Montrease Cottle

Hi Montresase,

First of all, I’m so sorry that you had to go through that experience! I agree with many of your points about how there are a lot of factors that aren’t taken into consideration when it comes to determining what makes a person healthy, even though they should be. It’s also very heartbreaking to think that the very people who are supposed to support and guide people into a healthy lifestyle are the very ones that carry these biases, especially towards people of color. That being said, I think your innovation would have a lot of potential to provide a more accurate diagnosis based on a wholistic background and not just one or two insights such as weight or height. Echoing Arpana’s comment, it could also track family history, preexisting conditions, workout habits, etc. In addition, maybe it could offer tools, resources, and tips on fitness plans based on each individuals needs and fitness goals.

I’m not going to lie, when I saw that Facebook and Instagram went down twice in one week, some shady stuff was going down. To me when an app crashed, I always think of the worst, especially if it’s for longer than an hour. A million questions float around in my head, and I always think that this is when these people are stealing our information and using it for something else. When both apps went down on Monday, I kind of liked not going on my phone every minute of the day. I got so much work done that needed to be done because I didn’t have access to these apps. I’m curious to see if this will happen again in the near future and see how it all goes down.

Such a great read!

Hi Montrease,

Such a timely topic I must say! I remember saying to two of my coworkers this past Monday “I think Facebook may be down” because my feed wouldn’t refresh after multiple attempts. Like you, I wasn’t affected by this crash due to the laundry list of items I had to keep me occupied. It was astonishing to see the news coverage this outage received – kind of makes you think where society is going and how dependent on and consumed people are with social media networks.

As you pointed out, it was also convenient that the next day a whistleblower came forward to Congress. Personally, I didn’t follow this story so I don’t know what was said or the evidence and claims that were brought forward. It seems like Facebook is receiving a lot of negative publicity lately – but seems like they have a loyal user base.

Hi Montrease, great article!

What a great topic to cover! It was a crazy week, and honestly, I was shocked that this story was covered so heavily. I know I should not have been surprised, but a part of me was questioning whether we have more significant problems?
When the app first crashed, I thought it was my poor wifi, but when I saw on other socials that everyone else was having problems with Facebook & Instagram, I didn’t know what to think. Although Instagram is a great app, and so is its parent company Facebook, I feel both apps are highly toxic in this current time. They amplify the need to be perfect and have this ideal life despite half of it not being honest or true.
While the outage was difficult, I thought it brought some perspective to people to see that these social media applications are not everything. If they were to go away today, would we be happy with who we are at our core?

Hi Montrease,

I admittedly didn’t realize until later in the evening that there was in fact an outage (I attributed my social troubles to really poor Comcast internet 😉 ) I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed the ensuing memes that resulted from this. I personally don’t think it was the worst thing that could happen (I know, easy for me to say.. I didn’t take a $6B loss – sorry Mr. Zuckerberg). But when I receive the alert on my phone showing how many hours a day I spend on my phone with the channel breakdown, I’m actually in disbelief! How can I possibly complain about juggling a full time job, grad school, 2 kids + their robust extracurricular schedules and yet still find an average of 8 HOURS per day scrolling? If only I was able to delete those social apps, I can’t imagine how much extra time I’d have on my hands to invest in other things – most importantly, myself! It was certainly a learning moment for me.

I agree. I feel the same way, until there’s a problem.

Interesting read Montrease.

I for one definitely see the moral hazard and privacy violations that most companies commit when it comes to the accumulating, analyzing, and selling of consumers information and data. Which in turn unfortunately leads to the very real threats of hacking and identity stealing. However, like Demi eluded to, I for one do not mind the aspect of creating online profiles for myself, and think that targeted ads can be quite helpful at times. I also feel more and more comfortable with how companies and our government are approaching the collection and selling of data, making it harder for those to hack. I believe there will always be a place for it, and with how apple just rolled out their newest software functionalities of two factor authentications and “ask app not to track data” options I believe we are headed to the right area when it comes to personal data.