Online reflection 3 - Anybody out there?

I´ve been reading the book "Anybody out there?" written by Marian Keyes. It´s a classic chick lit book about a girl named Anna and her way back from a terrible car accident. It´s a book in two parts and at the start you don´t really know, as a reader, what have happened to Anna. She´s hurt very badly with broken bones and lots of scratches and her family avoids talking about her boyfriend. In the middle of the book Anna realizes her boyfriend was killed in the car accident and that she needs to deal with the sorrow for him. The second part is about her learning that she deserves to be happy, even if she´s missing the love of her life.

This story really touches my heart because last summer one of my best friends, Sara, lost her boyfriend very suddenly. He was out for a bike ride and just fell of the bike and died. He was young, only 33 years old, so it was a total chock for everyone around them. In this book the girl, Anna, can´t understand that her boyfriend isn’t around anymore. She keeps calling him, texting him and emailing him without any response. I don´t think my friend Sara was that bad, but I know that she sometimes forget that he was dead and was about to call him before she remembered that wasn´t possible anymore. At the funeral she was a total mess. I cried so much just because I could hear her crying and see her shaking from the first row. It was one of the toughest hours of my life. I can´t imagine what she was going trough and hopefully I will never be aware of it either.

Some weeks after the funeral Sara was visiting me in my home in Karlstad and stayed over for a couple of days together with some other friends. We was hanging out, watching movies, drinking wine and we even went out on town one of the nights. She was in sorrow, but she allowed herself to have fun with friends. We wasn´t talking about what have happened, she didn´t want to, but she knew we was there for her in case she wanted to talk to someone. Sara knew that life goes on, regardless how hard it feels. And that´s something I think you also can learn from the book. Anna is in the beginning blinded by sorrow and can´t do anything at all. But time heals all wounds and both Anna and Sara get´s back on track. Anna keeps on with her work, hanging out with her friends and even learns it´s okay to love someone new, without forgetting about her lost love. I know my friend Sara is on right track with all of this and I really hope she will let herself fall in love with someone new when she´s ready for that. Life hit her once, but she got up and kept walking!

Online reflection 2 - Are droids taking our jobs?

I´ve been watching the speech “Are droids taking our jobs” by Andrew McAfee. It´s a lecture about how the technology has developed in the last years and how it quickly is being a part of almost every job. So the question is “are the droids taking our jobs?” I think the answer to that question is yes. Or at least we are giving our jobs to them, because it´s still up to us to decide which jobs we want the robots to manage.

Okay the droids could be the reasons why so many people are without jobs. But I will not believe in that. The droids are a help to us people. They can manage to do the same task for hours and hours, which we people can´t do without getting damages and also without getting bored. So the robots will just save us from doing repetitive tasks.

In the speech Andrew is referring to the translate service of words that is to be found in different sites on the Internet. He´s saying that for some years ago the translation had to be done by a person and nowadays it´s just to type the word at the site and the translated word will come out of it. I thought that was a bit of a weird comparison. When you´re on a trip or a conversation is taking place between two people speaking different languages a interpreter is an excellent help. No wordlist on the internet or app can compare to that.

But as Andrew was saying in the speech, the robots should be used in the right ways. The challenge is now to take care of all the resources in people and make sure people with good educations and qualifications will work with tasks that are well adapted to their educations. New jobs will come up even if some of the jobs are taken by robots. We just need to keep educate ourselves and keep on developing our systems so they will keep up with the future. 

Online reflection 1

After Reading the text From relationships to revolutions: seven ways Facebook has changed the World published in The Guardian it made me think about my own way of using Facebook. I joined Facebook in 2009 and I remember that from the start Facebook were a place to post pictures, tell people were I where and what I was doing. It was also an excellent way of keeping track of new relationships between people I did not know well enough to ask but well enough to be curious about. You needed Facebook, otherwise  you could miss important stuff about people you knew and, more important, about the people you didn´t knew.

Nowadays my way of using Facebook looks a bit different. My main purpose of beeing a member of Facebook is to keep in touch with old friends back at home, communicate with workgroups in school and at work and of course to invite and get invited to parties and other arrangements. Some people do still use Facebook as an everyday-communication to the rest of the world but I´m not one of those. I can post a picture, like once in a year or something, but that´s only when I feel I have something really fun or important I want to share. I don´t feel the need to share my everyday-life with everyone, but I still love seeing what everybody else is sharing.

Very often when I grab my phone the first thing I do is checking Facebook. I know for sure nothing super important has happened since I checked it last time, for like 30 minutes ago, but still I need to check it. I don´t know how I, and the rest of the world, could turn out like this. I guess the most of us feel some kind of need to see if something new has happened, so that we always "know the latest stuff" when we get into a conversation with someone.

As written in the article Facebook has turned in to an huge informer of all kinds of news. I think that´s great! I never take the time to read a newspaper when I´m at home or have the time just because I want to know what´s have happened in the world. I never feel like that´s the most productive thing to do. But still I uses Facebook, which can be very unproductive. Then it´s great that those two has combined so I can get som news at the same time as scroll down my facebookfeed to se what my friends are up to. That makes Facebook funnier, more interesting and more okay to spend some time on.

In the future I think Facebook will keep develop in the same direction as the passed years. In our everyday-life with work, families, friends, aktivities, houses, cooking and everything else we need it to keep track of the world and what´s happens around us!