Oh knock it off, glassholes.

First it was King, the company that created Candy Crush, that tried to own the word "candy." Then Apple tried to trademark "app store." Now Google is going after an equally common English word: "glass."

To my and the rest of the world's surprise, King was successfully granted ownership of the word "candy," even though it abandoned the trademark in the U.S. a month later. Google is having less luck with "glass." The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office responded by telling Google the word "glass" can't be trademarked under federal law because it's "merely descriptive." In other words, Apple has every right to trademark the word "apple" because everyone knows Apple doesn't sell apples. Glass, however, is closely related to the Google Glass product, which creates a problem. Google isn't even the first company to go after ownership of glass. Other pending or approved glass-related trademarks by software/hardware companies include "looking glass," "iGlass," "smartglass" and "teleglass."

Google's pending trademark

King's successful trademark of the word "candy" was met with a pretty big uproar among the general public. Not only is the idea of owning such a common word pretty absurd to me, but it hurt other app develops who had created (or were creating) unrelated products that used the word "candy." King was essentially granted a monopoly over the word and had full reign to attack other smaller companies' products and pull them off the market. As if Candy Crush had any reason to feel its market share was threatened...We're talking about an app that even my mom spends countless dollars on to get mores lives.

King's, and now Google's, attempt at owning common words is a practice some people call "predatory trademarking." It's frowned upon because the winners are the giant companies that control a vast amount of the market share already, and the losers are the small players who are just trying to make a living in a cut-throat market.

I'm not an expert in trademark law, and I'm sure a lot of it comes down to complicated legal procedures with the USPTO, but I'm not sure why companies like Candy Crush and Google should be granted ownership of such common words. If other companies were trying to mimic their products and posed a real threat, that would be different. But we're talking about Google here. As if the company doesn't control enough of the world (and our lives) already.

Google is already struggling to combat its "glasshole" reputation after a bout of bad publicity brought on by some pretentious Google Glass-wearers. This latest trademark application doesn't really help Google's case. You already own half the world; why must you own the word "glass"? Let some of us common folk have a chance!

Is virtual reality really the next big thing?

If someone would've told me when I was in middle school that before I graduated college we'd be able to experience virtual reality, I probably would have laughed in their face. But now "virtual reality" are the words on everybody's lips since Facebook bought Oculus, the Kickstarter project backed originally by serious gamers. It seems to me like people's general feeling about the deal is either anger that Oculus sold out to the social media giant, or just "why..?"

The answer to the question "why?" is the subject of this TechCrunch article, in which the author strongly defends Facebook's purchase. He describes a world in the not-so-far future in which we'll project versions of ourselves into an alternate universe, socializing with the virtual versions of our friends and family wherever we please. That's where he says Facebook comes in. Virtual reality will go social, and nobody does social better than Facebook.

I'm just not sure I agree with him. Or maybe I just don't like the thought of a future in which virtual reality really is the next big thing. It's obvious that buying Oculus is an attempt by Facebook to stay ahead of the curve by adopting new, disruptive technology. But personally, I have trouble imagining a future in which we're all wearing head goggles pretending like we're basking on the beach with a pina colada. It's way too sci-fi-esque.

When I was younger I was really into the book series "Pendragon." The fourth book in the series is called "The Reality Bug," and it describes a world dominated by "Lifelight," a virtual reality that allows people to escape into their own fantasy worlds. The image of virtual reality I got from this book was a bunch of people asleep in tubes preferring to waste their lives away and exist in their imagined ones. It was kind of sad and a little bit haunting. Nobody saw the point in living their boring, everyday lives anymore, and many people chose to stay in their virtual realities permanently. Sure, a world like that is pretty extreme, but the fact that we even have the technology to make it possible makes me a little uneasy.

We've talked a lot in class about whether our phones and social media prevent us from forming meaningful connections with people in real life. Imagine if we could hang out with our friends in a virtual fantasyland whenever we pleased. What would that do to our friendships in real life? How would our virtual selves compare to our real selves? And what incentive would we have to plan vacations if we could just virtually vacation for free?

