Anonymity Online

With todays technology anonymity is a bigger part of our lives than ever before. But the anonymity has brought up the question should people remain anonymous no matter what? As long as they are not doing anything illegal, people should always remain anonymous.

The Internet has brought about a level of connectedness that has never existed on this planet before. People are able to connect with each other across the world in an instant. But with this increased communication ability we have become farther apart than ever before. A level of Anonymity never before seen has gone hand in hand with the new ability to connect. Anonymity has been a blessing and a curse. It has been used to do good and to do bad. There are some people that say that those who say offensive things should be exposed to the public, but they should not.

In today’s society we are brought up to be “proper” which I do not necessarily think is a bad thing, but it has been taken to the extreme. Kids today are coddled and protected more than ever before. They are told to not say anything that will offend someone else. I feel that a result of this is why people are so vulgar and inappropriate online. The Internet is the only place where they feel safe to post how they really feel, or the place that they can get it all out of their system before going off, back into the real world.

Yes racism still exists in the world today, but it is nowhere near as bad as it once was. As Jeff Winger from the show Community says, “I think not being racist is the new racism.” Nobody in the world can claim that they have not disliked at least one person in their lifetime, however feeling bad about not getting along with that person because they are a different nationality is wrong. This is the reason that many people over compensate so much online with racist remarks. A very small percentage of people who make racist remarks online are actually part of organizations such as the KKK. They are just over compensating for having to keep all of their thoughts all bottled up.

I have gone to school with people like this. In real life they are some of the nicest people, but playing online games with them over Xbox live, they turn into some of the rudest people out there, using racist terms and verbally attacking people. But the next day at school they were back to normal, back to the quiet kids that they had always been.

The Internet can be a place of release, a place where you can be whoever you want, an escape from reality. This is why people’s identity should not be exposed for rude and offensive behavior. It is better for people to release their stress online, to be jerks, than to have them blow up in real life and potentially injure themselves or others.

The Internet is a place without boundaries. You must be responsible for yourself and use your common sense. Although it is almost impossible to avoid offensive material all together on the Internet you can do many things to limit the amount that you are exposed to. You must also recognize the audience of that community. The majority of offensive remarks made are by younger kids that try to fit in or get noticed for the comments that they make. And what better way to get noticed than to say something that you are not supposed to.

The website Fat Ugly or Slutty demonstrates sexist remarks made to female members of online gaming communities. It is obvious reading these messages that most of them come from young kids who are saying them because they have heard them as being very offensive to women and cannot think of anything else to say. But as being a member of Xbox live and getting many angry messages myself, I can honestly say that they are being treated the same as everyone else. I have received and seen messages that are much worse than those. With such a high population of male players in these communities, the female members are sometimes treated like the male members, in which for most cases nothing is too rude or unacceptable to say.

There has to be a line for Anonymity. As in real life, there has to be things that are not acceptable. If, and only if, these lines are crossed, a persons right to anonymity online should be lost. An example of crossing this line would be breaking a law. In these cases it is safer for everyone if these people do not remain anonymous.

Anonymity also protects people on the Internet, people who are willing to speak out against injustice in government and society. People can speak out against things like oppressive regimes and violence without the fear of having the people who are committing these injustices.

The Internet is the last outlet for people to truly express themselves. The key component to this is the aspect of being able to express yourself without the fear of being ostracized for what it is they have to say. Taking away anonymity from the Internet would change what the Internet is. It would just turn into a everyone being fake and not able to truly express themselves.

If we were to start exposing people’s identities for submitting offensive material, things like racist remarks, where we would stop? Anything put on the Internet can be considered offensive to one group of people or another. How could we make everyone happy? Which values would be deemed acceptable, be put above another? Even if we could come up with a set of guidelines that we deem fit, how would we justify the consequences of releasing these identities? Would one offensive remark validate harm coming to that person? This is why anonymity must be sustained in the Internet, because once we remove it for some people, it will never stop.

So it comes to an end

Hello fellow classmates! The year is coming to an end, and with it so does my blog. Finishing up my second year of University leaves me thinking back on my experiences and looking forward to the future.

I didn't believe people when they would say that time goes by at an amazing speed after high school, but they weren't lying. This semester was the fastest one yet; in this short time my life has changed in ways that I never would have guessed. Here are a few of the highlights.

