Angela Markwith
Staff Writer
In 2002, USF created the well-used student portal USF Connect. Thirteen years later on March 16th 2015, USF made the official switch from USF Connect to a new and improved portal, MyUSF.
The USF Leadership team approved the transition of USF Connect to MyUSF in February 2014, as it was decided that there needed to be a change in both function and format. The project officially started in June of 2014. Continue reading Connect to myUSF
On Sept. 10, emotion poured out of my eyes and ruined my make-up. I was missing New York City’s “Fashion’s Night Out.” I know, lame shame right? But in my defense, it was a day of status updates, tweets and style.com iPhone app alerts that drove my sadness home because I realized just how much I was missing. I’ll be honest: technology got the best of me and I cracked.
Fast-forward 15 hours. After what turned out to be a great evening of West Coast style events, I was enthusiastically uploading a new profile picture and scanning blogs for the best photo coverage of NYC’s night of shopping. Fashion never catches any beauty sleep as it lives in the cyber party-house of social media. Neither does your social image, because you wear your reputation on your sleeve, literally, with your style on and off the net.
I can’t think of a better reason to groom your personal style like you do your Twitter on a daily basis. This Style File relates how social networking is not just found online, but also in your daily adornments.
Four words we all see everyday when navigating “Home” – Facebook “Home,” that is: “What’s on your mind?” Rather it should read, how are you communicating your daily mood? Fashion can do that too. From one day to the next a wardrobe can transform from bold and adventurous to sophisticated and minimal. Let’s log on to two classy USF seniors and check out how they update their mood statuses through their everyday styles.
Aaron Dias- Melim
Aaron’s style shines like one of his many Apple products: functional, hip and smart. Melim said, “If I were to look back at all my tweets and Facebook status updates, I would probably be able to guess very accurately what I would be wearing at that point.” He often pulls inspiration from his family. Melim’s mother was a tailor so he spent much of his childhood playing under sewing machines. With a grunge brother, prepster sister and a father working the lumber yard, his style resonates from many avenues of influence.
Aaron shares three typical looks from his daily life including classroom chic, office mad man and bar black-tie.
Lauren Cromer
Lauren Cromer, back with a fresh face from a semester in Paris, is working on her graphic design major and dresses for success by keeping her style simple, fresh and cute while always evaluating cost per wear. This is one fashionista that styles smart.
“Sometimes I use my outfit to pump me up for the day,” she said. “Get cute and you will feel a lot better throughout the day, no napping!”
Cromer shows off a serene school look, an elegant employee style and some flapper fun.
Editor-in-Chief: Heather Spellacy
Chief Copy-Editor: Burke McSwain
Scene Editor: Tamar Kuyumjian
We live in a frenzy of information, bombarded with the whos, hows, and whats of every Tom, Dick and Harry. Some of the information is superfluous and irritating. However, there are a lot of other facts and formalities that serve to inform, educate, and even inspire an entire society of people. We depend on this information on a daily basis; and as of right now, it’s almost completely free.
Where does all of this free information come from? Simply put: the Internet. Some of it originates from the fingertips of Twitterholics who fit tidbits of information into 140 characters. Some of it develops in greater detail on one of the 800-million-some blogs floating on the net. Some of it is even exposed on the websites of news organizations who give the world a free peep show of information they would charge for in another medium.
With so much information buzzing around like swarm of blabbering bumblebees, another problem has arisen: how much of it can we actually trust? This topic is frequently discussed in news debates, and interestingly enough, comes up often when the notion of paying for online news is brought up. People respond, “Well I would pay for the news if I trusted it.”
To me, this is a completely counterproductive statement. After all, the facts don’t find themselves. How can we expect journalists to produce robust news at robot speed for a salary that decreases everyday and is almost completely dependent on minimal funding from advertisers? The reality is, we can’t.
The Internet created a get-everything-for-free-with-the-click-of-a-button standard that is definitely convenient, applauded by the masses, and also unsustainable—at least in terms of the news industry. The number of people who subscribe to the newspaper is increasingly low. Why would they subscribe? It’s all easily accessible online from the comfort of their homes or on their BlackBerrys while commuting to work.
It’s even sent via email with personalized daily and weekly news feeds. Broadcast news is also vulnerable to the Internet dilemma—the best news clips hit YouTube faster than the words came out of the reporter’s mouth. Any news topic can be spit into a search engine like Google, instantly found, and organized by relativity. It’s just that easy.
The time has come for us all to start making a sound investment in the information we depend on. The question is, what is the tangible value of this information? The Internet completely turned the economic platform of the news industry upside-down, and while this issue has been previously ignored, it’s time to address it.
So, how much are we willing to pay for news? Will we pay per story? Per topic? Will we subscribe to just local news or just politics or sports? Will we care enough to pay for the sensationalized crap that sneaks its way in? This question of the “tangible value” of news is one that we have not had to ask ourselves in a long time. As a journalist, I know my response.
Much like how I pay my 99 cents per song I download from iTunes, I would gladly pay per article that interests me. I would also pay for a subscription to my favorite news websites.
Unfortunately, this news-for-free online quandary does not end with simply asking for a few more nickels and dimes. What it also comes down to is regulating what information gets copied and regurgitated onto other portals of the web. A problem that no industry affected economically by the Internet has seemed to figure out, and one that I certainly wish I had the answer to.
