The impact of new technology on family and work Research Paper

The impact of new technology on family and work - Research Paper Example Technology forms a crucial part of our life since it constitutes the fuel that propels our lives. It is an integral part of human life because it benefits the society by promoting comfort both at work and in families (Freeland 1). Moreover, technology has greatly reduced and saved human effort as well as time spent in doing daily activities. In US, 88% of the American adult population posses a cell phone, 58% own a desktop, 61% posses a laptop, 18% own a tablet computer while 18% posses an e - book reader (Brenner 1). Therefore, technology has improved human life and increased standard of living. This, to some extent has reduced misery and stresses of life. However, since all things on earth have both advantages and disadvantages, technology has greatly affected human life a negative way (Freeland 3). It has been both a miracle and a burden all together. Some of the problems that human beings face are due to the inventions of technology. Human beings face these problems both at work and in the family set up and this contributes to misery. Thus, technology has had both positive and negative impacts on family and work. Positive impacts of technology on family and work Increased connectivity and accessibility In the current world, several technologies are not only wants but also form a necessity of life. Computer technologies have been widely accepted and used in the entire world. Man uses computer technological functions such as SNS, online face – face communications in video chatting, mailing among others. The use of computers and smart phones for internet surfing has eased information accessibility since workers and family members can browse on anything they want from the internet. (Goyder 21). Such information might be vital for workers performance and for the well-being of family members. Moreover, since most workers and family members join social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook Skype among others, they use computers and smart phones to access such services. The social networking services provide opportunities for people to access information, share, and offer their opinions concerning a given issue that might affect their lives (Hjorth 50). Due to such opportuniti es, both workers and family members have increased connectivity with fellow workers and other members of family. This is because the social networking sites connect friends, colleagues at work and other family members thus, enabling communication and information sharing. Moreover, both internet surfing and social networking sites help workers and family members by making them updated with current events, thereby getting information at the right time (Hjorth 55). This ensures that they can use such information to plan on activities, which can improve their living standards. For instance, workers can access job vacancies from the internet while students can access information pertaining to disciplines or subjects they want to pursue or they currently undertake. Consequently, the introduction of TVs and the internet has increased accessibility of workers and family members to information. People can watch movies through You Tube, watch news on their televisions, as well as read news po sted online from media houses (Lytras & Isabel 112). Moreover, people are exposed to happenings and thus, remain ever informed. This leads to improved living standards and ensures their well-being. Ease of data management as well retrieval The invention and use of computer both at work has greatly improved data storage, organization, management, and retrieval (Winston & Ralph 15). This is because computers have the capacity to process large amounts of data within a short time. Moreover, it can retrieve the same data whenever required, and in the most convenient way possible. This enhances efficiency as well as productivity since little time is used in doing a given activity. Increased innovation and invention The introduction of computers has greatly increased innovatio

