its own special kind of narcissism, it’s generating a lot of buzz in the psychology community.