I’m going to be honest. Coming into this research paper I didn’t really care about the topic I had chosen. I had heard that it had to be somewhere between 8 and 10 pages and I thought, 10 pages? I don’t know if I can write about anything for 10 pages. So I picked something that sounded relatively interesting that I had thought I could possibly come close to that. It wasn’t until I had actually begun to write my paper that I developed a real interest in what I was writing about.
It really is crazy to me the way in which technology affects today’s society, and to think that we can now meet our potential soul mates through an online dating service completely baffles me. As I was writing my research essay, I was trying to come up with as many crazy things that technology has affected today to help support my ideas throughout my paper. As I continued to write, I couldn’t think of anything that technology HASN’T affected. I had problems coming up with just one; one that would stand out as more absurd beyond the rest.
Some may still ask why I chose dating. Why that from everything to choose from, that was my choice. And I’m not real sure myself. I have always thought that the idea myself was somewhat crazy, that the thought of meeting a completely random person through a computer and finding compatibility just seemed so slim to me. So I guess by picking this topic, I wanted to try and make myself more open minded about the idea and maybe totally change my opinion on it overall.
One of the main problems I’ve always had while writing papers, is to properly support my sources and own opinions, and by doing it well. As I used to just site my sources and do my best to explain them, didn’t always make my paper “flow.” It seemed like I was doing just that. Finding a source, one that fit, and writing in different words, my own words, what the source had clearly already said itself.
Initially, my first thought on a “topic” was to sort of combine two different ideas. I was going to try to research and explain how social networking has affecting dating, while at the same time, showing how it affects people’s social skills. However, while explaining how social networking can be seen as a form of laziness, and losing “people skills” and social skills along with that laziness, technology has been a primary factor in that because more often than not, what we find ourselves preoccupying our time with wants rather than needs.
I felt that bringing up the importance of fraud with Internet dating was a big deal. I believe it raises a lot of issues, and for those that have a negative opinion on Internet dating, I feel it’s that, that makes them so eerie about it. That whole idea started one night when I was watching “To Catch A Predator” on MSNBC, a show where an young girl plays along with guys over the age of 18 to see if they will follow through with meeting this girl in person. When the guy shows up at the girls’ house, its there where they find out it’s a setup, and are arrested because they were clearly aware of the age of the young girl. It just makes you wonder how many times this happens, when it’s real and not a television show setup.
Finding and citing sources was a difficult challenge for me throughout my research essay. I found it difficult to find sources that supported the same ideas that I did. Some would help to prove one of my points while at the same time completely disagreeing with another. It was then that I realized that not all of my sources had to fully agree with everything I was trying to say and that by finding a source that did just the opposite and fully disagreed with my opinion was just as easy to use as an example to support my ideas.
For whatever someone feels towards online dating services, there are legitimate reasons behind each side. A main reason, and sometimes the only reason for why people that feel negative towards he issue, as I’ve already stated, is because of the fraud issue; the fact that you can’t be 100% positive that the person you are meeting is exactly who they say they are, or some creep who has nothing better to do with his time. On the other hand, someone who thinks it’s a good idea could have reasoning such as time. Someone that has no free time except for the hour they have to themselves when work is over and the kids are in bed, doesn’t necessarily have that extra time that some others do.
Throughout the semester, as we read three different pieces relating to technology, it helped me to remember back to what the writers of those pieces’ opinions on the forms of technology are that allow these types of advancements to take place, and to compare my own thoughts with theirs. Although I didn’t always agree, it helped to show me differently points of view that can be taken on with similar issues.
When our class met in small groups to talk over and give advice on one another’s papers, it proved very helpful to me. While revising my papers, I always notice that when things make sense to me, they don’t always make sense to others. So to see what my classmates did and didn’t understand helped me out a lot. It showed me what I needed to improve on that I, myself wouldn’t have seen otherwise. There were several times in my paper when students would either comment on that I didn’t give sufficient information to back up my opinions, or that I didn’t add in my own opinion enough with the sources I would use. That has also been one of my biggest challenges. To find a balance somewhere in the middle, where I have just enough sources to support my opinions and just enough opinions backing up my sources.
I believe that my research on this essay was successful. Not successful in the fact that I put down onto paper everything I discovered, but successful because of the fact that my opinion on online dating, did in fact, change. I didn’t go into this research topic expecting to come away from it with a life changing experience, however, I didn’t exactly expect it to change my whole outlook on the issue, as it did either.