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There is an issue that has been happening since I can remember, which is cyberbullying and the ethical issues of cyberbullying by the negativity that has been occurring in social media sites. Cyberbullying is the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature. I have a Facebook account since I was in high school and on my newsfeed, I have seen my friends cyberbullying other people online. Not only my friends were involved in cyberbullying, but strangers and unanimous users were creating fake accounts to “expose” their victims at the same time by typing false information about them for their own entertainment and to make their victims feel terrified. Today, I still see people getting cyberbullied on Facebook and it has become more common to be exposed in these types of behaviors and it is unfortunate for the victims to suffer from that embarrassment since everyone online are easily manipulated to think that everything mentioned on the internet is true. There are many reasons that cyberbullying can occur, but the main reasons are griefing, drama, harassment and relationship violence. Griefing is when someone irritates and annoys you online, but the victim does not know the person due to the fact that the person does not have a profile picture or an unrecognizable name. The griefing event is generally isolated, continuing until the griever has gotten the reaction he or she wants. Drama is a common type of bullying that often occurs in school, but it spreads on social media. Unlike griefing, drama happens when the bully and the victim personally know each other. Harassment is a “traditional” type of bullying, which the bully is “picking on” their victim online. Drama and harassment sounds that both mean the same thing and have the same result, but the key difference between drama and harassment is that in drama people involved have the same amount of “social power” that there are witnessed by many people. Harassment is more threatening such as abusive text messages where rarely there is no witnesses at all. Relationship violence has been spread throughout social media when a relationship has ended or in a rocky situation. Often mostly women are being cyberbullied by their former partner by threatening them by uploading photos and screenshots of their text messages on social media. I have seen this type of behavior on social media from people that I don’t know and what amazed me is that there are many users looking at the photos and laughing at the situation. The users make the situation worse by mocking the victim and calling the victim names that I cannot add in my blog. People that are being cyberbullied often commit suicide and fall into depression due to the fact that they feel vulnerable since anything that is posted on the internet, it stays on the internet permanently. I have seen and read many articles about cyberbullied victims committing suicide and it makes me angry that someone has the nerve to bully people online and not feel any type of remorse. Cyberbullying is becoming more common to occur since technology is advancing each year since people can access the internet in almost every electronic device.
Link for more information about cyberbullying
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4/20/2017 8 Comments smartphone addiction (blog #12)Mostly everyone owns a smartphone and it is useful for looking for an address, surfing the web, managing your bank account, and playing games. It does feel good owning a smartphone and it seems that we cannot leave our home without it. Everywhere we go and most locations such as fast food restaurants, retail stores, and maybe even small businesses offer promotions that you can scan QR codes with your smartphone to get a discount of a certain item or a food discount. Every day you see a lot of people walking around starring at their smartphones or just holding them in their hands. It seems that we have to have the necessity to own a smartphone and that we cannot live without one. There are some concerns that experts have that if people are spending too much time on their phone. According to an article from techaddinction.ca, approximately 72% of people said they are rarely more than five feet away from their handset at any time. This is what is known as nomophobia (an abbreviation of no mobile phobia); the fear that being away from your phone somehow disconnects you from the world. As with many forms of addiction, smartphone addiction is also something that often stems from other underlying emotional and psychological issues. Overuse of a handset can be a crutch that people with post-traumatic stress, attention deficit and social anxiety lean on too. The reason that it can cause stress and depression is basically logging on social media, which a user can be exposed with graphic content of violence, sees the achievements that a user shares with the world that can cause them to lose their self-esteem, and reading other users opinions that they don’t agree with. There are also consequences regarding to smartphone addiction when in regards to our bodies physically and mentally. Staring at a screen, for instance, prevents the brain from releasing something that is called melatonin, our natural sleep chemical. As a result, our bodies don't register that we are tired. Overuse of smartphones leads to interrupted sleeping patterns and means that we do not function as well throughout the day, affecting our abilities to work. Children are also being affected with smartphone addiction. Children that has possession of a smartphone tend to use it to play games and spend hours on a smartphone, which they lose interest of playing outside and interacting with everyone around them. It can be the other way around when an adult is distracted on their smartphone and a child wants to get their attention by poking them or yelling at them if the adult does not reply. It is proven that most of the time the adults reply in an angry tone towards the child because they feel annoyed and bothered. Smartphones are a useful and a good device that we can own, but we have to limit ourselves into using them and avoid having our lives sucked in our smartphones 24/7. As studies has shown that we are a generation that have an addiction to technology and slowly we are allowing smartphones to control our personal life’s.