We're probably far off from these questions becoming a real concern, if they ever do. I disagree with the TechCrunch writer that VR is on a path to collide with social media. I think VR will continue to be a fringe thing, popular in the world of gamers and computer geeks, while Facebook will continue to dominate the mainstream in its separate sphere. And that's probably for the best. Maybe Zuckerberg knows something I don't, or maybe he was just scared of the possibility that VR could take off while he missed the boat. For Facebook, it doesn't really matter. They've got the money to blow.

adamdorsey.com

Hey Elite Daily, stop hating on my generation

Two recent articles published to Elite Daily have got me a little ticked. Both of them follow the Turkle-esque line of thinking we've been discussing in class, which paints technology as a pervasive evil that robs us of forming meaningful connections. The Elite Daily writers apply this thinking to my generation specifically, arguing that social media is ruining the authenticity of Generation-Y and that we should learn how to "practice what we post".

I feel like I've already read these articles a hundred times before. I'm honestly getting a little sick of hearing about how my generation is doomed to hide behind the screens of our phones and measure our self-worth in terms of "likes" and followers. It seems like it's become popular to hate Facebook and dub social media the mainstream monster. Not only is it an unoriginal argument, but it's an offensive one. It assumes we're all helplessly unaware of the effects technology is having on our lives, and that we're all content with trading real-life connections with cyber ones. The reality is very different. I think my generation is reevaluating more than ever the role that technology should play in our lives. We're making a big effort to supplement our posting and tweeting with face-to-face hangouts with our friends. Many popular bars have enacted "no-phone" policies, and when I go out to dinner with a group we often stack our phones in the center of the table to eliminate distractions.

"With technology creating this wall around our lives, it allows one to hide behind a tweet, email or text."

This line bothers me.  We don't want to hide, we want our voices to be heard. And social media can make our voices louder than ever before. One of the articles says that my generation needs to "practice what it posts," citing the novel-esque Facebook tirades people post to their pages instead of acting on their beliefs in the real world. The author implies we're too lazy or too scared to voice our opinions off of the screen, preferring instead the removed security of social media. But traditional activism and online activism aren't mutually exclusive. We're using Facebook and Twitter to boost support for campaigns we're already carrying out in real life. It's not a trade-off. Today I walked through the quad and saw around 30 students holding signs and loudly voicing their stances on the abortion debate. Onlookers paused to watch the action and discuss their own views. It's true-- Social media will never replace the power of holding a sign and shouting out how you feel in public. But we aren't trying to replace it. We use it as a tool to better inform our arguments and help us accomplish our goals. So, Elite Daily, we're practicing and we're posting.

And then there's the whole issue of "authenticity." I keep hearing people say that social media has made my generation lose it's authenticity. One of the Elite Daily authors even goes so far as to say we're losing our sense of who we really are because we're so preoccupied with how we project ourselves online. So, the fact that what we post can be viewed by all our followers makes it inherently unauthentic?  They're still our words, our photos, our lives. And what I choose to post is an authentic decision based on what thoughts and events are most important to me and worthy of being shared. Some people try to argue that because we only post the good things that happen to us on Facebook, or the prettiest pictures of us on Instagram, we lose our authenticity. I agree that real life is much messier and uglier than our Facebook profiles, but social media isn't the culprit. What about when we perfectly craft our resumes to make us seem more appealing to employers, or when we're on our best behavior at dinner to impress our significant other's parents? We've been in an internal struggle between how we perceive ourselves and how we want others to perceive us long before social media came into the picture.

We really need to move away from thinking my generation is a bunch of narcissistic, selfie-taking Instagram whores. My generation is passionate, innovative and curious. We care about politics, about revolutions happening across the world, and about the direction our lives are headed. And we're exposed to an infinitely larger pool of information and opportunities for engagement than our parents were. The problem with making social media the evil is that it pushes us away from the tools that can help us create a better future. We need to stop letting "selfies" define our relationship with technology. We need to adjust our view that social media diminishes authenticity and start thinking of it as a valuable extension of ourselves and our ideas. If you share these authors' annoyance with your Facebook friends who post bouts of TMI about their recent breakups, pick up your finger and unfriend them. Stop letting a minority that we don't like act as the poster child for our generation. 

The complicated digital aftermath of break-ups

Today I discovered that Techcrunch, one of my favorite websites for reading digital news, has a new column called #Love that explores our complicated relationship with technology in the dating realm. I've always been fascinated by how social media is changing our relationships with people, especially when it comes to dating. This article explores one facet of our love triangle with technology: The digital aftermath of a break-up. You know, the little, unwanted reminders of your ex-boyfriend that pop up in your chat boxes and minifeeds when you least expect it.