Football: I have mentioned before that I play football for the Calgary Colts football team. Football has been a constant and extremely important part of my life for the past seven years of my life. It has changed who I am. It has made me into the man that I am today and has been the thing that I have always been able to lean on. At the beginning of last season I started to feel like I was coming into my own as a player, but I was knocked back by an injury. I had surgery on my shoulder in February and recently found out that I may require surgery on my left shoulder as well. I was very hopeful in making a big push to play a larger part on the team this year, but because of my injury I will miss almost all of the off season training and may miss the season completely if I require surgery on the other shoulder.
My injury has taken away a large part of my life in the form of physical activity. Football at this level is a year round commitment. I have learned to enjoy the off season training, not only for the physical benefits but for the mental ones as well. I have had to learn to cope with not having this in my life for an extended period of time. A positive that I have taken from the situation is that I have come to realize that even if it were not for football, I would still want to be physically active in my life and plan to be long after football.

Work: I have worked at Safeway since I Was in high school. I started at the lowest position that they had in the company. Over the past year I have made many advancements within the company and have secured myself as an important player within the store. I have become proud of the fact that I can do almost every job in the store and that no matter who you are, whether you be a twenty year veteran, your first day on the job, or a customer, you can come to me to help solve your problem.
This semester I was approached by another company at school. The company, Scholars Edge Painting, offered me the chance to run my own company for the summer. The opportunity intrigued me and I knew that I could not pass it up. The job so far has taught me about myself and pushed me to my limits. However it has also taught me about things that I now know I would never do. I have come to realize that I could never do a job in marketing (as I have had to go door to door advertising for my business) and I have learned that even though I can do it, I would not pursue a job in sales; I don't hate it, but I definitely do not love it either. Sometimes learning what you don't like is just as important as discovering what you do.

School: I have changed my plans as to what my end goal is with school countless times over the years. This year, and especially this past semester, have helped me narrow down the choices tremendously. I have been exposed to new thoughts and ideas (including this class), and have found a topic in which I actually really enjoy. Although many people despise organic chemistry I have grown to love it. So much so that I have decided to pursue it further and possibly pursue a career in it.

Women: Although this is a topic that I usually do not discuss with people other than my close friends the year would not be complete without some mention of the topic. This semester a lot of major things in my life changed in the span of about a month. My surgery brought about a lot of changes in my life, not only did I have to adapt to life with only one arm, but I went from being busy pretty much everyday of the week, with a day off maybe once a month, to almost nothing. Without having football five days a week, work four days a week (and no school for the week afterwards), I started to go a little crazy before I adapted to having all the free time. Shortly after that my girlfriend of ten months and I broke up. Without having any of my usual vices to fall back on made this a very hard time for me. But time heals all wounds and some good came out of all this. A girl that I have had a crush on for the past two years started to talk to me, and with fingers crossed I move forward, to what is hopefully a new chapter in my life.

I do not know what my future holds for me. There will be ups and there will be downs, but I look forward to every second of it. Thank you all for a great semester and good luck in your own endeavours.

Jared Salekin

Assuming

The problem with the internet is that you can be whoever or whatever you want to. With no way to validate another's identity on the web you must use your intuition to decide if you can trust people as to who they are. Unless you know and have met this person in person there is no way to know if the person you are talking to is who they say they are (example the movie and now tv series catfish). This has happened many times, including the mess when it was discovered that some of the editors of Wikipedia were not experts as they had claimed, but just regular people.

Now the problem with not knowing very much about the people that you converse with online is that you end up assuming a lot about this person. When I was younger I used to play an online game, something similar to a MMORPG. I made online friends, and because I had never met them in real life I assumed almost everything about them outside of our interaction in the game. As we became better friends we started talking outside of the game. For example I became friends with them on Facebook and MSN. I found out that al of them were completely different than I had imagined them being. Finding out more about people outside of the game always changed the relationship inside of it.

Another aspect to this is that I found out that people would fake an online identity to take advantage of people within the community. For example a significant number of people from my school also played the game. Now as you can imagine this online community was comprised of mostly males with a very small female population. A guy from my school told me that he was going to create a profile and pretend that he was a girl. He was going to do this to get other players to gift him premium items that required real world money.

I don't believe that the internet creates an assumption that everyone is a white male. I believe that the internet causes us to see people as we imagine them to be, and we almost always see them as being at the extremes. We need to remember that people online are just like you and me, and it is not fair to hold them to such extreme standards.

