Social Media for Money??

The other day my dad was telling me about how there's a page on Facebook, and a Twitter account in which you sign up and give them some information, and then recruit people to sign up under your account and those people will receive text messages sent to their phone.  The more people you get, the more text messages are sent out, and you end up getting paid a certain amount per text (I believe it was about 10 cents).  This doesn't seem like a whole lot of money, but if you get a good number of people under your account, there is actually some money to be made.  This may sound like a scam, but my dad's good friend is actually doing it and he said he's making about 1000 dollars a month.  This certainly isn't like winning the lottery, but I'd be pretty happy with an extra 1000 bucks per month in my wallet.  Social media has evolved to the point to where you can sign up with something such as Facebook or Twitter and start to earn money with barely any work needed.  It's gone from a few posts here and there, maybe putting up pictures and videos, to now people making accounts for a business set up through a Social Media site and make money.

Social Media vs. schoolwork

Is social media in regards to Twitter and Facebook mostly, affecting our schoolwork?  Has it made us worse at writing?  I don't think it has.  Some might argue that all the shorthand we tend to use while texting, tweeting, or posting on social media sites may affect our work and the way we write in a negative way.  If anything, I think it just made us lazier.  For me at least, I know can still write and spell just as good as I used to before using these sites.  When I use the shorthand phrases, such as "g2g" or "brb" it's simply a lazy thing for me.  It's much quicker to just type three letters versus typing out the whole sentence.  When it comes to schoolwork I don't really find myself making the same errors that I do when I post things on social media sites.  I know of some people that do make these same errors such as using "u" instead of "you" but I feel that that is just a sign on poor proofreading, or not proofreading at all.  If they simply read over what they just wrote I bet they would catch their mistake 99% of the time.  Overall, I don't feel that social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter have influenced my writing in such a negative way that it affects my schoolwork and the way I write in a proper way.

Kony Explosion

Recently, all over Facebook and Twitter all I see are people "retweeting" and posting links about Kony.  They are trying to get his name out there to show the world what bad things he is doing and how he needs to be stopped, but along with that some people also write about how much they hate him and what a horrible person he is.  I'm not saying he is right with what he is doing because it's pretty clear he is not, but what I am saying is that these people hear about this guy for one day and all of the sudden act like they have hated him for their entire life.  If it was not for social media in the first place they would have never heard about him, so I do not understand how they can act like they hated this person for so long.  He supposedly has been doing these terrible acts for atleast 8 years now, and the question I ask to these people who feel so strongly about him is: Where were you last year, or last week, or even 3 days ago before no one posted or tweeted about Kony?  If it wasn't for Twitter or Facebook you most likely would have never even heard about him to begin with.  Once again to clarify things, if what I have read and seen online is correct, I am 100% against what he is and has been doing.  This blog is just about how social media can cause a certain act or person to become so famous in as little as a day or two and make so many people feel "so strongly" about it.

Social Media / Parents

My parents, especially my not so tech-savvy mother, seems to think I never know what is going on in the world because I usually don't ever pick up the newspaper and read it.  They're under the impression that the newspaper is the only way to know what is happening around me.  They don't understand I can get the same amount of information, plus some, on the internet and social media websites.  For instance, on Twitter I follow several local News Stations and things of that nature.  I get the same stories my parents are getting in the newspaper, just on my phone and computer instead.  Our parents obviously did not grow up with the technology we are lucky enough to have today, so they just need to accept the fact that times are changing.  Online newspapers are becoming more popular, as traditional paper newspapers are on their way out, thanks to social media websites.  I do not see my parents making the conversion anytime soon, and it's people like them who are going to keep the traditional newspapers in business in the future, not that there is anything wrong with that.  I'm not saying there's a right or wrong choice, it's all about preference.