"No matter how it ends, or how it evolves after it’s over, every relationship has an echo. Today, that echo lives on the Internet."

The "echo" that lives on after we get dumped (or do the dumping) is something we all respond to differently. Jordan Crook, the author of this article, talked to several of her friends who had recently experienced a serious break-up. She concluded that how we handle the digital "echo" depends a lot on the nature of the break-up and each person's needs for moving on. She explains that people must strike a balance between "push" and "pull." The "push" is the little reminders that are thrust upon us unexpectedly online, and these are the ones we try to avoid when we block or unfollow our exes. The "pull" is when we seek out knowledge on our exes' lives by "stalking" their minifeeds.

I found this piece to be thought-provoking and very relatable. Almost everyone has experienced the digital complications that arise after a break-up. My most serious relationship lasted all through high school and ended after we both went to different colleges. We'd spent countless times together for four years, so the memories, both online and off, were everywhere. The struggle for me was deciding what was more important: Staying friends and being able to see what was going on in his life through Facebook and Twitter, or blocking him and drastically improving my chances of moving on.

It was my first time dealing with the online aftermath of a breakup, so I vacillated several times before settling into a comfortable balance between the "push" and the "pull." One of the most important things I learned, which has greatly alleviated the pain during my future breakups, is to minimize the "pull." Actively seeking out information on your exes' happenings and whereabouts too soon after a break-up is almost always self-destructive. Crook aptly relates people's behavior on social media after break-ups to the idea of a "success theater." Both exes will be much more inclined to tweak and tailor their feeds to put the best and most fun aspects of themselves on display. After all, people want to give off the image that they're happier and better off after a break-up, even if the opposite couldn't be more true. The problem then becomes that whenever we "pull" for information, we see all the fun things our ex is doing without us, which makes it even harder to keep our chins up and focus on our own lives.

Crook also talks about the "break-up makeover," the common practice of cleaning up our profiles after we get dumped. I've personally observed that everyone does this differently, usually depending on the terms on which the relationship ended. After a nasty break-up, people are way more likely to cut their ex out entirely, wiping out any digital trace of them from their profiles. It starts with unfriending and unfollowing, and then with deleting photos, sometimes to the point where an unaware person would have no idea the relationship had ever occurred. If the breakup occurs on more amicable terms, people may stay "friends" on Facebook, but then the little unexpected reminders occur more frequently and can sting just the same.

Having grown up in the digital age, it's hard for me to imagine a time when these considerations were not a normal part of dating and break-ups. But my generation was the first that had to learn to cope with the myriad of complications that arise when our relationships IRL collide with our digital lives. We've had to learn as we go, using a series of trials and errors until we strike a comfortable balance we can live with. It's uncertain territory, but we're getting better at it with practice. I think we're learning to exercise more self-control online, averting our gaze from our exes' posts when we know it will harm us and focusing instead on using social media to further our own happiness.

Gretchen, stop trying to make #nocializing happen!

I am trying to make #nocializing happen. And fortunately, I don't have a posse of Mean Girls squashing all of my ideas.  But before I introduce the term "nocializing" and why I think it has potential to make it big, let me talk about what I think makes something go viral in the first place.

In my opinion, the two single most important elements to make something go viral are timeliness and humor. Take for example when the refs called a technical foul against Coach K in the ACC tournament finals (Did Duke win?) after he threw his Expo marker onto the court in frustration. Tons of people were tuning into the game, and it was kind of an absurd foul to call (as much as I welcome any personal foul called against Coach K, however unwarranted). Within minutes, some clever, quick-thinking person created a Twitter handle called "Coach K's Expo Marker." The marker tweeted things like, "I don't deserve to be treated this way. Please retweet for all of the abused markers out there." It was an instant hit and garnered thousands of followers by the end of the first half. And then we all know the pioneer of well-timed viral content: Oreo. Its "You can still dunk in the dark" tweet during last year's Superbowl power outage has easily become one of the most-talked-about cases of a brand successfully leveraging social media.

Now on to my idea for something that could go viral. First of all, I can't take credit for the term "nocializing." One of my friends coined it when he took a photo of me and a few others fishing by the pond, only to discover the photo revealed all of us staring down at our phones. "You guys are nocializing hard," he joked. And then I realized how perfect it was.