Miser to Man of the city in a Christmas Carol Essay Example for Free

Miser to Man of the city in a Christmas Carol Essay Scrooge is not very well like by the Cratchits. You can see this by I wish I had him here. Id give him a piece of my mind to feast upon and I hope hed have a good appetite for it. This shows that he is not liked because he is an odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man. This make Scrooge feel bad and he learns a valuable lesson. Treat others as you wish to be treated. If he doesnt want to be called bad tempered, money grabbing, old sinner, then we has to be caring and thoughtful. Scrooge every year at his nephew Freds house, is invited to a Christmas party, but always turns it down. Scrooge is not very well liked by the people at the party especially Fred. You can tell this by they invent a new game called yes or no. This shows that Scrooge is talked behind this back and that people do not care if they hurt his feeling. Scrooge feels unwanted and uncared for. You can tell this by One half hour, Spirit, only one. This shows that Scrooge has feeling and he wants to go as soon as possible because he crying and in great disbelief. Scrooges future looks uncertain when he goes into the future and sees him in a corner of the graveyard, unnoticed, uncared for. You can from this point that Scrooge is at the end of his tether. You can tell this by For the first time his hand appeared to shake. This shows that Scrooge has become more and more frightened and knows he must change his future to be cared for and missed dearly. He does not breakdown till this point because he can not change the past and that does not bother him. At the end of all the spirits visiting Scrooge is disappointed himself by being a selfish, lonely, old man. The Last straw is when he visits his own grave. He is already depressed with the entire trauma and another dig in his grave has made him tremble in fear. You can tell this by The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to one. He advanced towards it trembling. This shows that Scrooge is scared of him and wants to change rather than just a person who has just died. Scrooge really wants to change because he doesnt want to be the man in the corner that no one visits. You can tell this by Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they the shadows of the things that may be, only. This shows that Scrooge wants to change because of his experiences over the night. He wants to know that if he changes and mingles with people he will not die and nobody will care. He gets more and more distressed because the spirit wont tell him if he can change his shadows of the future. You can tell this by Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life. He is on his knees, desperately trying to change his future. This tells us from this point onwards Scrooge will be a changed man to avoid distressing death. Scrooge wakes up the next morning a changed man, a generous man. You can tell this by Scrooge regarded everyone with a delighted smile. This shows that Scrooge has took into great account of what the spirits said and gone out to change his future. He is a changed man to the public. You can tell this by If you please, said Scrooge and not a farthing less. A great many back-payments are included in it, I assure you This shows Scrooge as being as kind, thoughtful, caring man rather than a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching covetous old sinner. Scrooge now respects the poor people more than ever, especially the Cratchits. You can tell this by and therefore I am about to raise your salary. This shows that Scrooge would rather share more of his money to make more people happy than just himself. This is different from the beginning because when the gentleman comes to visit he pushes him away and believes in Laissez Faire. Scrooge has now become a happier and more cheerful human being because he has changed his way of living. You can tell this by they all sit around the table eating Christmas dinner. This shows he is not self-contained, lonely old sinner, but a sociable character and because he changed his actions, Tiny Tim did live and Scrooge and his family say God bless Us, Everyone!

The Abandonment of the Jews by David Wyman Essays -- Jewish Holocaust

The Abandonment of the Jews by David Wyman â€Å"To kill the Jews, the Nazis were willing to weaken their capacity to fight the war. The United States and its allies, however, were willing to attempt almost nothing to save them† (Pp 5). If we would have put half as much energy into loving the Jews as Hitler spent hating the Jews we could have made a great difference. Wyman’s book, The Abandonment of the Jews was very intriguing to me. Although I found it very thorough it left me wanting to know how something this horrible could have been allowed to happen. Although Wyman does discuss why more was not done, I am still horrified that this was allowed to happen. Wyman proves that the US should and could have done more to help the dying Jews. I found a reoccurring theme to be that a large problem was that Jewish people had nowhere to go. No one wanted them.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The book begins by giving a brief background into the setting of America at the onset of the war. It details an anti-Semitic America. It also explains most of the anti-Semitism as passive, which ordinarily would do little harm, but during a holocaust crisis became a reason for America’s inaction. The book then jumps right into the emergence of information that became available. The first major report was the Bund report. This estimated the number of victims to already be over 700,000. This report and the ones to follow were hard to believe. The state departments skepticism kept the news from reaching the media for several months. They were convinced that the deportations were for slave labor even though this explanation has huge flaws. As more reports of the mass murders developed they were finally confirmed, 17 months after the first killing began. One of the first steps taken was that seven different Jewish organizations came together to form the Temporary Committee. They decided on 5 steps of action and after obtaining them they dissolved the committee without much accomplished. Some of the steps included press announcements, a national day of mourning, and a meeting with President Roosevelt. The committee wanted action but had prepared no proposals. All they left with from their meeting with FDR was an agreement that the president would warn Germany of war crimes. This was the only meeting FDR granted to Jewish leaders. In December 1942 the UN Declaration was signed by the 3 main allies... ...to be able use this as an example and as a bargaining tool to convince other countries to do the same, but the small effort did not convince anyone.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The War Refugee Board may have saved as many as 200,000 Jews, but it was in no way as effective as it should have been. The two biggest downfalls were that it was not funded properly and it was established too late.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The sad fact is that during the time when humanity needed our help the most we let red tape, fear and greed keep us from helping. Wyman suggests many options that were available to help that would not have harmed our military effort yet we refused to try. We are now stuck with this burden of not knowing. Unfortunately they were not American nor were they British. Even worse they were not only foreigners but also Jews. Wyman suggests this is a huge reason why we were not willing to save them. After reading this book the conclusion to a pageant meant to inform Americans of the Nazi atrocities has stuck with me. The corpse of a people lies on the steps of civilization. Behold it. Here it is! And no voice is heard to cry halt to the slaughter, no government speaks to bid the murder of human millions end(pp91).

