arvention

[arvention]

            Marketing the products of various international companies has played an integral part of a process we have been calling ‘globalization’. According to Rouse (2007), “Globalization is the tendency of businesses, technologies, or philosophies to spread throughout the world.” In this technologically-advanced era, marketing or promoting products around the world is not anymore a problem. We have the internet as the biggest stream of ideas that can help various companies in promoting and sharing their very own products. This is a big innovation for product promotion.

              According to a study by Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), internet ad revenues hit the historic $20.1 Billion in 2013. This can be a reason why many international companies is trying their luck by promoting their products online. Various innovations on the concept of their ads have been also developed throughout the years. One of these innovations is the use of witty ideas on presenting their product.

            The commercial ad above promotes a camera made by Canon. In this ad, Canon is convincing camera enthusiasts that their company has the greatest technology when it comes to taking a steady shot. The Cheetah, the fastest animal on land, was attached to various equipment to keep it from moving. The Cheetah in the picture can get you without even hitting the top speed (Smith, 2013). They are convincing the consumers that their product can catch a photo even if it is the fastest moving object in the world.

    Works Cited:

  Rouse, M. (2007). Globalization. Retrieved from http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/globalization.

Interactive Advertising Bureau (2013). Internet Ad Revenues At $20.1 Billion Hit Historic High For Half-Year 2013, Up 18% Over Same Time In 2012, According to IAB. Retrieved from http://www.iab.net/about_the_iab/recent_press_releases/press_release_archive/press_release/pr-100913.

Smith, R. (2013). A Cheetah Can Get You Without Hitting Top Speed. Retrieved from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130612-cheetah-speed-hunting-big-cats-animal-science/.

[arvention]

Addicted and I Know It

           In our world today, stories about youth getting addicted to drugs is already a cliché.  That is why I am not going to write about drug addiction in this entry. Instead, I am going to write about something we can all relate to, especially the youth of the 21st century. I am going to talk about a true story – the story of the youth in this technological era.

              For the past few years, different devices like laptops and cellphones are getting cheaper than ever. This made technology even more accessible to most of the people, especially the youth. Today, the youth owned, used and ruled each and every kind of gadgets from a cellphone to a PC. Even a 3 year-old kid knows how to open a tablet and use applications in it even without the supervision of an adult. In line with improving our technology, we also developed a new way to talk to each other. We are all guilty of committing the same kind of addiction – the addiction of using the different gadgets of this high-tech era in conversing with one another. To put it in layman’s term, we are guilty of being hooked to social media. If you are not addicted to social media, then you must be living in a different world.

              For this entry, I am going to use a video produced by my group in a project for a Filipino subject in our school. The video is entitled “Hashtag Lasalle:  Ang Social Media sa Pag-aaral ng mga Lasalyano.” In this documentary, we focused on the causes of Social Media addiction and the effects of this addiction in the academic performances of Lasallians. We interviewed and surveyed different students from different colleges in the university to tell us their side of the story regarding this matter. We asked some university student body officials to tell us the advantages of using social media in communicating with the whole academic community. A professor from the university also gave us the pros and cons of using social media in teaching. We also interviewed a counselor in our school to find ways on how to get rid of this addiction.

              In the video, most of the students agreed on one thing – social media can be a very convenient tool for learning but it can also destroy your academic enthusiasm. One of the most obvious use of social media is communication. Communication, in our modern time, was changed a lot by the internet and social media. Now, we often use social media to communicate than talking to the other person face-to-face. In this internet-driven age, students enjoy doing collaborative projects online. This can be very helpful if you and your group mates live very far from each other. You can use the power of social media to communicate with each other. On the other hand, it can destroy your concentration on the project by tempting you to do other things on the net. This happens to me all the time. I will open Facebook to chat with my group mates about the project, but I will end up browsing my news feed. This is also true whenever I am browsing the internet to do my assignment. I always end up using Facebook and Twitter.

            Back when I was in 1st year high school, I bought my own pocket broadband. Yes, I spent my money to have my own internet connection. I have to reload it every single time just to use it. Back then, I have to save money from my allowance to be able to do my assignments using the internet. I also have to manage my time to do all the things I need because the load for the internet connection is limited. In short, I bought the pocket broadband to help me in my academic life. If you will ask my father regarding the use of social media in academics, he will say that it is very inappropriate and unnecessary. Why? He always claimed that during his time as a student, he did not use any of that social media to plan on group projects. Instead, they always plan their project by talking to each other personally. This gave me the idea that the youth today might be too lazy to plan the project using the traditional way. I think we might be relying too much on the use of these social media to procrastinate our way to our academic endeavors. Yes, I used the word procrastination because it is the trending attitude of the youth today. During the time of our parents, they plan ahead to finish the project on time. On the other hand, we always enjoy our time using social media instead of doing our projects through the help of internet. 

              I might not be addicted to cigarettes, beers and other manly vices, but I have to admit that I am truly addicted to social media and the whole of the internet. We all have to agree and admit to ourselves that all of us have this craving for the internet. A few years ago, I declared that social media is just for bored people in the net and I promised not to be addicted to it. But I ate up all those words and found myself spending a lot of time using it. Maybe the best reason for my addiction is my ��lack of social life’ as stated in the video. Many of us uses social media to express our ideas because of the freedom that it gives. For introverts like me, it gives us the freedom to speak of what we believe in without personally talking to others.