It's timely. It seems like everybody (or at least our class) is talking about how the iPhone has taken over our lives and rendered us all incapable of living in the moment. I don't entirely agree with that, but I know we've all been in situations with a big group in which you suddenly look up and realize you've all been sitting in silence typing on your phones. It happens pretty often, and its frequency coincides with my generation's reevaluation of the role technology should play in our lives.

It's humorous. The larger the group, the more amusing. Extra points for the more absurd locations, like when we were all caught "fishing" by the pond. Here's a photo I took of my friends nocializing on a roof during last week's burst of warm weather:

#nocializing

See how fun it can be? Nobody's safe. Start targeting the antisocial and let's make #nocializing happen!

Don't blame the phone, blame the one who holds it

In class yesterday we had an extended discussion about the effects of technology on our lives. The conversation centered around three questions:

1. Have we stopped living in the moment?
2. Is conversation dead?
3. Is social media making us sad?

We ultimately decided that to each question, the answer is sometimes "yes"and sometimes "no." It might seem like a convenient way to avoid taking a clear stance on how technology is affecting our daily lives, but the way I see it, there is no other choice.

Making a generalization about the effects of technology-- iPhone use or social media use, for example-- requires making a generalization about people. Technology has brought us a host of tools that can be used for good or bad, in moderation or in excess. Hand two people a Netflix subscription and one may watch their favorite show for an hour before bed each night and the other may binge-watch to the detriment of his real-life relationships. Similarly, one person may use Facebook to maintain regular contact with friends and family while another may escape to the depths of their feeds until voyeurism replaces meaningful friendships.

I babysit a girl and a boy, in 5th and 3rd grade respectively. For them, the lure of their iPads is real, but fortunately their parents have instilled in them values of self-control by allotting specific amounts of time for internet use. When I see young families in a restaurant all glued to the screens of their smartphone, I blame not the smartphone but the family's lack of discretion to ban phone use at the dinner table. "Everything in moderation" is a bit of a cliche, but I think it applies when answering the three questions above.

Have we stopped living in the moment? Some of us probably have. The people who spend the duration of a concert viewing it through the screen they hold in front of them, for example. But others have learned to use their phones selectively to prolong a special moment, capturing the memory for future reminiscence. In my post about the UNC basketball victory over Duke this year, in which I respond to the question "did our phones ruin our victory over Duke?", I argue that my phone actually enhanced my memory of the win. Now whenever I want to relive that moment I can watch the video I took as I stormed my way from the Dean Dome to Franklin. And my ability to do that outweighs the slight distraction I might have felt by bringing my phone out for a few minutes

Is conversation dead? Not for some of us. For some of us, conversation is richer than ever, flourishing on more platforms than we've ever had access to before. A face-to-face dinner table conversation can be augmented by the countless new perspectives that are voiced on Twitter, forcing us to refine, and sometimes reevaluate, our own arguments. For others who choose to hide behind their screens and use digital communication as a substitute for in-person chats, conversation may be dying. Technology has the ability to shape, extend and challenge our conversations in new ways when we use it to supplement the conversations we have in real life.

Is social media making us sad? All the fuss about FOMO has led many critics to conclude that technology is creating a general sense of dissatisfaction among its users who are constantly exposed to the exciting, superior-seeming lives of their friends. Sometimes, this is true. Over Spring Break I had to make an active effort to avoid Instagram so I wouldn't compare my work-filled break with the tropical, booze-laden adventures of my friends. But that's a choice everyone is capable of making. It's not like social media is forcing us to wallow in our own envy. The happy people use social media to connect, share and grow. All of my cousins on my mom's side live in Texas, and I see them once a year during our annual family beach trip. Before social media, I had to wait a year to find out how they had changed and what new things they'd gotten involved in, but with Facebook I now feel closer to them than ever.

Humans have always (and will always) adapt to new technologies in different ways, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. A knife can be a cooking tool or a weapon, and just because some people use it to inflict harm doesn't mean we should discount all of its wonderful uses. The problem I find with people like Sherry Turkle is they place too much blame on the technology and not on the people using it. Technology is capable of being seductive, distracting and intrusive, but it can also be informative, reflective and empowering. It's every person's job to define the role of technology in his/her life in order to harness its benefits and minimize its potential harm.

