Say Everything by Emily Nussbaum
http://nymag.com/news/features/27341/
I chose this article because I believe it brings the issue of finding purpose and people’s identities/ dual personalities into light in a personal way. This article takes the topic to a personal case study level, making it more relatable and seemingly more realistic. I want to focus in my paper about how people are personally having trouble connecting, a large sense of social disconnect, losing the ability to converse face to face, and hiding our true personalities online where anyone can find them. I believe this article can help because I can paraphrase the stories they tell to explain my point with specific life examples. But I can also take specific quotes that I like from the article to quote in my paper to give more power and opinion. The end of the article brings up a good point that I want to address to, is that technology and the social media lives we live are a revolution and we can’t get stuck in the past as technology grows forward. I find Nussbaum to be a good and intelligent writer who is very unbiased about bringing forth information which is good for a source since this allows for the information to be fairly presented and can be used to argue either side of this argument. The final thing I may use this article for would be to talk about how the internet affects our interactions with other people but specifically with employment opportunities since we mostly converse with future employers via email or phone instead of in person contact. Because it is hard to get rid of everything on the internet we forget of the stupid things from our past that others might find, especially when employers search for us and the whether or not they decide to ignore it, that I find is a very interesting concept that I want to go about exploring.
The Machine Zone by Alexis C. Madrigal
I chose this article because of its unique view on the social media realm, that it is sucking our time and energy away. I want to use this article to talk about how with all the distractions in the world people are losing time to be spent finding their identity and their purpose and filling this time with nonsense like cat videos. This article can also be used in the same vein as the Nussbaum’s article talking about how social media has stripped us from our privacy and split our personality in half, having our physical personality a mere watered down shadow of what we truly are which we share on social media. Or we use social media to hide who we truly are disguising our true identity for only our friends and other close ones to see but others see the “best side” of us online. But mostly I want to talk about how distractions have led many to delaying their purpose-finding and identification. This connects well with what I want to talk about, the separation of physical communication and true personal understanding that is slowly being eradicated in the young generations of today.