              Addiction to social media is not very harmful, if you know how to control your actions. It is even better than being addicted to cigarettes, liquors and other bad vices. Using the internet and social media also yields positive things, especially in academics, if you will utilize it properly. Knowing your self means knowing all the things about yourself, including the things that you are hooked to. If you are aware of all of your cravings, you also know how to control and deal with it. If you know how to control it, you can say that you are addicted and you know it. 

[arvention]

Mainstream Relationship

            Singing a love song on a beautiful night for a lovely girl. Chopping woods to prove your worth to the king of your princess. Doing each and every detail you need to do just to impress the girl of your dreams. These are the things that a young Filipino man will do just to achieve and be worthy of the sweet ‘yes’ from his cherished girl. These things shows the sincerity and the determination of every man to make his princess the future queen of his family, which means keeping this love alive for a lifetime. In our society today, the young people is exposed to the different technological devices available which makes things easier and faster including courting and maintaining a love relationship. Does this also mean that the young people today takes relationships easier and fast-paced? What effect can it cause if a person have this kind of relationship?

            In this topic, I am going to use two videos from Lloyd Cadena, a Filipino YouTube superstar and comedian, to express my points regarding the mainstream love relationships of young Filipinos nowadays. Lloyd Cadena is a Filipino college student who expresses his ideas by making funny videos about it. He gives his thoughts in a funny way but at the same time reflects the reality in our society.

            LC Learns, the video series of the YouTube sensation Lloyd Cadena, features many topics which depicts the different hot issues across the archipelago. This video series also serve as a channel of understanding within the young community of netizens, wherein several videos talk about affection in the context of the youth. I referred to the series as a ‘channel of understanding’ because many young Filipinos can react and relate to the ideas that Lloyd is expressing in his influential videos. These reasons gave me the idea to use his videos to present my own thoughts on how relationships work on this technology-driven society of the contemporary Filipinos.

            In the first video, he expressed his ideas regarding ‘mutual understanding’. In my own context, this term is created to express a feeling before ‘love’. It is a concept which makes the couple act and feel like ‘in love’ and in a relationship without a commitment to stay loyal to each other. This somehow gives me the notion that the youth today, well most of us, does not take love relationships seriously.

            In the second video, he expressed different steps on how to make a relationship last, but I will use some of his points to show the norms of the present-day relationships as we all know it. In this video, he said that a relationship can get affected by just forgetting to text ‘good night’ or ‘good morning’ to their partner. This is alarmingly immature but at the same time absolutely true in our present-day society. I have never really experienced it but I have seen many relationships crumble in my very own eyes because of the ‘immature communication’ problems that hinder the growth of affection. Another important point of this video is regarding the privacy problems. I have witnessed many relationship problems being exposed to the world using different social media which is wrong if we will ask the conservative citizen and the etiquette experts. This exposure in privacy can cause a larger friction between the lovers that will not solve the problem. Another ‘truth’ in this video is the negative attraction of the youth towards premarital sex which is against the teachings of the major religion in the Philippines – Roman Catholicism. In my own opinion, this ‘reality’ gives the biggest gap between the meaning of love today from the notion of love from the ‘conservative’ generation of Filipinos. This is a big problem in our morality that should be addressed by the whole community.

            In today’s meaning of relationship, we may infer that some young people takes relationships faster than before. Some of them do not realize that this is a step to a commitment that will soon give birth to a constitutional responsibility – to start a new family that will contribute to national growth. The kind of relationship discussed above – immature, open, fast-paced and radical – is the kind of mainstream relationship that is really present today as far as I am concerned. If you have this kind of notion of relationship, you should be more mature and concerned about the things around you including your future. It is a proven fact that love relationships inflict an effect –whether positive or negative – to a person’s future. With this being said, we should always be mindful of all the things that we will do in a relationship. Love your partner, but love yourself and your future better.

[arvention]

Mail Metro App!

When we were asked to write about a specific application used in various computers today, the first software that flashed into my mind was the remarkable Mail metro app equipped to the much anticipated Windows 8.1. The much awaited updated version of Windows 8 is furnished with a more powerful, more flexible, and more stable Mail metro app and the geniuses behind this helpful application is our geek buddies from Microsoft, the provider of the most well-known operating systems in the world. The incredible updates of this application made me realized that it is now capable of showing its ‘true superiority in performance’ that was once stored as its potential. This superiority in performance convinced me to feature this application as my first media log in this blog.

In this Mail metro app, you can have all of your email messages in one single click. It updates itself every time if you are connected to a network. Alongside this wonderful feature, there are also other things that the Mail metro app can offer you. This astonishing app, working hand in hand with the updates provided in Windows 8.1, provides you numerous remarkable features like toast notification and live tiles.

Toast notification pops up like a toast bread whenever you receive an email from any of your addresses while you are using other applications in your device. This is very much helpful to the people who is waiting an important email from somebody while burning that waiting time using their device’s other applications. This feature is also helpful for the effective communication between different people or organization using email messages. An obvious example is the communication between the academe and the students. With this feature, the user cannot miss a single school announcement because the app updates itself from time to time and notify the user whenever an email arrives.

The other feature that the Mail app provides is the use of live tiles. With this live tile, you can see the unread emails from your metro start menu. This also helps you to monitor the number of emails that you have not read yet. This live tiles also provide a quick view of an excerpt of an unread email message shown in your metro start menu.

This app, available in all devices running Windows 8 and 8.1, automatically saves all the email messages that your addresses receive. This can help you in accessing some of the important emails even when you are not connected to any networks.

Above all, I can say that the Mail Metro App of Windows 8.1 has truly revealed its true form as a good one-stop application for email messaging after its major update. It is so far the best tool that provides the 'most powerful' email service because of its massive productivity and astonishing features.