Persuasive Advertising Essay

Advertising plays an important role in our diverse, media-saturated world. It surrounds our everyday lives. It is in everything we do, whether we are looking for a number in the phone directory, taking a ride down a road, or watching TV. According to Jamie Beckett’s article in San Francisco Chronicle, â€Å"The average U. S. adult is bombarded by 255 advertisements every day–100 on TV, 60 in magazines, 50 on the radio, and 45 in newspapers† (Beckett). More recently, Advertising Age estimated that the average American sees, hears, or reads more than 5,000 persuasive ads a day, which means that there is almost nowhere we can avoid their presence. Today, ad agencies spend more than $300 billion in the United States and $500 billion worldwide on advertising. Therefore, we can acknowledge that advertising is created in a results-oriented perspective that will increase companies’ and organizations’ profits in the forms of purchases, donations, votes, joinings, etc. This perspective can be achieved by using manipulative and persuasive techniques in advertising that would get people’s attention. These messages appear in many formats–print and electronic, verbal and visual, logical and emotional. As Stuart Hirschberg wrote in his essay â€Å"The Rhetoric of Advertising†, â€Å"The most common manipulative techniques are designed to make consumers want to consume to satisfy deep-seated human drives. In purchasing a certain product, we are offered to create ourselves, our personality, and our relationships through consumption† (Hirschberg 229). Thus, we all become the targets of this form of persuasion that uses pathos, positive images, and/or deceptive language to influence our needs, interests, and decisions. The ad from Martha Stewart Living magazine shows its readers a new Honda CR-V automobile. Also, the company at the same time introduces its new campaign called the â€Å"Leap List† to the magazine’s primary audience that mostly consists of women ages 25 to 45. This campaign encourages people to make a list of the desired things they want to accomplish before the major event happens in their lives, such as the birth of their children. As we see, the ad is mostly aimed at younger consumers of the magazine who are looking for a better appearance of the car and new opportunities in their lives. The company offers to achieve these things with its new CR-V automobiles by using some of the aforementioned influential techniques, such as pathos, visual arts, deceptive claims, and weasel words in order to get viewers’ attention, establish credibility and trust, stimulate desires for the product, and the most important, motivate the audience to buy it. Pathos is the most powerful and effective tool in advertising. As stated by Hirschberg, â€Å"The emotional appeals in ads function exactly the way assumptions about value do in the written arguments. They supply the unstated major premise that supplies a rationale to persuade an audience that a particular product will meet one or another of several different kinds of needs† (Hirschberg 229). Due to the fact that human beings are initially emotional creatures who are more likely to be persuaded by emotions and feelings, and then rational by thinking and reacting, advertisers use both positive and negative emotional appeals to force and influence our minds. One of the ubiquitous emotional appeals in advertising is the use of the â€Å"you† word, which is supposed to address the message to each individual. In its ad, Honda uses the â€Å"you† word five times by making the ad more personalized and stressing consumers’ personal benefits from purchasing the company’s new car. In my opinion, Honda evokes positive as well as negative emotional appeals in its ad. There is an orange, bold title in the ad that says Before I have kids I want to and then there is an illustrated list of ten goals. It includes flying a plane, rock climbing, skyaking, sailing, running a marathon, learning to scuba, mountain-cycling, learning to pick the banjo, marching in a Mardi Gras parade, and taking up archery. As the viewer, I can say that this list catches my eyes because the goals in the ad are interesting and they make me feel enthusiastic and excited. In my opinion, Honda demonstrates our freedom and variety of opportunities that we can achieve by doing the things that we enjoy and like. After reading and seeing these examples, the audience starts to visualize its own desires and the ways of achieving their personal goals. The ad makes us feel motivated and excited about pursuing our dreams and wishes. On the other hand, the company persuades its readers to think and feel guilty of wasting their time and not achieving the things they want the most. That is why the company offers its all-new, 31-mpg-highway Honda CR-V that would deliver the potential buyers to wherever they want to go and whatever things they want to accomplish. In our modern world of technologies and computers, advertisers have recourse to artistic design, computer graphics, high-tech artistry, special effects, digital sounds, and computer animation that can help them to get various kinds of viewers’ attention. A study made by the University of Georgia has found that exposure to visual art in advertising, even if the exposure is fleeting, makes consumers evaluate products more positively. According