Reference no: EM133716847

The sad part is, I did not create this invention. But that is only because this invention already exists, I just missed the boat, and whether you think you would get in or not, I'm pretty sure you already are in it. Dothese images of ordinary life look familiar (at least prior to the pandemic)?

What I didn't tell you is that this invention was not so much a box as much as it was a screen. And as the screens get better, we become more and more dependent on them to experience our friends, our families, our sports, our relationships, our hobbies, our education, our jobs, our lives. If anything this pandemic has just sped up our entry into the box! How far will it go? Will this become us soon enough?

As I watch that clip of this "dystopian future" from 2008 (if you've never seen Wall-E, you should), and as I remember life in 2008 (some of you may not), I think of how far off into the future all this technology seemed. No one would have thought how quickly everything would have moved. Here are some observations on the technology from 2008:

• Self-driving cars were not even understood by the average person, we hardly had electric cars. No one had really heard of Elon Musk, much less Tesla or Uber.
• Hologram technology was only in sci-fi movies, Tupac had not made his appearance at Coachella.
• Amazon was strictly a bookstore where you could have your books delivered in 2-3 weeks. This was great as I had another option other than the university bookstore! (By the way, Buy n' Large was based off big box stores like Walmart and Costco)
• There were no tablets, laptops needed a big bag in order to haul them around, and the first iphone had just come out...with no social media apps available.
• Ah yes, social media, perhaps the thing that has changed the most: MySpace was a thing, Facebook was not public and only found on college campuses, and YouTube had a few registered users.

If there is anything that has brought us into the "box", allowing for us to have those experiences without necessarily actually being there, more quickly, it's our use of social media. Now we know this isn't going away, the question is, is it leading us to the good life?

In this discussion, I'm going to assume that you have a social media account and that you are not only aware of how you use it, but how it is used more generally by members of society. We are going to consider the ways social media might be making our lives better and leading us closer to "the good life", and the ways social media might be making our lives worse, or taking us further from living "the good life".

Here are step-by-step instructions on what to do:

1) Write your initial post answering each of the following questions:

• Describe one way you think our social media use is making life better?
• Describe one way you think our social media use is making life worse?

NOTE: I'm not asking you to do any research on the topic, just draw from your own experience and the ways you see and hear of others using social media.