Media Law and Lit

This will be the last entry in my blog for the class, and I believe it has been very helpful for me to do.  While it has taught me many things, I believe the most important part is how it has given me a new reference point for media, and how people consume it.  This blog has been my opinion, and I think that has been obvious and good.  For this reason, I believe that everyone can be, and to some extent is, a blogger themselves.  While they may not have a weekly blog where the write down all their thoughts and opinions, the have a social media presence, or platform at work, or discussions with family, or some form of discourse that they share with others that reflect their beliefs and opinions.  That is good, but I think there is an art to it, and that art is dying out.  Less and less people seem to want to hear others' opinions, but want to make sure there opinion is heard by everyone.  As a media and communications student, this worries me for the future.  I'm tired of ha

For the past couple months, and really the last three years but this is just the newest thing, the mainstream news outlets have been showing 24 hour coverage of the Trump-Ukraine hearings.  This started when an unnamed whistleblower, now known but not confirmed as Eric Ciaramella, leaked information regarding President Trump and a conversation he had with representatives from Ukraine.  This sparked the latest in a long line of impeachment queries that have been launched against Trump since even before he was sworn in as president; and, as the evidence has been flushed out, it now seems that Ciaramella never had any firsthand knowledge of the claimed incident.  While this is a bad example, it is an example nonetheless of whistleblowing: the act of alerting the masses and news media of wrongdoing by an official or their administration.  Chelsea Maning, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Ellsberg are names that generally come to mind when people talk about whistleblowing.  These are people

We are living in a world where people prefer safety over privacy, or at least think they do.  Many plots from major blockbuster movies over the past couple of years have revolved around this subject, and the dangers of what happens when people give up their liberties to feel safe.  Google, Facebook, Twitter, and pretty much any big tech company you can think of have been involved in privacy scandals over the last few years, but they have gotten little to no repercussions for it.  Most of all, here in the U.S., our government has taken surveillance to a whole new level, with drones, satellites, cameras, and even our own phones being used to watch our every move.  As we have learned in class, restrictions of privacy are rarely, if ever, a good thing.  But, people today have done something that the people in the past never did when it came to their privacy: they are giving it up willingly.  While these people may not say they give their privacy away if you ask them, but, when you exa

In class this week, we are researching and presenting on different theories and ideas as it applies to people's perspectives.  I am researching confirmation bias, and I think there is no better place to research this than in America right now.  First, confirmation bias is the idea that people will look for facts that support their own biases when researching a topic.  Take gun control for example.  Two different people may look at the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School form two years ago, but come up with two totally different conclusions based on the biases they had going into their research.  I think an example like this, which was very prevalent in the weeks after the shooting, is the perfect example of confirmation bias, and America's current thought process as a whole.  It seems like everyone is playing into their confirmation bias in today's culture, instead of actively trying to understand all points of view.  People today are too worried about being ri

  T here is no denying the impact social media has had on thew world over the last decade.  Facebook has dominated the industry, Twitter has gone from a niche for friends to use to a news platform, and Instagram has become a career for some people.  But, with all the benefits social media brings, it comes with a fairly big amount of detriments.  First, the rise of social media has made people more comfortable with giving out private information.  As we learned in class, and as America has seen over the past couple of years with the Facebook privacy scandal, social media businesses are just that: businesses.  Their main goal is to make money, and they do so through some fairly suspicious ways.  Social media platforms, like Facebook, sell information to third parties, like Cambridge Analytica, in order to make money.  These companies then go and use the information to target things such as ads and websites to these people out of nowhere.  The joke of "I talked about buying shoes a

  In class, we have gone over Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations and Ideas, and attempted to plug things into the graph to see its trend.  For this blog, I will be using Drones, and seeing their trends as related to what we have learned in class.  For the graph, there are 5 main parts: Exploratory, Uptake/Ascent, Tipping Point, Saturation, and Laggards.  Exploratory holds the pioneers or inventors of the product, and says that only people who invented it or use it for a specialized field will have need for it.  The Uptake/Ascent category holds the Early Adopters, who are the people that saw the benefit of the product or idea earlier than most.  The Tipping Point is the point where the product has been accepted as necessary in society, and many people have one or are planning to get one.  The saturation line shows how as time goes on, and more people buy the product or accept the idea, it becomes more and more assumed that everyone will have one.  Finally, the laggards are people who

As we have talked in class this year about the First Amendment, we have gone over all the different aspects of it, and why they are each individually important.  This week, we have gone over the Eight Values of Free Expression, which are all detailed in the link below, and all cover different aspects of why free expression is essential to a functioning society.  The one that stuck out to me most, and the one I believe is most important, is the idea of Promote Tolerance.  I believe the freedom of speech is the bedrock on which the American Experiment was laid, and without it we would not have lasted as long as we have.  The idea of Promote Tolerance is the idea that the First Amendment protects all speech that doesn't incite action, even speech that we don't like.  The idea of the government making rules on regulating what we can and can't say seems blatantly wrong to me, and to virtually all Americans, but the rest of the world is beginning to disagree with that.  More an

