My Paper on New Media (11)

This semester I am taking a writing class to progress to my degree in information technology. In this class we had to write a paper to compare two talks that we given by Elder David A. Bednar, who is a member of the quorum of the twelve apostles in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or otherwise known as the Mormons. These talks were given on the topic of new media. I have included my paper below.

- The IT Dude

Comparing Two Talks

                In this paper I will be Comparing and contrasting two wonderful talks that were given by Elder David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The first was given in May of 2009 and is titled “Things as They Really Are”. The second was given in August on 2014 and is titled “To Sweep the Earth as with a Flood”. The first was addressed at a Church Educational System fireside at Brigham Young University-Idaho. This means that the audience would have been relatively young, in their mid-twenties. The second was given during Education week at Brigham Young University in Provo, meaning that the audience in attendance would have most likely been older in age than the audience of the first.

                Now that we have identified the settings and designated audience of these two talks By Elder Bednar I will describe the topics, similarities, and differences of them. Both talks were given on the topic of modern technologies, entertainments, social media and how we, as Latter Day Saints, should utilize our time while using them. As well as what we should be aware of and ultimately avoid all together. As I was reading these talks the main point that stood out to me over all the rest was how the talk “Things as They Really Are” seemed to resemble Elder Bednar’s apostolic calling as a watchman on a tower giving warning words to those of us below. An example of this in his talk I would be when he said the following speech on virtual reality: “If the adversary cannot entice us to misuse our physical bodies, then one of his most potent tactics is to beguile you and me as embodied spirits to disconnect gradually and physically from things as they really are.” In His Second talk “To Sweep the Earth as with a Flood” Elder Bednar speaks more on things that we should do when we use social media versus things we shouldn't as he did in the first. Similarly an example of this in his later talk would be when he quoted Elder L. Tom Perry saying: “…We invite the young and the old, the adults, the young adults, the youth, and the children everywhere to join with us in this exciting new work by becoming Facebook friends with the missionaries in your area on your own computers and sharing their gospel messages online and by becoming involved in missionary work yourselves.”

                Finally I would like to state that although both of these talks were given at different times, to different audiences, and with different focus points; I felt that they were not so different. Both of these talks were based on similar, if not the same, topics: social media. Both addresses were given to inform the members of the church of the positive and negative uses of social media as both talks mention positive and negative individually. I feel that the reasons for the opposing focuses between the first and the second were due to the timing and the intended audiences.