Book Panel Presentation

In the first book panel presentation they discussed peer networking then had us get into groups and discuss it. The social media platform we discussed was Groupme which is an app for texting and messaging. It is incredibly useful for many things then it isn’t great for other things. It is a mobile group messaging app owned by Microsoft. It was launched in May 2010 by the private company GroupMe. In August 2011, GroupMe delivered over 100 million messages each month. By June 2012, that number had jumped to 550 million. It creates an equal platform for group messaging across different phones. With Groupme you get texts from everyone in the group message. That is both a pro and con because you want to keep updated in the conversation but then you’re getting billions of notifications.

I personally thought that the second book was more interesting. The author brings up the digital divide and how being digitally connected becomes more critical to economic, educational and social advancement occurs each year. More issues brought up throughout the book is that no, not everyone has to be on the bandwagon of technology but the more “plugged in” you are, the better off you will be. Monroe suggests that everyone should be connected to the internet. It is a personal choice to keep up but everyone should be connected. The areas that are not connected are called the “have nots” and they are the rural areas and central cities. Which isn’t wrong because inner urban cities are clearly lacking in technology as are rural areas. So it could be a personal choice to lack of opportunity to be connected which creates a riff, therefore brings the digital divide. Technology and latest technologies creates divide between people who have the right thing aren't behind. Technology is crucial to learning. Another issue brought up in the book by Monroe was the impact of race. Social interaction through language differs among socioeconomic classes and ethnic groups. This is interesting because socioeconomic classes and ethnic groups are studied frequently on use of technology. So the race and cultural differences can cause a rift in literateness and it all has to do with technology. Culturally there are differences between classes and technology which makes it all different. So while we do live in the Net Generation, not every has access to the internet which is interesting because I feel that everyone in all my classes and schools is accustomed to technology so it’s crazy to think that not everyone has access to the internet. Something brought up in class was if the information was outdated. The book was written in 2004 and then now we are using it in 2015. To me, most of the information is still relevant and important. We clearly are still stuck with the digital divide and it grows each year.