There's an app for that

New apps pop up every day that purport to make our lives easier. Calendars, reminders, planners, and more help us keep our crazy lives organized. You also likely have an app for your bank, for your local weather, and an ESPN app to follow your favorite sports teams. Some of these apps have become so integral to my daily life that I honestly don't know what I would do without them (or how I even functioned before the iPhone). But I would argue that some apps that claim to make our lives easier really just add to the clutter, digitizing tasks that are better off done the old-fashioned way.

Below, I list a few apps that I couldn't live without, apps that have undoubtedly earned their permanent place on my iPhone home screen. Then I'll list some apps, old and new, that I find to be pretty frivolous and whose purpose is better served off of the screen.

Keep It:

1. Wells Fargo app

No idea what I would do without my Wells Fargo app. I use it every day, whether it be to check my account balance before I buy a Starbucks latte, or to deposit a check from babysitting, or to send off a bill payment for my apartment utilities. Just typing that out reminded me that I need to send off a bill payment.

2.  MapMyRun

This app will forever be my workout buddy. I have a short attention span when it comes to running, so I like to take impromptu routes when I go for a jog. This app uses GPS location data to chart out my route and calculate the distance, average pace and calories burned for a given run. A voice also gives you updates (over your music) when you hit certain mile markers. 

3.  Shazam 

Oh, how did I survive the days of playing "Name that Tune" with my brother and not being able to cheat with Shazam? Just kidding, I never cheat. But I use this app probably more often than most, pulling it out whenever I hear a song on the radio or at a bar that I like. The best part about Shazam is that it saves the tags of all the songs you shazam, so I go back later and download all the ones I liked.

4.  Scanner app

My scanner app (I used TinyScan until it started charging, and now I use Genius Scan) has been the unexpected frontrunner to make my list of most-valued apps. It's perfect for scanning and sending off forms, which I've been doing a lot of as I prepare for studying abroad this summer. You just snap a picture of the document and the app resizes, reformats and enhances it for you, spitting out a ready-to-email .pdf doc.

5.  Dropbox

This is probably on most people's essential repertoire, but Dropbox has replaced the old "email-it-to-yourself" technique and allowed me to access important documents at home and on my desktops at work or in class.



Ditch It:

1. Meditation apps

 Mediation apps were the cool new thing of 2013. Calm, Headspace and Mindfulness are a few popular ones that, as one Huffington Post article put it, can bring you "Inner Peace On the Go." But I find something inherently contradictory about meditating with my handheld. The reason meditation is popular right now is because it offers a space for silence and solitude in the cluttered, digital overload that is our everyday lives. Using your iPhone to facilitate that kind of escape just defeats the purpose.

2. Tinder

Nothing good comes out of Tinder, unless maybe you use it for pure entertainment. Tinder is an invitation for young people who lack the confidence or social skills to date normally to flirt casually on their phones with similar people in their area and judge each other solely by physical appearances. Tinder prides itself on its number of "matches," but I'd like some data on how many of those matches lead to long-term relationships.

3. 30/30

I heard about this app in Mashable's recent article, "9 Super Simple Apps That Will Make Your Life Easier." It's basically a fancy timer that organizes your tasks into 30-minute chunks, allowing you to focus completely on one task at a time for just 30 minutes. I, for one, think this app would make accomplishing my daily tasks a lot harder. Not only do the things I need to accomplish rarely boil down to 30-minute intervals, but I'd be too distracted by my dwindling time allotment to actually focus.

4. Cloak

This "anti-social" app I wrote about in my last post is totally unnecessary, and I seriously doubt it will ever catch on. To recap, it lets you track your friends using location data and helps you avoid them by notifying you if you get within a certain radius of them. Its founders think anti-social apps are soon to be on the rise, but I don't. I'd only put active effort into seeing people I want to see, not into avoiding the possible awkward run-in with people I don't.

5. My Fitness Pal

Okay, I know a lot of people use this app and find it really helpful. You basically use it to set fitness and weight loss goals, and then type in every piece of food you consume and every minute of physical activity you perform, and it keeps you on track for achieving your goals. A friend and I gave this app a try one time when we decided we wanted to lose 5 pounds for Spring Break. I lasted all of 24 hours before I grew extremely irritated with having to type in the exact amount and brand of everything I was eating (Who knows how much a "cup" of Cheetos is?). I prefer good, old-fashioned self control.


So there's my list of must-haves and need-nots. What's yours?