Is Football ever not trending?

Although I am more of a CFL fan than an NFL fan, with all the hype and the big names it's hard not to pay attention to the big off season moves. I will be giving a quick recap of all the moves so far.

The Minnesota Vikings are my favourite team in the NFL. mainly because they have two of my favourite players in the league, Adrian Peterson and Jared Allen. Percy Harvin was a player that I really enjoyed watching, however he was traded away recently. Although he was exciting to watch and a great player he was having some troubles with the organization and was not happy. Even though he was a good player the Vikings got what I believe to be a good deal. They got several high draft picks for the years to come, and as the past couple years have not been the kindest to the Vikings they need to rebuild. Having these extra picks will most definitely help them to do that. To replace Harvin the Vikings signed Greg Jennings. Although I have not had a lot of first hand experience watching him I do know that he is one of the better receivers in the league. He is getting old though and hopefully they can get as much as they can out of him before he is done.

One of the biggest surprises for me so far this off season was to hear that Wes Welker had signed with the Denver Broncos. For as long as I can remember Wes Welker has been a patriot, he is one of the guys who has stayed constant with all of their success. It will be weird for me to see him in anything other than a Patriots uniform. Another aspect that I found interesting about this story is he is moving from Tom Brady to Peyton Manning. I have always considered Tom Brady and Peyton Manning to have one of the greatest rivalries in all of sports. Whether others, including themselves, believe this, who knows. They are the two best quarterbacks that I have ever seen play, two of the best quarter backs in the history of the game so there is always excitement when you hear that they are going to face each other. I would imagine that Brady would feel at least a little betrayed by Welker moving to a team with his rival.

Another surprise for me was hearing about Anquan Boldin. Boldin is another guy that I see as an elite player in the league. Now the surprise was not so much that he was traded, it was more for what they got for him. He was traded for a sixth round pick. Not only is this insulting, but incredibly stupid. I realize that the Baltimore Ravens were trying to free up some cap space but that is ridiculous! I cannot see any upside of trading a player of his caliber for a sixth round pick.

A story that I had not heard about until visiting nfl.com for some stories was the story about Elvis Dumervil. Apparently he had been asked to take a pay cut, after negotiation he had agreed. However he was still cut. Why? because his agent failed to send in the proper paper work by the deadline costing Dumervil his job. Apparently the agent had been asked to use a more modern way of sending the documents as the fax machine had not been working properly but the agent refused. Another example of being stubborn and not accepting change and technology getting you nowhere.

A Little Bit of Controversy....

My blog post this week will be a little more controversial than the past weeks, as it involves probably the most controversial and polarizing topic in the world; Religion. Before I present my views with you I'm going to give you a little bit of history on myself and Religion.

My extended family on my mothers side are hardcore Ukrainian Catholics (very similar to Roman Catholics with a few differences that I am not 100% sure on), other than that no one in my family is very religious. On a more personal note I attended Catholic schools for ten years, in which religion class is required. Although I do not consider myself an expert on the Catholic or Christian Religions I feel that I have a good knowledge of them. 

I will admit that I am not a Catholic or Christian now, I do not associate myself with any Religion in fact. However I do not consider myself a Atheist either. Some people may look down on me for this, or even say that I am not "allowed" to do this, but I have my own set of beliefs. Could you say that I made up my own Religion? Maybe, but do I? No. I simply consider them as irrational beliefs that are a part of me.

This Blog is not about my belief system, this Blog is about the Catholic and Christian (with either word hereby referring to both) Religions. Now I want to make this very clear before I begin, I DO NOT CARE WHAT RELIGION YOU ARE. I do not look down upon any religion and do not have a problem with any of them as long as they meet two criteria 

1) They do not encourage their members to hurt others (whether this be physically, mentally, or damage to their possessions) and 

2) That they do not push their religion onto others (there is a difference between informing, which is okay, and pressuring, which is not)

Now the problem that I have with the Catholic religion is not its underlying teaching or the mantra that it teaches. My problem is its unwillingness to evolve. The Catholic religion has stayed almost the exact same for centuries. They must accept that the world has changed and it as well has to change. Now I am not saying that the entire Religion has to be overhauled, I am saying that they must evolve in the ways that they deliver their message. 

