For Andy Hall, senior English major, having a laptop in class is helpful because he uses it to look up information that professors suggest.

For Andy Hall, senior English major, having a laptop in class is helpful because he uses it to look up information that professors suggest.

“I don’t find it necessary for classes, however, I like to use it for classes because my hands hurt when I write everything out in pen when the professors talk really fast,” Hall said.

But students who do not use laptops in class have different views on the topic.

“If it helps them in class, that’s good for them and if they’re just getting on Facebook instead of paying attention, it’s their money,” said Brenna Fulton, senior theater major.

Kim Swain, junior secondary English education major, said that laptops in class are distracting and people often abuse the privilege by using sites like Facebook or by checking their emails.

“If they want to use it for note taking because that could be a quicker way of getting down what they need as opposed to writing that’s fine,” Swain said. “Anything other than that is unnecessary in my opinion,” Swain said.

Though Hall usually uses his laptop in class, he said that he does sometimes get on Facebook during class.

“I am ashamed when I use it during classes… Facebooking in class is like texting on your cell phone,” Hall said. “It is not focusing on the professor’s lecture. That’s incredibly rude”

Hall said that laptops are handy for taking notes, and they are good for researching information, but they can become addicting.

“Laptops can interfere with professors’ lectures and other people’s learning just like cell phones going off or people texting during classes,” Hall said.

Megan Koranda, graduate teaching assistant for psychology, only has one student that uses a laptop in class.

“It depends on the student – if they want to get the information down they can do it faster,” Koranda said. “Other students might just be taking (it) as a general education class and get bored and bring it to play games in class,” Koranda said.

Koranda said that laptops in the classroom can be helpful, but she has her own classroom policy for students with laptops.

“I ask students to sit towards the back because they can be distracting for other students,” Koranda said.

Richard Schrock, professor of biology, said that he only has a few students that use laptops.

“During class, when I glance over… it’s hard to know if they’re actually taking notes,” Schrock said.

Schrock also allows electronic dictionaries to be used in his classes, but this is becoming an issue because the dictionaries are now on cell phones.

“This merging of technologies has made it difficult for uses in class, but I just have to stay on top of it,” Schrock said.

Schrock said that convenience has replaced learning and people think they can simply look up information online now.

“People say they’re the way of the future – oh no, they’re not,” Schrock said. “If you want to learn less, go that way, but it’s not cheaper or more economic. The technology is very short lived,” Schrock said.

Beth Edmonds

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Emporia State athletic fans have an opportunity to show their school spirit in the next two months. Both Topeka and Emporia Subway stores have partnered with Emporia State and Washburn University to present the Subway Facebook Face-off. The rules for competition are simple enough. The school who has the most followers on their athletic department Facebook page wins the contest.

The winning school will have the privilege of seeing their alumni director put a pie in the face of the losing school’s alumni director at halftime of the men’s game between the Hornets and the Ichabods on Jan. 15. Subway is also giving away a $10 gift card to a student who likes both the ESU athletic page and the local Subway page. A $100 gift card will be presented to a fan of each school during the final week of the contest. To enter, just click “LIKE” on the ESU Athletics Facebook page.

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Steven Stanek

Once in a while, there is a movie that defines what a generation is all about. For our generation, that movie is “The Social Network,” which is one of the most defining movies of the year, and possibly of the decade.

“The Social Network” is about the worldwide Internet sensation known as Facebook, which is used by almost everyone in our day and age, but the movie is not complete by letting us know who created it. The man with the plan is Mark Zuckerberg, a strong performance played by Jesse Eisenberg.

Zuckerberg is a Harvard student, techno geek, and seems to speak in a language of his own, which would be defined as computer talk, and is now the youngest billionaire in the world. He came up with the brilliant idea of social networking for college students everywhere in order for people to meet new people. But was the idea truly his?

Throughout the movie, we see him struggle to keep his idea alive while being sued by a few fraternity students who claim it was their idea first. Along with that, we view how his best friend and co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield, also sued him.

The movie is all about college students, but these students do not speak like college students. They sound like actual adults dealing with huge problems. What enhances it even more is how each of the actors builds up so much intensity from each other. Every actor in the movie is pitch-perfect and keeps their chemistry strong, which is really hard to see in a movie these days.

