Macbooks are adorable, aren’t they? Who wouldn’t want a Macbook? They come in the brightest and most eye-catching of colors; they boast a solid yet sleek, sexy design; and they have, on average, a longer battery life than my (stupid) Droid Eris.
I don’t have a Macbook. In fact, I’ve never had a laptop that wasn’t a hand-me-down from my mom or step dad. But when I think of these little technological slices of heaven, my neural networks thrust forth irritating images of the Facebook home page and other people’s tagged photos. And… FarmVille.
Macbooks are touted as the perfect computer for young professionals and college students — they’re fast, easy to use, they never crash, they allegedly last forever and you can do almost anything with them.
Including harvest your farm during class.
(I should point out that my topic of discussion here is not the use of Macbooks among college students — the only reason I bring them up is because 80 percent of the students I see on a regular basis that bring their laptops to class own this particular — superior — breed of laptop.)
In my experience, approximately half of the people in my classes bring their laptops to lecture. Sometimes, when I’m desperately seeking a diversion that will keep me awake during a dry two-hour class, I’ll glance around the room to count how many people are using laptops, and how many of them are actually using them to take notes. Usually, it’s less than half.
The number one distraction for students who bring laptops into the classroom is, of course, Facebook. I have, on countless occasions, sat behind girls (it seems like it’s always girls) who literally do nothing all class period but peruse Facebook. The best part is, many times they sit there refreshing their own profile page.
I had a discussion with a roommate once in which we calculated how much each person spends in tuition on each class they attend. For in state students, it’s around $20 per class, depending on credit hours and length. These people spend $20 per lecture to come and spend an hour glancing through their own tagged photos, rereading comments and checking out the overall look of their page. That’s something I’m only vain enough to do in the privacy of my own room. I’m hesitant to admit that I do it at all.
Obviously, people are entitled to do whatever they want with their tuition dollars. But when you’re sitting directly behind someone who spends an hour or two doing nothing but planting or buying or harvesting or feeding — or doing whatever the hell it is that people do — on FarmVille, it can be extremely distracting. People who text during class don’t bother me because they’re usually fairly discrete about it; they hide their phone under the desk. I’ve never played (not even sure if that’s the correct verb) FarmVille, I am not a FarmVillain, or whatever, but it’s the only video game I’ve ever encountered that has actually intruded into and disturbed my perfect, ignorant little game-free world completely uninvited. If I’m not staring directly into someone’s cow pasture in class, then it’s clogging my News Feed or alleged “friends” are sending me invitations begging me to give them chickens.
I don’t care about your chickens. Keep your farm away from me, or I’ll take a torch to it.
I never felt violated by a video game before the advent of FarmVille and its Facebook counterparts. To me, video games were a somewhat isolated subculture that you could choose to be a part of or ignore at will. As a new media communications major, I had to take New Media Futures, which irritated me, but it didn’t make me despise the gaming industry. FarmVille hasn’t done that either, but it has created a negative mental model that I associate with Facebook and now Macbooks (thanks for the terminology, Loges). Other than that, it’s disruptive and distracting in class.
Also, I should mention that I have no qualms about reading over people’s shoulders when they’re farming or Facebooking in class. Anyone who may be disgusted by that has severely lost touch with the reason they’re in class in the first place.
26
Apr
Learning to love (or live with) website comments
(Note: The material in this post came in part from a staff editorial I wrote for the Barometer in November 2009)
As managing editor of the Barometer, one of my responsibilities was to moderate comments on our website. Through College Publisher, comments can be submitted, but won’t be posted to a story until an administrator approves them. This means reading through every word of each comment and deciding if they were too offensive, off-topic or nonsensical to approve.
This ultimately depressing and tedious duty was my happy privilege for more than six months. It was depressing because, while the Barometer is easily the most-consumed student media venue on campus, it has its fair share of haters (when working at a daily newspaper, you quickly discover that the loudest voices are those of the people who hate your coverage — the ones who like it rarely speak up).
There are certain people who I got to know by name or e-mail address because they would literally wait until each night around 11 when the Barometer would be published online, read every article, and rip each story and its author a new one via comment. However, these comments were usually well-written and totally appropriate, so I had to approve them.
The work of moderating comments can be a privilege and the bane of our existence. The democratic principles of newspapers can take their purest form in article comments. It’s wonderful to know what the audience is concerned with and talking about, and sometimes the conversation is lively, informative and engaging. If article comments will keep newspapers in business, at least online, then they’re irreplaceable. As Mike McInally, editor and publisher of the Gazette-Times, pointed out, those who comment on stories sometimes drop important news tips. But they can also be a source of serious frustration.
In keeping pace with the democratic traditions that newspaper people hold dear, we generally like the concept of article comments. News outlets are meant to serve the community and to allow for conversation. There is no better new media example of participation in a public forum than this. However, many of us feel more reverence to good old-fashioned letters to the editor. They tend to be more conceptually mature, articulate and actually make a discernible argument. At the Barometer, they are limited to 300 words, can be included in the daily print edition and, best of all, include the person’s name and contact information, so they’re held accountable for their response.
Article comments on newspaper websites were designed to be an open, constructive method of encouraging community and reader feedback and allowing the reader to interact with the newspaper and its audience. They allow readers to have a voice, to let us know what they appreciate and what didn’t work. Unfortunately, this privilege is frequently abused. Because comments allow for anonymity, people post vulgar, offensive and sometimes threatening responses because they can’t be held responsible for their views or their lambasting.
Sometimes, newspapers are forced to disable comments on certain stories because they know they will be inflammatory and offensive. While habitual posters may kick and scream because they feel that their right to democracy is being jeopardized, some stories simply speak for themselves. At a workshop with Steve Bagwell’s copy editing class last Wednesday, McInally said that the Gazette-Times disables comments on stories involving race or sexual abuse charges, because the comments can quickly degrade into predictable, offensive swill.
As moderators, we’re constantly on the lookout for not only spammers, but for “trolls” as well – people who post controversial and generally off-topic responses to articles to elicit a response from other readers. And while there are the occasional heart-warming posts commending a writer for their reporting, most of these comments are knee-jerk reactions to a detail of the story that the reader didn’t like.
But I can’t write this post in good conscience without mentioning the silent savior, the shining star of Barometer website comments. There is one particular reader (he or she goes by the free text reader name “Anon”) who could write article comments for a living, if such a job existed. Anon’s e-mail address remains the same each time, and on more than one occasion I’ve considered writing to him/her (this person is definitely a him in my mind, so I’ll stick with that) just to find out who he was and offer my appreciation. Even if he disagrees with something the Barometer has published, he is articulate, polite and informed. Instead of arguing, he offers his point of view — which is always brilliant and makes me wonder why he follows dailybarometer.com so closely in the first place.
Hats off to you, Anon. Thanks for keeping it real on the Baro website.
While some news outlets have probably suffered enough abuse that they’ve had to disable all comments, at this point it’s a venue that people are so used to that it doesn’t make sense to take it away. If it keeps democratic traditions alive in news media outlets, it’s a necessary evil.
And, as always, don’t feed the trolls.
14 years ago Short URL Comments
Gravity in the never ending news hole
College Publisher/Mike McInally/news media/The Daily Barometer/the Gazette-Times/trolls/website comments