Now How about those CREDIBLE Sources?

Now that I’ve discussed the idea about bad sources, I’d like to delve right into my topic and show you how to appropriately incorporate sources into your writing (that is, once you weed out the bad ones by using the techniques I discussed in my last blog post).

Is technology causing the downfall of family? According to psychotherapist Melinda Clayton, “Family communication is in crisis. Not only are families faced with historical issues that have always challenged family communication...they’re also faced with an onslaught of technological distractions.” In Clayton’s article in the Relationships and Family: Communication section Helium.com, she notes a lot of common situations that I personally see happen all of the time.

How many times have you been in the middle of a conversation with your parents or siblings when your phone went off in your pocket? That simple event can destroy the conversation. It can not only distract the participants of the dialogue, but if you choose to leave and answer the text or phone call that just came in, you’re showing what you find to be the priority of that moment. Even by deciding to answer, you decide that the conversation between you and your family member isn’t as important as the possibilities of whatever you just received.

Dana Wollman, a writer for Laptop Magazine, wrote an article for the magazine’s website entitled “Is Technology Tearing Apart Family Life?” Wollman covers many factors including text messaging, social networking, and online video. From the beginning to the end of the article, Wollman is strategic about how she intertwines the words of many individuals with degrees in fields relating to her topic. Instead of just writing based on opinion, and quoting just anyone, the people she chose to include had actual backgrounds in the areas of discussion.

For example, Gwenn Schurgin O’Keefe, MD is a member of the Council on Communication and Media of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and was quoted saying that “We’ve let technology invade places where it never used to have a role. [Parents] think it’s their right, if they own a cell phone, they can surf the Web [anytime].” That testimony is important in the issue of family and technology because it really shows the negative effects technology is having on the family.

Dana Wollman and Melinda Clayton provided me and my blog with credible sources to look at in very different ways. While Wollman included credible people with a background in the topic, Clayton herself had that background.

Photos used:

http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/images/set3/text-messaging-1.jpg

http://images.teamsugar.com/files/upl2/0/3362/15_2009/1eca7c92e0126d63_56362456.xxlarge.jpg

A Word on Bad Sources

I've learned a lot recently about conducting research online. Nowadays, almost anyone can have a blog, or a website, or write an article to post online. It's become really important to analyze the sources you use when commenting on a topic when you want to show your credibility in discussing that topic. I personally conducted an online search for some good sources, and I definitely found those, but along side them, were plenty of sources that only appear credible. I've learned a lot about this form of research, and will share some techniques and things to look for to separate the good ones from the "not-so-good" ones.

When discussing family and technology, there are a lot of people who are educated and qualified in speaking on this area. The key is searching for those people. I found numerous articles from http://www.helium.com/, all of them titled "How family communication is harmed by technology." After reading through the articles, I could easily see how these articles could be viewed as credible from an untrained eye. Take Angela S. Young's article for instance. Everything in her article made sense. She was great at combining broad comments with stories from her own life, but I looked at her profile for helium.com and found that she has absolutely no background in the area of family or communication. Though she does have a Master's Degree, it's in Education, and though she has a family of her own and sees how technology affects them, she doesn't have the grounds to comment on the trends of families as a whole.

However, with further investigation of those articles on Helium, I found one that was written by Jane Evans, who has both her Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in Communication Studies. Unlike Young, Evans has a lot of background in communications, and even though she doesn't have a degree in communications in the context of families, she is still more credible than some other authors who are merely writing based on their personal stories.

I discovered another article; this one however was on a different website, http://www.clickz.com/. The website’s name in itself didn't seem credible, but I hoped that maybe I had jumped the gun in judging this website. I read through an article by Enid Burns called "Technology Brings Family 2.0 Closer" and really thought I had stumbled upon a good source. It was a relatively old source, being from 2006, and it was short, but she named a source, and included a statistic. Silly me, I should have known better. Not only is there no works cited or bibliography at the end (unless you count the brief noting of a source in her first sentence), but when I looked to get more information on Burns herself, all I got was a site that pointed me to more of her articles.