We can thank director David Fincher for using his vision to wow audience members about what went behind the social networking phenomenon. The movie does not follow a standard story structure. The movie is viewed with the two trials of Zuckerberg being sued embedded inside the background of what went down creating Facebook.

Aaron Sorkin, the writer of the screenplay, must really be happy to see what the movie has become. He must have known that Fincher was the perfect choice to direct his script. Speaking of which, the script features words that can be described as potent poetrythat comes out of these characters. Only some of these characters can understand what they’re talking about and it’s amazing to see how some of them actually understand each other.

“The Social Network” is truly one of the year’s best movies and one of the best movies to come out in recent time. It is easy to compare this generation movie to a movie, such as “Citizen Kane.” It can also be expected that the movie will get some high Oscar consideration with its tensely shot direction and superb performances from its actors. For anyone who is curious to see how this phenomenon came to life and see whom the creators were, this dark and tense biography is definitely a MUST-SEE.

Steven Stanek

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Photo illustration by Alissa Miller.

A study done over the summer by researchers at Northwestern University found no link between the time spent on social networking sites and grades. Approximately 1,000 first-year students were surveyed for the study where no effect was established.

This study published in the latest issue of the “Information, Communication, & Society” magazine rejected other studies done prior to July 2010.

The average time spent on Facebook and other social networking sites by 10 interviewed Emporia State students was one hour. These students felt that their grades have either not changed or were better with the use of Facebook.

“Facebook helped me pass classes at K-State – my friend helped me with my grammar,” said Jackie Denton, junior marketing and business major.

First-year ESU students that were interviewed spent an average time of one to three hours a day on Facebook. None saw changes in their grades or study habits.

Surveyed second- to fourth-year students spent less time on Facebook on average but again saw no change to their grades regardless of time spent.

Overall, the interviewed ESU students also found no link between Facebook and grades. They saw Facebook as way to stay in touch with friends and teachers, get information regarding homework and connect with fellow classmates for help.

Director of the Office of Professional Education Services Sue Peterson noticed a different correlation between social networking sites and academic performance.

“It does affect professional performance, not necessarily the grades or GPA,” Peterson said.

She did not see the direct link of time spent on social networking sites to lower grades, but relayed stories of situations in which Facebook had led to lower grades due to content on the pages.

Psychology Department Graduate Assistant Megan Koranda also saw a different correlation of Facebook use to grades. Koranda believed social networking sites such as Facebook were great communication tools that could correlate to grades.

“With all the network sites that everyone is sharing, it could be a situation that it could be sharing too much information,” Koranda said. These social networking sites impact students with their communication and access to information that could ultimately affect their grades.

The 2010 study referenced the results of a 2009 study done by researchers at Ohio State University. Researchers at Ohio found that Facebook use directly led to lower grades in students.

When a researchers later went over the data of the 2009 study it was found that was not enough information to determine if that conclusion was true.

A commenter on the 2010 study felt that students used Facebook and other social networking sites as a diversion. But with this diversion came a connection to other classmates and discussion that led to more comfort in academic settings.

Liz Coffey

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We are a generation of electricity junkies.
Every time I go into the library, I see at least a few people surfing Facebook, writing messages to their friends and stalking for potential ones. I see people reading news and playing games online. Even today before writing this article, I took a test online.
The internet is all around us and can be incorporated in nearly everything we do. Our generation will “Google” something before they will use a book to research it. Hell, even the capitol of our state was named Google for a month.
And, as with any new dominant form of media, it has changed our view of the world. Our use of the Internet has shaped our generation into something quite different than any before. The Internet has made us lazier, more prone to distraction and more self-absorbed.
It should be remembered that the Internet has affected more than our generation, but ours is the one that has latched onto and revolutionized it. Younger generations will be the same, but they may even have their own technological advancement that trumps ours.
To analyze the importance of the Internet to society, we first have to look at the past. Marshall McLuhan was an English professor at the University of Toronto who came up with the theory of media ecology.
Media ecology is the idea that all of human history is divided into four ages, or epochs, that are determined by what is the dominant medium is the time. The dominant media then affects how we view the world. He coined the term, “the medium is the message” to sum this idea up.
The four ages are the tribal age, the literate age, the print age and the electronic age. The according dominant mediums of the ages were acoustic music, written word for the few, print word for the masses and finally radio and television.
McLuhan died before the debut of the Internet, so we can only guess what he would have thought of it. Some who have studied his work would say the internet would create a new age and others would lump it into the electronic age.