to Henrik Hagtvedt, the artist and one of the researchers of this study, â€Å"Visual arts have historically been used as a tool for persuasion. It has been used to sell everything from religion to politics to spaghetti sauce to the artist’s image† (Hagtvedt). The same strategy can be observed in the Honda CR-V automobile ad that consists of many bright, positive images and bright colors. The color of the presented car is shiny Metallic Silver that typifies elegance, patience, modesty, and reliability. According to Pat Bertram’s article â€Å"What the Color of Your Car Says About You†, â€Å"People who drive silver vehicles have above average confidence about the course of their lives, and they also have consistent mood† (Bertram). Besides, this color is unisex and suits both females and males. Another visual attention-getting feature in the ad is tinted car windows. What is this for? In my opinion, advertisers make our eyes focused on the car itself rather than the interior or background and they try to accentuate the look of the vehicle. The tinted car implies the feeling of security and privacy that is becoming very popular in the modern society. Also, the direction of the car heading towards the illustrations of the goals from the Leap List emphasizes the company’s statement of helping viewers to achieve their aspirations. Another widespread element of reaching and influencing the audience is the use of weasel words and ambiguous language. Asking personal questions in ads shows us one of the deceptive techniques in language used in advertising. The question used in the Honda CR-V ad leaves its readers wondering about the answer. â€Å"What are you waiting for? † asks the ad, the question that viewers usually cannot answer. The tactic of asking the rhetorical question provokes curiosity and creates interests that make people think, desire, and visualize themselves having the product. Another kind of common deception in ads is the use of weasel words. The frequency of using the weasel words can be observed not only in politics but in advertising as well. According to Hirschberg, â€Å"Of all the techniques advertisers use to influence what people believe and how they spend their money, none is more basic than the use of so-called weasel words that retract the meaning of the words they are next to just as a weasel sucks the meat out of egg† (Hirschberg 232). As the target audience, we repeatedly see, read, or hear such weasel words as helps, free, virtually, like, new, as much as, faster, or better. These ambiguous words allow persuaders to say something without really saying anything and make us believe in the importance of purchasing their products. The ad in Martha Stewart Living magazine states that the company’s new technologically advanced, up-for-almost-anything new Honda CR-V automobile was built to help us check off every last item from our leap lists. By using the word â€Å"helps†, Honda offers a solution and aid to the consumers’ problems, but in reality the company promises nothing really concrete. So the word â€Å"helps† lets the companies escape from its supposed promises. At first sight, advertising seems to be relatively simple in structure, format, and availability, but its content and depth is complex. Hirschberg said, â€Å"Whether ads are presented as sources of information enabling the consumer to make educated choices between products or aim at offering memorable images or witty, thoughtful, or poetic copy, the underlying intent of all advertising is to persuade the specific audience† (Hirschberg 227). After reading â€Å"The Rhetoric of Advertising†, I learned that pathos is a very powerful and influential approach in advertising. I also started to analyze the details used in ads because all of them have different purposes. It is very helpful to know the techniques advertisers use to get our attention as well as the ways they apply the language and visualization. Personally, I started to pay more attention to colors that advertisers use in ads because each of these colors has its own definition and characteristic that can influence our perceptions of the images. As we may observe, advertisers do not waste any inch of the ad space on adding unnecessary information, but they also do not provide all specifics and features about their products. That is why, as the primary audience, we should be more skeptical and questionable of what we see and want to buy. In the ad created by Honda, we can see pathos, bright images, and claims that can attract the potential buyers’ attention. John O’Toole, the former president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, believed that the consumers should be at the center of the process, and that the only kind of language either verbal or nonverbal effectively persuades the consumers as an individual. As discussed earlier, disclosing people’s desires and making the personalized ad makes this Honda ad from Martha Stewart Living magazine more attractive and memorable to the viewers. Advertisers also used the persuasive language that we can observe in the ad in the forms of weasel words and question claims. Overall, I found this ad well made and interesting to analyze because it consists of different influential and persuasive techniques that we can determine after reading Stuart Hirschberg’s essay â€Å"The Rhetoric of Advertising. †