Note to self, and all of those reading my blog: always be sure to find the background of the author. If they have no background in the topic, or they don’t have one on the website at all, that’s the first red flag. Also, if they don’t site any sources, or even have a bibliography at the end of their article, that’s another red flag. Finding good sources definitely isn’t as easy as finding the bad ones, but with practice, it’ll get progressively easier in spotting the difference.

Photos from:

http://www.amirkurtovic.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/helium_logo.jpg

http://corporate.zvents.com/images/lgo-Clickz.jpg

Etiquette Needs to Expand from the Dinner Table

Now that more and more family members are communicating through the internet with things like e-mail and social networking sites like Facebook, there is going to be a lot more talk about online etiquette. Whether you’re Facebook chatting, or sending a text, people need to be more mindful of how they’re talking to different people.

It is one thing to send a message to a friend from class, and not include capital letters or appropriate punctuation, but for someone who grew up in the world where your hands get hit with a ruler for missing a comma, or you get detention for poor grammar, the level of online etiquette may need to be adjusted.

Jenny Preece wrote about online etiquette going from being just a nice thing you see here and there, to something that has become necessary on our world of internet use. It’s no longer about whether you look intelligent because of the grammar and technical writing methods you use, but now it’s getting more into the realm of whether or not the words you use are offensive to others.

Without the possibility of nonverbal communication, a funny joke that your uncle would take lightly in person might actually offend him because even with the addition of “LOL” it could still be taken as serious rather than kidding around. Just like we all need to be more conscious about what we’re saying online in general, we also need to be conscious about how we’re saying things online (especially to family members, who may get more easily offended than your college buddies). Etiquette needs to finally expand from the dinner table, and started reaching the cyber world.
photo from: http://bit.ly/9WH27U

Some Things Shouldn't be Converged

The concept known as convergence is really taking over our world, especially in the world of technology. Not only is technology converging with every aspect of society, but different realms are converging with other ones, even outside of that technology zone called the “Net” in a 2005 Time Magazine Article (which you can read by following this link: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981132,00.html).

This article was really interesting to me, even though it was written so long ago. Interestingly enough, while I was reading it, I felt almost as though it was even older than five years ago. It seemed as though they were talking about the internet like it was just up and running, but I remember using it extensively when I was 10 years old, and that was in 2001, so to read this article knowing when it was actually written seemed very strange to me.

Thinking about this article in the context of convergence brings up a few thoughts for me. The same issues that the article speaks about are definitely continued today, and though some of the individual cases have been resolved, the idea of convergence in itself has intensified. More and more people are figuring out ways to abuse the internet and converge their worlds, whether that be of business and making money, or advertisement, or just plain messing with people, with technology, or other areas of society via the internet.

One part of the article that stuck out to me was a quote from Martin Nisenholtz, an advertising executive who “drew up a set of guidelines for marketing to the Net,” the first one being “Intrusive E-mail is unwelcome.” This particularly affected me recently, when I discovered that my email account had been hacked and someone, (or someone’s script) had been accessing my account and using my personal email to spread around a link to everyone in my address book that when clicked, attempts to get all sorts of identity thieving information.

It’s really sad that this is what the internet has become. It wasn’t meant to be this way. It was created to “enable academic and military researchers to continue to do government work even if part of the network were taken out in a nuclear attack.” Basically, it was meant to be an information highway, in which people could send and receive information quickly. However, instead of just adding a positive tool to our lives that we could use to simplify daily tasks, it has also created many other problems. In terms of convergence, we have now created a world in which local criminals can be converged with national, and even international, citizens.


Photo taken from: http://powerideaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/hacker.jpg

The Historical Context of Family and Technology

I can’t even begin to imagine what life would have been like for my family when technology wasn’t in the picture. According to an article on BBC, the postal service reached the public in 1635, removing the requirement of travel to spread the news of an engagement, or a recent birth.
By the 1870s, Alexander Graham Bell brought an even larger miracle to families, the telephone. This invention removed the waiting time between letters to know that news has reached your relatives. You might have been married for weeks or even months by the time your cousins and aunts were able to read your letter, and send you a congratulatory card. Even still, Bell’s invention was blown away a mere hundred years later when the first cell phone call was made.

