What Adolescents Miss When We Let Them Grow Up In Cyberspace

            Thanks to e-mail, online chat rooms and instant messages- which permit private, real-time conversations- adolescents  have at last succeeded in shielding their social lives from adult security. Now instead of that good old fashion phone call worrying about an adult answering the phone, walking to the person's house and having to talk to the person's parent who opens the door, the adolescent can by-pass all of that and talk to whoever it is they want to talk to though the World Wide Web. But in doing so, they are isolating themselves from real-world interactions. They can shop online, browse the web, play games over the internet, chat and so on- so why go out with our friends to do those things? Its not necessary anymore.

         
           "Mr. Lewis illustrated a point with Marcus Arnold, who, as a 15-year-old, adopted a pseudonym and posed as a 25-year-old legal expert for an Internet information service. Marcus did not feel guilty, and wasn't deterred, but when real-world lawyers discovered his secret and accused him of being a fraud, he simply responded that he found all of the books boring, leaving us to conclude he had learned all he knows from the internet and watching his family's bis screen TV."
                                                                                            -Brent Staples                 "What Adolescents Miss When We Let Them Grow Up in Cyberspace"

            I do agree with Staples that if we allow adolescents to grow up on the internet that they will not develop the social skills that they need to be successful when they reach adulthood but, I also believe that the use of social media to communicate with distant friends and relatives is needed.  

Summary of a Newspaper Article

             More than half a century ago, 80 Korean laborers died of abuse and malnutrition as they built an airfield for the Japanese military in World War II. Koichi Mizuguchi helped to find the graves and also helped to build a six-foot memorial at the site to honor those Koreans who were buried there.  It has never been easy for Japan to come to terms with their militarist past, and tried to set aside the issues raised by war as it rebuilt itself into the peaceful nation it is today. Pressure to erase the darker  episodes of its wartime history has intensified recently with the rise of a small, aggressive online movement known as the Net Right. The Net Right are organized cyber activists who were once dismissed as radicals on the far margins of the Japanese political landscape, but they have gained outside influence with officials who share their goal of ending negative portrayals of Japanese history.

          A shift in Japanese political culture which has emboldened the ultra-naturalists to target the acts of historical contrition that Japanese society previously embraced has been one result of the events that have taken place according to Sakaguchi and other experts.



Fackler, Martin "Pressure in Japan to Forget Sins of War" New York Times 29 October 2014: A4, A9. Print.

A Summary

          Today in class, we read Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy by Robert Applebaum published in The Norton MIX 2013. 
          This piece was all about eliminating student debt completely so that the money can go elsewhere and help stimulate the economy. Applebaum goes on to talk about the trillions and trillions of dollars that go into student loans, and the trillions that don't get paid back on time each year. This money also goes into "funding banks, financial institutions, insurance companies, and other industries of greed that are responsible for the current economic crisis", as stated by Applebaum. There's really not much else to say about this piece because that's all it was about. It was interesting to read, and it included a lot of statistics to prove his point. I thought it was funny at one part where he stated "outstanding student loan debt totaling approximately $550 billion (that's billion with a "b", not a "t")". 
          I suppose this is it for this entry, until next time.