For example, the Catholic religion refuses to change its stance on subjects that are now considered common knowledge. For example the theory of evolution. Overwhelming evidence has been put forward that support evolution, but the church refuses to acknowledge this evidence. The bible would not have to be rewritten and the words changed from "God created man" to "Man evolved from a monkey." I am suggesting minor tweaks in the way that the information is delivered. God created the universe in seven days, who is to say that God, an immortal and all powerful being, uses earth days? Why can they not teach that God created man, and that evolution was just part of the creation of man? That to reach the final product God went through many forms. 

The creationism theory is not the only one that I suggest needs tweaking. The practices of priests being allowed to wed (which historically they could), not only would attract more people to play a larger part in the Catholic community, but would also most likely cut down on what I consider to be the biggest problem that the church refuses to face. The problem of child molestation at the hands of people within the church. Another thing that really bugged me when I heard about was when the pope refused to support the use of condoms in Africa. Africa has a huge, sickening amount of unplanned pregnancies and people infected with AIDS. With one sentence the pope could have saved millions of lives but he refused.

A bit of an after note is the fact that Catholics look down on other religions, I believe that the world would be a better place, however unlikely it may be, if people learned to accept other religions the world would be a more peaceful place.

But this is my opinion and I know that many people will not agree. As always I welcome people to call me out on anything they see fit. 

I have questions, the internet has answers

Through my second blog post I am going to explore a fundamental trait of mine. The fact that I am almost unnaturally curious. Now a lot of times this can be misinterpreted for being nosey, which seem to go hand in hand with curiosity, and some may argue that they are one in the same. Now a lot of things that I am curious about and find interesting are incredibly boring to most people. One thing that I have always found interesting is the human mind and how people think. Here are a couple articles that I have stumbled upon that I have found interesting. I will do my best sum up the articles and let you decide if you would like to read them for yourself or not. 

The first article addresses a question that no matter who you are, I can guaruntee that at one point or another, you have obsessed over for hours. The article is called Want to know if someone likes you? Now as promised I will spoil the article in an effort to save you some time. The author of the article explores the idea that laughter has a direct link to whether or not a person likes you or not. This could mean anyone from your secret crush to your coworkers and classmates. While reading this article I looked back on my life, and came to the realization that there was merit to this, not only in the reactions of others but I found myself guilty of this too. I realized that no matter quality of joke or amusing observation, when it comes from a person that I do not like, at the very best it may get a smirk. 

When an article is called How do I improve my memory? Most people would not expect the first sentence to be "Do you know what is essential for a good memory? The ability to forget." This article explores a thing that not many people, including me, think about, and that is the importance of forgetting. I wasn't sure if these people were really out there or if they had been a "what if" thought of someone, but apparently there really are people who can remember every detail of their life. After reading this I realized that for me personally this would be absolute torture. I already have trouble letting little mistakes going, but if I could never forget them I don't know if I could survive. 

Well thats all for this week, hopefully I've kept you entertained and maybe sparked a bit of curiosity in you too. Until next time.   

It's all about me

Hello fellow classmates!
This will be my first blog post I have ever written and I'm not completely sure how to start this or what exactly I 'm going to be talking about. A great piece of advice, and one that I hope that you will follow when reading this, is to go in with very low expectations so that you will always be pleasantly surprised.
I guess first I'll start off with a little about myself. My name is Jared, I'm 19 and have lived in Calgary all my life. As you can probably guess I am attending Mount Royal currently taking a Bachelor degree in General Science. I have been playing football for the past 6 years and am currently a member of the Calgary Colts and this has resulted in slowly turning me into an old man as I now have problems with my ankles knees hips and shoulders. This past season tore either my labrum or my rotator cuff in my shoulder. I had always been curious what an MRI would be like, the silver lining was that I got to have one. One of the techs had the most original description I had ever heard. He said that having an MRI is kind of like being at a rave, in a coffin. I had another procedure done at the same time, it was called an arthroscopy. It is when they inject die into the joint and then x-ray it to get very detailed picture. What they don't tell you is that the needle is three inches long!
At this point I am not 100% sure on my goals for this blog, and unfortunately don't have any that I know enough about to compare it to. However I do hope that it will be a way for me to express my opinions and be completely honest (to a certain point) about subjects that may not come up in everyday conversation. I would like to point out that I do not always have the "popular" opinion on some, if not most, subjects. However I always love a good debate so if you do end up reading this and not agreeing with something that I say do not be afraid to call me out on it.
I look forward to writing about different topics in the future so check in soon!