Travis Reading Response #1

In his recent work, Eric Qualman suggests that social media is not a good thing for the world. Qualman urges us to consider what is happening to the world because of social media. Social media is changing the way we learn information about the world. One implication of Qualman’s treatment of his idea is that if facebook was a country it would be the fourth largest countries in the entire world. That is big, it is almost as big as the Unites States. Although Qualman does not say so directly, he apparently assumes social media is changing the way of life. He means that because showing it took almost 40 years for television to reach a whole bunch of people, but it only took less than one year for facebook to reach one million viewers. That is so much quicker than television. My own view is that social media is not destroying, but on the other hand it is not helping. I have seen people who are addicted to facebook or myspace and it is really sad. All they want to do is be on that web site and not do anything else. Though I concede that people have to choose their own opinion and not be forced to side with people, I still maintain that Americans need to not use the internet for so many things. For example checking the news, people could read the newspaper instead of the internet. They can also watch the television to see if anthing happened like natural disasters or terrorist attacks. Although some might object that social media isn’t doing anything wrong, I reply that I have mixed emotions about social media.