Medium of Entertain

I'm going to take a negative stance on the role of technology in politics: while technology has clearly connected us and transmitted knowledge around the world at breakneck speed, its ability to misinform and divide has contributed to the United States' increasingly contentious politics. Photo by Darren Halstead on Unsplash Technology has surely helped link individuals in previously unknown ways. For example, in the 1800s, a politician might only engage with his constituents once in a while when he came into town. Politicians (or at least their workers) can now tweet directly to constituents, send mass emails to their following, and so on. This, however, is a double-edged sword. Consider how simple it is to misinform people today - look at controversial discussion forums about conspiracies and notice how much information is spread with little basis in fact. The anonymity of the Internet has been a boon in many ways, but it has also been a curse: anyone can now put up a blog and...

It's all about social media in general. Every person with a phone knows they can post something heinous on Facebook and hold it over your head, forcing you to satisfy their every wish. People understand that if something goes "viral," it can make or damage someone's business or employment, and that they will receive coupons and apologies from "head office." Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash I've worked in the industry for 20 years and have done everything from host to KM and then GM, and I can't even begin to describe how bad it's gotten. I've worked for all of Canada's major retailers and can tell you that they're all the same in this regard. Because the market is oversaturated with medium-level chain restaurants, the competition for visitors' seats is fierce, and social media has become far more significant than it should have been. As the general manager of one of these restaurants, I spent an inordinate amount of time every ...

This has nothing to do with video games. This has everything to do with escapism. For the vast majority of individuals I know, life stinks. Nobody is pleased, and everyone is devoid of hope. Photo by Hello Lightbulb on Unsplash The elder generations simply do not seem to understand that the future for young people in the Western world is exceedingly dismal. Our economy is in shambles. The ultra-rich have cashed our paychecks, leaving us to fight over leftovers. What few employment left for young people (particularly the impoverished) are in risk of being completely mechanized. Taxis, transportation, and deliveries, for example, are expected to become totally robotic within the next 20 years. That's millions upon millions of people, not to mention the collateral damage. These jobs do not pay well... in fact, they do not pay at all. I've never worked harder than when I was paid $8 an hour. With no breaks, it's highly labor hard and exhausting. Compare this to a 60k office wo...

Ampersands have different meanings in URLs and in the HTML that transforms the content from a website into the structure of boxes/lists/tables/links/forms that you see in your web browser. In HTML, quotation marks have a special significance when they are used outside of the page's plain text and inside links or forms. Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash When you're programming things like websites you often need to take data from one system and essentially turn that into part of the code for another system. That can get really messy though when that data could look just like the code you're mixing it into.  What makes things especially difficult with websites is that early web browsers tried to be really forgiving about minor mistakes in your HTML code, basically you could write whatever and they'd try their very best to do what you probably meant. 20 years later and we're building things like Reddit and Google Docs in our web browsers yet trying not to break all the...

When my friend's baby was born, she created a Facebook page for her. This is despite the fact that child privacy laws restrict Facebook from registering profiles for anyone under the age of 13. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash She has, in fact, uploaded numerous images of her daughter, including metadata such as location, date, and time, as well as other persons in the snap. This highlights common destinations like childcare and parks. My issue is triangular. For starters, the child could become the target of a predator who uses mountains of metadata to pursue the child and eventually compel them into some illicit behavior. Second, I'm concerned about the child's future autonomy. We all went through a moment in our early adolescence when we tried to separate ourselves from our families and develop our own identities. How much more difficult would that be if your entire life up to that moment had already been told to you by someone else? Will it slow down the process of em...