I personally think that while the internet isn’t the dawn of a new age, it is a stepping stone between two. We are, at the very least, exiting the electronic age and entering the digital age.
So what does that mean? To me, it shows a dangerous future. McLuhan himself said that the electronic age is a part of society’s push to go back to the tribal age, saying that we have become a global village. This is because of the instant communication available to us allows us to communicate across the globe before you could even hand write it.
What it really has done is allowed us total personalization to a completely unnecessary degree. It has increased our overall inflated idea of individuality to make us narcissistic. This is evident by looking at most of our peers’ Facebook pages and at every single old abandoned MySpace page.
The very nature of the internet tends to make us flighty and unfocused. It isn’t very easy to concentrate on writing or researching when your favorite tower defense game or any number of random YouTube clips is just a click away. And that ease also leads to procrastination, a disease that plagues us college students all of the time.
If we keep going on this road, we will only become more and more absorbed into the digital world. We already text things to people who are with us in the room, how long will it be before we text message someone instead of physically talking to them all of the time? Our drive for closeness to others only leads us to go through the easiest possible route, which is a path of depersonalization.
So perhaps the next time you’re checking your Facebook, maybe you’ll think to put your face in a book instead.

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In a crowd of several hundred, nearly all of the students had a Facebook account. But what worried Janet Judge, collegiate sports lawyer, was the content of each student’s page.

“Anything that (students) put up on the internet is no longer theirs,” Judge said. “(Students) have to think about the implications of putting things up.”

Judge delivered the speech “Developing your personal brand: The Power of Facebook” on Monday to an audience that was mostly comprised of student-athletes at Emporia State.

“The majority of things that I said about student athletes apply across the board,”
Judge said. “The same thing about being careful about the kind of pictures that you are posting and the kind of things that you are writing, these are all important things.”

Her focus was how student-athletes represent themselves and their universities.

“When you mess up, the headlines are that you play on a certain team and that’s what people remember,” Judge said.

Judge discussed hazing, social networks and alcohol as a representative of the NCAA. She has presented at 100 schools in the last two years on a grant from the NCAA.

“She was really informative and she made things known that you wouldn’t necessarily know was happening online or on Facebook,” said Loryn Zoglmann, sophomore elementary education major and member of the Stingers. “If you aren’t a student athlete, I think it all still applies to you.

“You don’t want people to know things or see pictures of you that aren’t flattering. And even people who aren’t student athletes get the shirts that represent their school and if they are out doing things, they wouldn’t want their school to have a bad name because of it.”

According to an Alfred University study on hazing that Judge presented, one in five student-athletes surveyed had been subjected to illegal hazing, two in five student-athletes consumed alcohol on recruiting visits and it is estimated that 250,000 student athletes were hazed in the survey year.

While hazing is illegal in every state, Judge said it still happens. However, students only get caught if they document the events with photos and put them online.

“I thought that she would be a good candidate to come and talk to our campus because Facebook and sexting is new and cutting edge,” said Carmen Leeds, associate athletic director. “We wanted to educate the students about it.”

Sexting was also a topic that Judge brought up because the consequences of sending explicit texts and revealing photos to others can be just as damaging posting photos online. Things sent through text message can be posted online just as easily.

One thing that Judge was adamant about was the need for students to pay attention to who is viewing their pages on social networking sites. She said that with the new privacy settings on Facebook, students may need to reset their privacy settings and should always keep them on “Only Friends.”

“A lot of people see what’s on Facebook and they don’t even realize (that it’s bad),” Leeds said. “We want students to be smart so that they could get a job one day and not have anything come back to haunt them.”

Judge used examples of students from other schools who have had consequences for things that were posted online including photos and twitter statuses.

“There were a bunch of football players who were waiting for their coach for a team meeting,” she said. “One of the players was disgruntled and got on his twitter account and wrote ‘I wonder why my own coach can’t show up on time to his own team meeting.’”

“His coach opens up the newspaper the next morning and on the front page of the sports section is that tweet with his picture. Nobody on the Texas Tech football team has a Twitter account anymore.”

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