Annotated Bibliography

Kornblum, Janet. “Meet My 5,000 New Best Pals”. Text Messaging: Reading and Writing about Popular Culture. John Alberti. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009. 159-164. Print.

This essay was a very interesting source. The main ideas that Janet Kornblum was attempting to answer in her piece was how an online social life may change the understanding of what it means to be a friend and how social interactions on a social networking site can be similar to real interactions, but they could also change face-to-face communication. Kornblum uses many outside resources that contribute to her ideas.
This source was very useful for me. Not only was I able to find a lot of interesting information, but this source also lead me to another source as well. The use of outside research made this source reliable. Kornblum kept an objective tone throughout her piece, giving the pros and cons of her ideas.
The information that I gathered from this essay fit very well into my own essay. The research that Kornblum did will help me to answer questions of my own throughout my research essay. This information helped me to shape my argument by providing information about social networking and the development verbal communication skills. This source has also brought to light the amount of research I need in order to attempt to answer my own questions.

Social Networking

Social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, have become very popular among young people in the past few years. These sites allow one to communicate with people all over the world, but this use of communication does not include face-to-face interaction. This new type of communication has become “the new way of socializing in the networked world (Kornblum 160).” People are able to socialize and make new friends via these social networking sites, which is very different from the past. In the past, friendship was “played out in school hallways, on playgrounds, and in late-night phone calls,” instead of through emails. Since there are so many people on these Internet sites, one can accumulate many different friends, but can they really be called friends? Most of the friend lists include best friends as well as virtual strangers and serve as an indication of social success or failure. Not only do these sites promote fake friendships, but they also produce a loss of face-to-face interaction that could be harmful to these young people’s social skills. Without practice in verbal communication, then these skills could become underdeveloped in many teenagers, but this could just be a temporary phase that these people of generation z will grow out of. As Janet Kornblum, a reporter for USA Today, writes, “Every generation finds its excess for people to meet people. This is just this generation’s thing. It will die back a little bit (Kornblum 164).” For now though, these teens are developing bad social skills that could leave a lasting effect.

Source:
Kornblum, Janet. “Meet My 5,000 New Best Pals”. Text Messaging: Reading and Writing about Popular Culture. John Alberti. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009. 159-164. Print.

Witnessing Generation Z First Hand

My two younger sisters are part of generation z, not only by age, but also through their actions. They are rarely seen without cell phones in hand, and when I find myself looking for one of them I usually look no farther than the computer room. Whenever I hear from my sisters it is through a text message or through email, never over the phone. I find myself wondering if my sisters will grow up with the same communications skills that I have, given that they are growing up in a different era filled with technology. It seems like children are now receiving cell phones, iPods, and computers at a very young age and I believe that this must contribute to their conversation skills. The advancements in technology have brought our civilization from strictly face-to-face contact to many different modes of communicating with others. This technology has made communication much easier, but is it really helping? Or could it also be hurting my sisters’ generation because of the decrease in personal interactions? It is strange to think, that I am less than a decade older than my sisters, but yet their lives have been so different from my own at their ages. It is interesting to wonder what new technology will arrive in the next five years after looking at all the progress that has been accomplished in the past five years. Will this new technology limit the use of in-person communication even more? Or will our society find that this could be harmful to valuable verbal communication skills?

I believe that the reliance that the youth of today places on technology could be potentially harmful. An interpersonal conversation evokes more feelings and personality than a conversation over email, or via text message. Even a smile or :) is different, and I personally value an in-person conversation with real smiles, real emotion, and a real voice.

Welcome!

I would like to welcome everyone to my blog and encourage input about generation z. I am attempting to find a connection between this generation’s reliance on technology and their ability to have face-to-face conversations. Generation z includes anyone born in the mid 1990s through the late 2000s. Generation z has often been called the technological generation, and I would like to discover if by placing too much dependence on computers, iPods, and text-messaging, that the people of this generation will become more impersonal and loose their speaking skills. Using online networking sites to make friends, listening to an iPod instead of talking to surrounding people, and text-messaging someone instead of calling them all remove verbal communication, and I wonder if the growing participation in these actions will ruin one’s ability to speak in-person all together. Is generation z, out of all of the other generations, the most susceptible to this loss of speaking skills because they are born into this era? If anyone has any ideas about these questions, please feel free to leave your thoughts, and here is a video that might trigger some ideas!