Posts Tagged ‘internet’

De-facing the Book

Tuesday, October 20th, 2015

No_Face_logoSo, for a full month, I was off Facebook.

Over the last decade or so, Facebook has managed to become an integral part of our society.  Facebook pages are nearly as important as, if not more important than a company’s website.  A Facebook account has become the single account used to access many other websites, rather than a site-specific account and password.  It is our address book and is trying hard to replace e-mail as our primary means of electronic communication and interaction.

So the notion of not using the site for nearly a month seems ludicrous, even for someone like me who, while not in danger of being called addicted, did use the site fairly heavily.  So how did that go?

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Happy Birthday To You… Tube!

Saturday, May 28th, 2011

Six years ago, if you wanted to show the video of your kid’s first day of preschool to your friends and family, chances are, you plugged your camcorder into the television set, fiddled with channels and inputs, and eventually got it working.  If you had family far away or were just technologically inclined, you might have loaded the video onto your computer and burned a DVD to pop in the mail.  Not so anymore.  Today, everyone just uploads their videos to YouTube.  This month, the service we all rely on turns six years old.

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No Internet For You, Young Man

Monday, December 20th, 2010

According to a new study, parents see internet access similar to how they see watching television — especially when it comes to using it as punishment.  More than half of American households take away television viewing privileges as punishment, a figure that has not changed significantly over the last ten years.  What has changed is the number of parents that use internet access as a form of punishment as well.

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The Internet Christmas Tree

Sunday, December 5th, 2010

I remember, from my childhood, going out into the woods with my parents, finding the perfect tree, and cutting it down to bring home.  We did that once.  That was far too rough and rugged for my parents — their idea of roughing it was Opera in the Park.  So they bought a plastic tree with little plastic bunches of green pine needles that kept falling off the brown plastic branches and we never had a real tree again.

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Beware the Virtual Mall

Friday, November 19th, 2010

Just because your teens aren’t hanging out at the mall, don’t presume they can’t run up your credit card bill.  In fact, it may very well be that they are part of the population of online virtual worlds racking up a whopping — dare I say mind-blowing? — 7 billion dollars in sales of virtual goods in 2010 alone.  Yes, you read that right — in the midst of a huge economic crisis, people have spent 7 billion (with a “B”) dollars on stuff that isn’t even real.

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Facebook for First Graders

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Facebook has become such an integral part of our culture that it is as familiar to the average person as the horseless carriage (cars) and the magic picture box (television).  Of course, it is the younger generation that is primarily driving acceptance, but it is increasingly popular with seniors as well, as they discover how easy it is to keep in touch with family members living elsewhere.  Even as it is becoming a way of life for teens and adults, however, what about the elementary school crowd?

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