Family Trip Essay

The most memorable vacation ever, was our family trip to Idaho two years ago. We were excited for weeks leading up to our departure from the Memphis International Airport. This was my husbands’ first time to fly. When the day finally came, he was extremely nervous, about the flight. I remember him telling me his stomach was in knots; he must have said I love you 25 times that day. The girls laughed at him all day, because they had flown in the past and knew there was nothing to be nervous about. I told him, that once we were in the air, looking down over the city would be absolutely beautiful. As we boarded the plane we could see the anticipation and excitement built up on his face. We settled into our seats, got our girls settled in, and away we went. From the air the buildings, roadways, and homes looked like a live monopoly board. My husband seemed to calm down and started to enjoy his first flying experience. He and I chatted throughout the flight about how gorgeous everything was from the blue skies. After a few hours and a hectic plane change, we made our much awaited decent in to the great city of Spokane, Washington. When we left Memphis, Tennessee, the temperature was a comfortable 45 degrees on December 19th. As we made our bumpy landing on the runway, the co-pilot announced that it was in the mere teens and the city was mostly snow covered. Coffman 2 We were extremely excited to see my parents which we had not seen in a year. Our family greeted each other with open arms and a few happy tears. My parents hurried to baggage claim ready to load us up and make the snowy ride to Priest River, Idaho. Throughout the drive from Spokane to Priest River, everything was covered in the prettiest, shiny, white snow we had ever seen. The road conditions were so different from what we are accustomed to in the south. The roadways were clear of snow and ice. This made the 100 mile drive very enjoyable. When we made it into Priest River, Idaho, we were surrounded by snowcapped mountains. This town was the prettiest place I’d ever seen. I felt like we were driving through a movie scene. The town had a homey atmosphere with a small grocery store, small auto repair shop, and people clearing sidewalks of snow. When we reached my parents road and the bottom of Moose Mountain, we started the climb up to my parents’ home. As we rounded the last curve on the mountain there sat a nostalgic log home overlooking the glistening Sand Pointe River. While on vacation our favorite tourist attraction was a secluded bed and breakfast that also gave sleigh rides. When we arrived we were greeted with hot coca and popcorn. The lounge area was totally covered in wall mounted wild game, and had a cozy warm fireplace sitting area. As well, there was a ten foot elaborately decorated Christmas tree. We had a great time taking family photographs by the tree. When it was time for the sleigh ride they provided us with heavy wool blankets and off we went. The sleigh was pulled by an amazing team of Belgian horses. It was painted fire engine red with shiny hand carved wooden seats. The trip around that mountain was surreal. Coffman 3 There were many attractions that we enjoyed while in Idaho. I am very thankful for that opportunity and the memories my family made. That vacation is one that we will never forget.