  Over this past weekend, one of the most anticipated movies of the year, Joker , arrived in theaters.  Met with a staggeringly good reception by its audiences, as it is currently sitting at a 9/10 and 90% on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes respectively, as well as early calls for leading star Joaquin Phoenix to receive an Oscar for his work, it seems like Joker should be the media's favorite thing to talk about for a few weeks.  Now, while it is seemingly one of the main points the media has been talking about, it has not been for the reason many would assume.  While there are some articles analyzing the movie and the work    the cast and crew put into it, the majority of the articles put out on the movie are ones that speak of the danger it poses to society.  How a movie in and of itself poses a threat to society, I haven't the slightest clue, but the media seems to think it knows something that the audience who went to see the movie doesn't.  In mine, and every other movi

  For class this past week, we were divided up into groups and each presented on a form of technology that has changed or helped progress communication.  I chose the Personal Computer.  As I researched all the history of the personal computer, I was reminded how far we've come in the advancement of technology over the past half a century.  People from my generation, myself included, take the fact that we have access to computers and the internet whenever we want it for granted, and doing this research presentation really reminded me of that.  Without going into a full history of the PC, it started out as a glorified calculator.  The idea of a machine   that could send messages, play games, or even just have a color screen was foreign to early PC developers.  It came in pieces that you had to assemble yourself, and when it was complete, it looked like a pile of thrown together parts when compared to todays computers.  But, in a day and age when computers normally took up an

Media is a good thing.  It has brought people together, changed technology for the better, and created new ways for people to learn and express themselves.  While I believe media is great, and technology needs to continue to be pushed in order for innovation to rise, I am beginning to see a trend of media being used to create division, instead of being used to bring people   together.  While I'm sure this has been going on for longer, the start of this trend of using media and new technology, specifically social media, to look for ways to attack one another, began when Trump became president.  Weather you are for or against him, it is hard to deny two things: 1, he has very little control over his mouth, and 2, that people started believing more and more that in order to have a discussion with someone, you have to have the same beliefs.  With the seemingly 24 coverage of the president, on CNN and Fox especially, it seems as if people enjoy arguing just for the sake of it.

In the 2014 film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier , the main plot is for Captain America is to stop an evil organization, who has built themselves up in the US Government, from starting a string of widespread assassinations called "Project: Insight."  Though arguably the greatest movie in the MCU, the plot of this movie seems fairly ridiculous when you think about it.  A secret terrorist organization builds itself up in our government for 60+ years, builds three flying aircraft carriers with thousands of guns on them, and those guns are all connected to some database that predicts who will be a threat, even before they can become one, and subsequently dispose of them before they can become a problem.  This idea makes for a good movie, but seemingly has no bearing on the real world.  Well, they aren't doing it with flying aircraft carriers, and they aren't very secret about it, but the American government seems to have a "Project: Insight" of its ow

"It's like if you were trying to buy a house, and Google owned the house, and a lot of houses on your block. And they were the buyer's agent and also the seller's agent," said Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt. "It would raise questions, certainly."'  This perfectly sums up the idea behind CBS News' article "48 U.S. states launch antitrust investigation into Google."  The article focuses on the lawsuit brought to Google by the attorneys general of all US States, except California and Alabama, as well as the attorneys general of Washington   D.C. and Puerto Rico.  They are investigating weather or not Google has a monopoly on the internet search engine business, and if Google is using this monopoly to push the search results it deems most important.  Google's firm grip on the search engine business leads to them virtually giving the first search result to the highest bidder, as the article explains.  The article highlights

  As we have talked about the founding of our nation, and especially our form of government, it has further astounded me that the Founding Fathers had enough foresight to form the government in the way they did.  Three separate branches, keeping each other in check, all getting their power to operate from the people, was an idea the world had never heard of before.  One of the aspects that I did not know much about was the supreme court.  The two videos we watched for class that are linked below really explained the courts in simple ways and had one main theme: the judges are Americans just like the rest of us, and they get their power from the people in the same way that the other two branches do.  When talking about the history of the supreme court, the fact that the courts receive their power from "public faith," as the video puts it, is possibly the most radical idea to come from the Founding Fathers.  A people who decides their own laws, and petitions the court to

For over 13 weeks, massive protests have raged in the streets of Hong Kong. Demonstrators and police have clashed with shouts and riot shields, and the growing unrest between the people their government and China is close to boiling over.  The protestors, showing up in throngs of millions, demand two things from Hong Kong's government officials: one, that they cement their government into that of a democracy, a system that has hung in the balance since Britain released control of it in 1997; and two, that their government hold the past and present police officers who have used brutal force against the largely peaceful demonstrators.  These protests are occurring now because of the deal Britain made with China when they let go of Hong Kong, and that was that China would leave Hong Kong alone for at least 50 years.  China technically owns Hong Kong, but there are two governments and two peoples residing in the nation.  China, however, has started to tighten its grip on the city-s