Thursday, June 18, 2009

wireless forever!

Something that is near and dear to my heart (and many other people's, as I'm told) is my cell phone. Its brand and style are just one reason why I love my cell phone. The other, bigger, reason is all the freedom it affords me. Not only am I not wired down, as I would be with a land line, but I’m not even restricted to one specific (relatively small) geographic location, as I also would be with a land line. Cell phones allow us to do everything one can do with a land line, and then so much more. When was the last time you texted a friend from your cordless phone? Or live in two cities for four years and keep the same phone number all the way through? It is because of reasons like these that youth in Canada (and I would presume many other countries as well) are leading the migration away from landlines.


According to StatsCan, the number of Canadian households that have only a cell phone (and no land line) is eight percent. But when looking only at households comprised of 19 to 34 year-olds we see that over 34 percent have made that change. Obviously this trend will only grow from here. So why is it such a struggle with Canadian wireless providers to have better and cheaper plans? Why are we forced into three year contracts, a system access fee, and other rediculous charges if we want anything beyond a basic voice and text plan?


The times they are a changin'. Unfortunately our providers are not.




Thursday, June 4, 2009

why i even have a blog.

There is really only one reason why I have started up 'the dive'. But first, some story...

I made my Facebook account at the beginning of my first year of university, when the whole network seemed like a little oasis in the vastness of the internet: only university students could join, being validated by our super-important official university e-mail addresses. Over the years of my post-secondary schooling, while studying two of the most traditional degrees within the faculty of Arts & Science, the emerging world of web 2.0 fascinated me.

Four years later I had to get a Twitter account, because my boss asked me to. I had been resisting the Twitter phenomenon for one main reason: just because I'm into all this media stuff, it doesn't mean that I don't have some sort of life unattached from a computer. In fact that's the whole other side of my life- exploring the city and experiencing what Toronto has to offer the average 20-something year-old. Twitter just seemed like something that would suck away any remaining free time after Facebooking time had been accounted for. But now, I tweet.

And thus the digital circle of life just seems more complete with a blog. It's where the social activity of Facebook (the endless amount of events + post-event pictures pushed by promoters from the clubbing district, Church, and the hipster region) and the hyper-interactivity of Twitter can all meld together into the giant blogging extravaganza that is 'the dive'.

So, this is that. No promises made, and we'll see what happens!