Can anyone else appreciate how incredible of a breakthrough the cell phone was? Once cell phones were in the picture, so many family complications were demolished. No more waiting around when your club got out early and your family didn’t expect to pick you up for another hour. No more panic when you get stranded at the mall and want to spare yourself the embarrassment of going to the help office.

There were just so many ways cell phones improved the quality of life, or at least the difficulties of certain aspects of it. Of course, cell phones also brought on some new issues as well. I remember when I got my first cell phone at fifteen years old. It was a Trac Phone, so it wasn’t really even what I saw as a “real” phone, but it still was an extra $30 a month my family had to pay for. In addition, my younger brother, who was around seven years old at the time, complained more than ever, since whatever I had, he wanted too. My family finally caved when he was eight years old (ridiculous, I know) and I’m sure they regretted it when my brother discovered texting, and racked up a $200 cell phone bill for them to pay for.

Communication between family members has gotten exponentially easier through the years, as things like MySpace (founded in 2003) and Facebook (founded just a year later) took over our world, followed by Twitter shortly after. These new kinds of websites have made all new ways to talk to each other (as well as allowing some mild stalking between siblings, parents and children, etc.).

I love how easy it is to access pictures of the new babies in my family when I’m away at school, as well as how simple it was to follow my sister’s Tweets, but I see how these relatively new ideas of communication are being abused, and causing more issues than when the only interface for communication was writing a letter.
It’s a new world these days where you have to be careful about what you put on your social networks, and what you say in your updates. I remember a few times that friends of mine were confronted by family members at home because of their Facebook statuses, or pictures they had in their online albums. It’s great to be able to keep in touch in such an easy way, but it seems to have gotten to a point where there’s newfound lack of boundaries and privacy that we need to protect each other from.

It’s one thing to show your family the things that are going on in your life, but there comes a time when people need to learn how to adjust their settings, and other ways to hide the information you wouldn’t want your grandparents (let alone your parents) seeing.

Sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1082558
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/kidszone/history_telephone.html
http://cellphones.org/cell-phone-history.html
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1099476/text-messaging
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120364591

Photos from:

http://www.aiplayground.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/writing_c.jpg

http://www.thedigeratilife.com/images/online-social-networking-2.jpg

http://smart-parts.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/computer_literacy.jpg

Introduction

Everyone has a different upbringing, and therefore a different experience at home with their families. Communication styles differ from person to person, sometimes making it difficult to get messages from one family member to another. Another issue involving communication involves how busy people are. People’s schedules are always changing, and don’t always match up with their siblings, parents, children, etc.

Another issue comes as children in the family start getting older and moving onto the next stages in their life; things like college, raising their own families, getting their own homes and the list keeps going. As families are going through their different life stages, it can be really difficult to keep in touch and maintain that close family relationship that they once had when they lived all together in one home.

As technology has started advancing, it has made many ways to solve these ever so common problems. I will discuss positive ways technology can be incorporated into family life such as staying in touch, sending pictures through the internet, and solving scheduling dilemmas. Though this positive affect goes on and on, I also believe that technology has also added extra things for family to stress about, a topic in which I will explore more in my research.
I chose this topic because the one thing I know I could talk endlessly about is my crazy family and all of the funny stories we have. Interestingly enough, because of technology, I have even more great stories to tell. My major here at Maryland is Family Science, and I intend on declaring two minors, Leadership Studies and Communications. Family Science and Communication definitely interest me and will create a great basis for this blog.
I’d really like to explore more ways that technology can help family as well as ways that it can cause more problems in.

I’m also really interested in seeing how technology has changed the family in essence, or possibly even ways that technology has had hardly any affect on family. All in all, this should be a blog that will not only benefit me, but benefit those who are interested in how they could possibly solve various stressful family situations with the newest technology.



Photo from: http://magazine.ucla.edu/features/american-family/