Just Some Final Thoughts:

    The day has arrived my internet friends, the final blog post. I hope this blog has peaked someone’s interest somewhere out there in the vast internet world. Today for the final post I want to spot some of the trends I see happening around me every day. I have to give it to Cairncross, she hit a lot of them spot on. But as we know the world of technology is changing and transforming faster and faster every day and there was no way Cairncross could have predicted some of the trends that are prevalent in our world today.

 One of the main trends I have noticed is the reliance of the internet as an online worldwide market place, for EVERYTHING. These online behemoths have grown to become as relevant if not more than brick and mortar business like Target and Walmart. Take Amazon for example you can now have your groceries delivered to you within the hour “It describes a drone that will deliver packages to customers based on GPS data from their smart phone, within 30 minutes of placing an order”.

    This trend of almost total reliance on the internet to complete everyday tasks is the most interesting factor of how technology has formed society in the past few years. As mentioned a few weeks ago in a class discussion board we all talked about just how reliant we are on our cellphones to go about our everyday lives. We need them to get directions, call an Uber, check our bank account to see if we have enough money to even go out that night, and to text our friends and make sure our plans are still on.

   This to me is the trend that Cairncross missed, and how could she have known?  That this is what our world would have become? A place where the lines between technology and man are so closely intertwined that it is sometimes hard to see where one ends and the other beings. Who would have thought twenty years ago that coding would have been taught in high school classrooms? Or that celebrities would be created on the internet? In this age of ever changing norms for how we go about our day to day lives I think it is important to carry with us Cairncross's spirit of being a trend spotter. We must stay on our toes, and be on the lookout for the next big thing. Who knows maybe Myspace will make a comeback.

    That is all my internet friends, until we blog again, stay curious.

Work Cited:

thestar.com. (2017). Amazon celebrates 20 years: How the online giant has changed the retail world | Toronto Star. [online] Available at: https://www.thestar.com/business/2015/07/15/amazon-celebrates-20-years-how-the-online-giant-has-changed-the-retail-world.html [Accessed 24 Jul. 2017].

Instagram Models

  Hello internet friends! Today I wanted to examine one trend I believe Cairncross never saw coming was the rise of the actual trendsetter. You know who I’m talking about, the Instagram “models” we have all come to worship. The ones who have 300k followers are aren’t really sure why but for some reason that absurd number of followers makes them some sort of celebrity to us. We devour every word they say in their lengthy captions, we obsessed over finding out where they got that shirt, we spend hundreds of dollars ordering that Fit Tea they promote.

     Where did this internet celebrity come from? How did these Trendsetters become so influential in our society? I believe Cairncross missed this point because perhaps she never realized just how influenced we would be by the internet. Perhaps she never thought that we would get to a point that celebrities are no longer movie starts but YouTube stars. In the Social Media Landscape: Performing Citizenship Online it is said that: early studies of the internet often conceptualized a ‘virtual world’ as separate from a ‘real life’.

   I believe this rise of the Instagram celebrity is due to the fact that to many the internet is no longer just that virtual world, it is reality. How could it not be? People spend their entire days staring at their brightly lit up screens. Eventually the people within those screens have become what is real, they are to me at least the perfect manifestation of what everyone wants to be. With their perfectly white teeth and waist trainers these Instagram models project to women (and men) across the globe the image of this perfect being. And since the internet is such a large part of our lives now we see these people as being reality, they are real to us. We worship them, aspire to be them. What we forget is the hours of Photoshop and tweaking that goes into each and every picture and video they post. These girls are not rolling out of bed looking like this- even if their caption is “Woke up like this”.

    I think Cairncross missed the rise of the Instagram models as trendsetter because she saw the internet as a virtual reality. She didn’t see that one day it would become such a huge party of people’s lives that the internet is now the reality people live in. Is it the best reality? Probably not. Should you but every waist trainer and Fit Tea that pops up on your timeline? Of course not. Yes, these women are trendsetters but we must not forget that they are not our reality. People don’t go walking around looking the way they do in Instagram photos all day. Stay real ladies.

Work Cited:

Haynes, N. (2016). The social media landscape: Performing citizenship online. In Social Media in Northern Chile (pp. 39-62). London: UCL Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1g69xv2.6