One Vote Campaign 2008

This post is about a video on YouTube which is an advertisement featuring many celebrities to help raise awareness for the One Vote campaign. This campaign is meant to get American voters out on election day and to help influence the presidential nominees to make poverty in Africa one of the major issues in the 2008 elections. Celebrities such as Bono, Matt Damon and Tom Brady speak on the video and although their words can be seen as inspiring, I doubt it will get many people out to vote.

When looking at the comments posted about the video, I noticed one comment which expresses a view that I happen to agree with. This person said that solving poverty and AIDS in Africa should not be a major issue in our presidential campaign, especially when we have alot of poverty in our own country. The writer also said that it is not the responsibility of the United States to be the world's police. I have always had this opinion, as we are constantly giving money to African countries when you can walk the streets of New York City and see plenty of poor and homeless people. Also, you can go to rural towns in middle America and notice that the people there are living in extreme poverty and the education level is extremely poor. I know the celebrities who are on this video and the people who launched this campaign mean well, but maybe they should look at the conditions in their own country before calling on Americans to make the conditions in another country one of our main political issues.

Click Here to Watch The Video

Facebook: Social Networking or Stalking?

Tonight I read an article from the Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled "The Fakebook Generation" from October 6th, 2007. In this article the author Alice Mathias, a recent graduate from Dartmouth University, discusses the popular website Facebook and whether or not that website is achieving its goal of social networking. One of the main things she points out is the privacy that is offered by the website and which aspects of that privacy are important to most people in our generation. Although the website offers its members alot of privacy options, the most popular option is that people will not see when the member is currently online. People do not want their friends knowing when they are on the website, regardless of what they are doing on the website. However, many people are not ashamed to show pictures of themselves consuming large amounts of alcohol or partaking in sexual activities. This shows how our generation functions since they are more embarrassed of people finding out they are at home than they are of people seeing pictures of them that they might later regret taking.

Another interesting topic she brings up is when she mentions a possible program that would let other people know who is looking at their page. As a college student, I know many of my friends who go online and "e-stalk" the guys who they might have crushes on, or see what their friends are doing that they were not invited too. Internet sites such as this make it much easier for people to see who is doing what and when and this can be highly addictive for many college students. However, facebook has many advantages in connecting people on a college campus who might never meet but have many of the same interests. This social networking aspect can be extremely beneficial for many college students.

Although I no longer log onto facebook, I found this article extremely interesting because the author seems to enjoy the way people use it. Without this website, how else would people be able to stalk the people they are too embarrassed to approach in real life?


Click Here to Read the Article