A Box of Chocolates

"Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get."

I have been sitting outside the library for the past 30 minutes since it is one of the most trafficked places on campus. I have taken notice of the people coming and going and what they are doing. Most of them were simply walking in and out, but there were a good number of them on cell phones. Now some believe that the "consensual hallucinations" that we spend a lot of our time in is real. But it is not. It can never offer the same kind of reality that reality does.

You can go on someone's facebook profile to learn who they are or how they are doing, etc. But you can't actually know someone unless you are face-to-face. There is also no variety online. On Facebook you are looking at the same 10 friends every day and ignore the rest. I see hundreds of different faces every single day on campus. There is spontaneity and feeling of the unknown in the real world. I never know who I am going to see each day or what I am going to experience. When I am online it is the same thing every day. Same emails (spiderbytes), same Facebook, same news stories (usually bad). The real world is a journey, the online world is a destination. In the end, the unknown of the real world (and curiosity for adventure) always wins.

This class has taught me more than I could have expected. I knew very little about Cyberspace and information technologies before this semester other than that I loved them. Now as the semester is coming to a close, my eyes have been opened to the online world and its effects on society. Online worlds have become more and more prevalent that one day we could end up completely living in them! The biggest shock for me from this class was realizing my dependence on technology. It is scary to think that there are very few of us who could live without the Internet or cell phones or any of the other information technologies we have come to love. I wish we could have talked more about specific companies such as Facebook, Google, and Apple and their impacts on us and why they do what they do. This class has advanced my abilities as a writer as well as a thinker. My FYS experience has been more helpful than I could have imagined. I have grown as a writer and analytical thinker. I look forward to using what I have learned (in writing and thinking) in all of my future endeavors.