Warming Again to Coldplay

No post on a Monday!? What is this madness that has occurred over the last couple of days? Well it was Halloween for one and I was in no fit state to compose a blog post and so I thought that I would defer to today when I'm a little more awake. Never a better decision has been made either because today I have probably been as tired as I ever have been before. I could feel my head flopping in lectures this morning (9am start - ouch!) and for the rest of the day I found it hard to get myself going. How I even managed to take lecture notes today is mystery to me but I've managed to make it to tonight unscathed. Tonight's post is based on something that I stumbled across last week. I found out that Coldplay were streaming their concert in Madrid live on Youtube and I was all over it. Subsequently I've hit a real love for their music again, especially their new album - I can't believe that I ever doubted them.

The 2011 Reality

I love to listen to adults talking about the past and what the good (and bad) things were from their time as a young adult. In many respects the 'now generation' is living the high life because we've not lived through a war that's affected the home front; we've not had to do mandatory service in the army; and as young people nowadays we have more rights than ever. We live in a modern era where the internet provides the basis for almost everything we do and when we can access just about anything we want (from the past and the present) at the click of a button. We have access to brilliant education and we are encouraged to thrive by our elders instead of being ignored. The question I then ask is this: why do some people think we've got it bad?

Could Face-to-Face be Phased Out?

As the dulcet tones of one of my university lecturers echoed through the corridor of my flat this afternoon, it dawned on me that personal contact isn't quite as important as it maybe once was. We (that being myself and 2 of my flatmates) had a lecture today that was replaced by a recorded lecture which was online. It was the same stuff that we would have been told had we all trudged over to the lecture theatre as our timetables tell us to but this week the lecturer in question was unable to attend and so made a digital version instead. It's a curiosity of the modern era that, in a time when we are told as youngsters to get away from the computer screen and become more sociable, we are being fed more and more information via the internet. Personally I like it because it adds a new level of flexibility to your day - something that I'm starting to feel is essential after only 3 days of 2nd year - but its long term affects could be perilous.

Subtlety in Blogging

Blogging is an incredible creature. Yes I may well have a biased view on this topic since I've had a blog in my life for quite a while now but I think that my opener encapsulates the general consensus amongst fellow bloggers and blog readers alike. Blogs are very flexible, they can be accessed by anyone on the internet and the content can appeal to so many different types of people. 

When I started out I thought about starting up a 'marmite' blog where the topic of the posts would be very focused and would only appeal to the minority. In many respects this blog that you find yourself on today is testament to the fact that I chose to make this blog appeal to as many people as possible. I might well have shot myself in the foot with that decision because now I write one of millions of 'generic' blogs on the internet and therefore it is hard to get readers. This blog (contrary to the title) isn't even exclusively for teenagers either - it's hard to come up with a unique selling point. Those negatives aside however, I get to write about anything I want to. It's a great thing to be able to play around with because, despite it being generic, I know my audience (damn, I know most of my readers) and therefore I can pitch my posts at them and see what they think. The only problem with this (and yes, I'm being a little negative today but I'm slightly hungover) is that I have to try and be subtle when it comes to writing about things that relate to people I know. I don't name names and I don't act as a news-broadcaster for people's lives - I just put down my take on an event, nothing more nothing less.

The Internet: The Third Arm of Society

You learn a lot about people when you travel. I'm not talking about the people that you are traveling with in particular because you are bound to get to know them better; I mean the people that you encounter along the way. Traveling appeals to lots of different types of people and therefore when you stay in hostels all over Europe you get to see a very clean cross-section of the 'world society'. Anyone who has ever been in a hostel (either at home or abroad) will understand the kind of mix of people that can be found in places like that - it's all very interesting. One of the main things that I observed about these people when I was on holiday was that they all had one thing in common: they all wanted access to the internet. No matter what type of person it was or where they were from, everyone hovered around the computers in the hostel until there was one free. Most of them were looking for their fix of Facebook but no matter what they wanted to do online it struck me that whatever it was, it was vital. It brought me to the conclusion that most people (particularly young people) can't live without access to the internet for longer than a few days. I'm no different and I knew that I was going to struggle but it's nice to know that I'm one many who need to have the internet at their fingertips whenever they desire it.

To Trust or Not to Trust - The Power of Wikipedia

Somehow I managed to get through all of my years at high school without ever having to produce a bibliography. When I tell people this they glare at me and I can feel their leer burn my face but I'm not sure why. I was of the mind that if I knew my stuff then I wouldn't have to look anything up and therefore I wouldn't have to cite anything. It's a very unprofessional way of writing essays as I am coming to realise, but then again it seemed to work pretty well for me. The thing is that I can't get away with that anymore. At university there is too much stuff sitting in books that you don't know for you to be able to get by on only the 'stuff' that you do. If I was to hand in an essay to any one of my tutors that hadn't been properly referenced then there is a good chance I would get pulled up for plagiarism and then swiftly put out on my ear by the powers that be. The thing is that it would have been far from deliberate but because I'm reading so much material now that it's sometimes hard to tell which words are mine and which aren't. As a result my essays are a minefield of footnotes, stapled firmly to a bibliography. I actually don't mind writing this type of essay. If anything I'm enjoying it more than the usual splurge of text that I would punt out for every essay in high school. However it is a time consuming business which brings me on to the topic for this post: Wikipedia. There has hardly been a piece of work that I've done since coming to university which I haven't started at Wikipedia for. We're not allowed to reference it (if one more teacher tells me this then I may flip) so why do I bother using it? I'll tell you why...

What Does Egypt Tell us About Social Networking?

How many 'event' invitations do you get every week on Facebook? I get about 2 or 3 that I could actually attend and then countless more that are inventions of the Facebook junkies which have thousands of people attending (but not really). I'm not going to start to harp on about the wonders of Facebook because I think that we are all fairly well versed in that particular area but the 'event' function has become a huge part of our lives. So when I heard that a large majority of the political protestors in Egypt were informed about the protests by such an 'invitation', I wasn't far from surprised - not that it doesn't worry me.