Link for more information about smartphone addiction Technology has been revolutionizing each year that people and companies are looking forward to try new smart gadgets to witness the power in technology. 3D printers are the most astonishing piece of technology that surprises consumers by its ability to print many things from toys to guns. For pharmaceutical companies, 3D printers are being tested to print prescription drugs so that the pharmaceutical companies can later sell the printed drugs to patients. Today, 3D printers are now available for purchase, but the pharmaceutical companies are suggesting that patients can have access to make their own prescription pills. It sounds that 3D printing drugs is a one step forward for patients and pharmaceutical companies to engage in making pills, but it can be a risk for a patient to be making drugs in their home and can create 3D printers into a personal drug dealer or the 3D printer might fall into the wrong hands. Although that the public does not have access for 3D printers that print drugs, there is an ongoing debate of the pros and cons that if it’s a good idea that if the public can be trusted owning a powerful machine that prints prescription drugs. 3D printers began into play since the 1980’s as an experimental invention to revolutionize modern technology. In 1986, Charles “Chuck” Hull invented a stereo lithography machine, that was known as the earliest 3D printers according to Elizabeth Matias and Bharat Rao. In 1988, another inventor named Scott Crump invented fused deposition modeling (FDM), which is known as the second invented 3D printer. Seventeen years after the second 3D printer was invented, designers and engineers quietly evolved and developed more 3D printers. In 2005, Dr. Gordon started a RepRap project, which is an open source community with the goal of making 3D printing technologies accessible to all. As I mentioned before about the controversy about whether let people own their own 3D printer to print drugs has been focused on more about the risk if a drug abuser has access to this printer and begins to have his or her addiction worse. The best option would be for patients to not be given the opportunity to own a 3D printer to print their own prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical companies are still developing more research to print out more 3D pills, so it is not safe for patients to print drugs. Pharmaceutical companies are only predicting the future and are working on making it a reality. Pharmaceutical companies are not aware or they don’t care about people that have drug addiction problems and are preparing to allow people to 3D print drugs. Statistics in the US, patients and non- patients that are drug addicts overdose from prescription pills die each year and imagine the chaos that can occur if patients and non-patients can print drugs to possibly double the number of drug overdose and deaths. The ethical framework that describes each stakeholder (pharmaceutical companies, patients, and non-patients) are Ethical Egoism. Ethical Egoism means the rightness of an act is determined solely by how much it benefits the agent doing it. Some defenders of ethical egoism argue that we are always motivated by our own self-interest, whether we realize this or not. Pharmaceutical companies argue that they’re rebuilding the future in medicine and care deeply for their patients, but individuals in pharmaceutical companies only see interest in themselves by selling prescription drugs to drug dealers only to satisfy themselves with money and greed.
3D printing drugs link for more information As I am constantly reading articles from different news networks, there has been once certain topic that has caught my attention, which is concerns of videogame development and accusations of gamers behaving in a sense that they are not themselves. Most of us have played videogames when were young and quite often we played videogames that are M rated (Mature audiences that are over 17 and up), so we see content that we are not supposed to look at such as gun violence, drugs, sex, prostitution, and profanity. I can say that it is quite true because when you go on YouTube and watch someone play Grand Theft Auto 5, you can hear kids on the mic playing these types of games. I used to play violent videogames since I was a child and I saw it as a fun game, which they are. I am not encouraging anyone to let children and young teens to play these games, but my point is I seen articles about people accused of school shootings and killing individuals that the media links their acts by playing violent videogames. For example, a 20-year-old man named Adam Lanza who was responsible for shooting at the Sandy Hook elementary school was a frequent player of violent first-person shooter video games. It was said his existence largely involved playing violent computer video games in his bedroom. The media strongly insist that violent videogames are responsible for unexpected tragic events that suspects feel “encouraged” to apply from what they control in front of a TV screen or computer to harm innocent people. Does playing violent games desensitize you to violence? The videogame industries argue that they are not responsible for those tragic incidents that occur. I think that the videogame industries have the right to defend themselves because they are not encouraging anyone to harm others and it is unnecessary for people to point fingers at them when the suspect was known to play violent videogames.
The ethical issues in videogames does not just only revolve in violence but in accusations of discriminating women in certain videogame titles. In M rated videogames, most women are routinely abused, bullied, and harassed while the industry’s largest companies tend to remain silent. Like in Grand Theft Auto 5 or any other previous Grand Theft Auto videogame, there are strip clubs that women are working and asking men for lap dances also when your character is driving you see women dressed as prostitutes with a cigarette on their hand trying to get your attention. In my opinion, it has become common to see women in videogames that are portrayed that way, so mostly anyone considers it as a routine gameplay. There was an article that I read last semester that a woman was playing a game using a Virtual Reality headset that she can see other users character in the game that some man approached her and began touching her inappropriately that she felt sexually assaulted even though she was not physically assaulted. Can this incident be linked on how women are portrayed in M rated videogames? Who knows, but it can be a possibility, but we cannot just assume that it’s the reason. Link to article on woman sexually assaulted in the VR game Link to article on 14 Mass Murders Linked to Violent Video Games |
Fernando MadrigalHello, my name is Fernando Madrigal and I am a Junior at CSUMB. My major is Computer Science with my concentration in Network and Security. I recently transferred from Hartnell Community College last fall. Archives
May 2017
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