Final Blog Post- My Relationship with Technology

My relationship with technology started in third grade, and I had to share a phone with my sister. My sister was in fifth grade, and you can imagine how unhappy she was about sharing her new phone with her little sister. My parents got us a phone because they worked a lot and wanted us to have one with our babysitter. I did not know then how much I know now about technology, but if I did, I would not have wanted a phone. Getting a phone changed everything; I thought I was the coolest person ever. I would always show it off to my friends and consistently play games on it. As I grew up and got my phone, I used it for its advantages. Around fifth grade, I started to get involved in different social media platforms. My friends and I would post funny videos and photos of ourselves with no care in the world. When I was that age, we just used it for fun. There was no point in it; it was just something to do. As we got older and social media started to pick up its popularity, so did my use of social media. Now it was all different. We were not posting just for fun but for people to see pictures of your life. Now it was more of a competition of who does what. No one will ever admit it, but there will always be competition between friends on social media today. 

 I used to give in to the temptation of competition. I would always see my friends doing cooler stuff than me; they always looked like they were always having fun. In reality, people post what they think other people will like. My relationship started very shaky because of how insecure I was growing up. Today, I have learned that it does not matter how many followers or likes you have because that is all fake. Those followers are not your real friends, and they are not real likes. I am pleased that I have matured out of that stage in my life, yet most people still think it is a competition. 

I spend more time on technology than I should. Now with apps like TikTok, it is so easy for people to get sucked into the “TikTok world” and never stop scrolling. TikTok is different from any other social media platform. Every video is thirty seconds, and you learn something new in every video. On the video to the left, it shows you how TiKTik creates videos for people. It allows people to learn new things in such a short period, and people love that. You never get bored because it is always something new, and people’s attention span has shortened due to TikTok. Technology is taking too much time; I could be doing much more productive things than watching videos on TikTok. Yet, even though I say and know I should spend more time off the technology, it still pulls me in.

Technology can make you smarter. Undoubtedly, people have gained a lot of intelligence since technology has improved. You can look anything up and get an answer right away. It opens a whole new world of opportunities for people to learn. Millions of different types of information have surfaced because of the internet and technology. Even though we have gained so much from technology, knowing what information is misleading is still challenging. You can take specific steps to ensure a website is reliable, yet people do not know how to do this. If people took the time to find out if the source is reliable, we would have less misleading information on the internet. 

I have a small online footprint since I do not post anything online, and all my social media accounts are private. Even though I say I have a small online print, I do not know because the internet could have a lot more on me. When I look me up, my Linkeln comes up; the rest is my mom and dad. My parents owned a business, so that is why there is so much information about them online. I want to grow my online presence to look for even more professional jobs. I do not want jobs to see my parents and associate me with my parents being successful business owners. I want to make an online presence of professionalism and want to make sure that my LinkedIn always stays at the top, so that is what employers want to see first. The image my online footprint shows is nothing except for my parents.

Lastly, I want to talk about the two videos we watched. The first video is about how technology improves our everyday life, and there are no wrong sides to technology. It predicted a world in which technology would be our savior, save us, comfort us, and solve our problems. It talks about how technology lets us explore the future, which is true. It also discusses ice testing and climate change, a huge problem today. They discuss deserts that make the water fresh from the sea for people to drink, new highways for people to transport more materials, etc. They talk about how they study the ocean and how a hotel could be underwater. Contrasting this to the second video is a very different outlook on technology. This video shows the harmful effects of technology and how it is ruining everyone’s life. It shows how depressed people get and how all people are ‘glued” to their phones with no personal interaction. It shows how people are fake on social media, creating a hierarchy. It shows how technology makes people very lonely because it is like everyone lives in their bubble due to technology. Both of these videos are accurate, and both have truth in them. To me, the world is a balance of both. Technology has pushed the world to learn new things and have a lot more opportunities, but with all good things must come bad things, and we saw this on the wrong side of the Technology video.  

Diffusion of Innovations- Social Media

The Diffusion Theory explains how new ideas, products, or technologies are adopted and spread throughout the targeted population over time. The website describes the different stages people go through when figuring out if they want to adopt or reject an innovation that comes out. This theory explains why a new creation becomes so popular or flops. It shows how innovation gets integrated into society and affects society. The website also shows what the critical elements in diffusion research are. The research starts with innovation, then adopters, then communication channels, time, and finally, a social system.

Social media has been an innovation that keeps getting newer by the year. Hundreds of new social media platforms or anything related to social media come out yearly. It is one of society's most rapidly diffused innovations since the 2000s. I will describe the diffusion of social media through the five stages of the adoption process. First is awareness; in the 2000s, the first social media platforms that came out were SixDegress.com and MySpace. Before the booming of social media in 2004, only early adopters knew what these platforms were. In 2004 the Persuasion of Facebook became a lot more popular. Social media was becoming used more by ordinary people and was being used for talking to friends, showing photos, and learning new information. The decision stage of social media came when people started to use it more. Users began to look at the personal benefits and what they could get from it. People began to take a deeper look into how social media works and what its parameters are. During this stage, users would try to see if they could use social media in their everyday lives and how effective it was. The confirmation stage "is both intrapersonal and interpersonal, confirmation the group has made the right decision." Users want to make the right decision by embracing this innovation.

A lot of people became early adopters of social media for several factors. Some were "it was the new thing," people wanted to interact with friends more, and there was a professional side of social media. People like exciting new things, and social media was a big culture shock. People wanted to be able to look into people's' lives and connect with their friends, even from far away. Professionals saw social media as a great business opportunity to get their information and spread it fast before everyone else. Some reason people adopted late to social media was that the older generation wanted to stay the same. It is known that when an innovation comes out, some people will always want to be the same. Another reason is people did not want to have social media. Some users care enough to be updated on others' lives or to know what people do in their daily lives. Another reason I found was privacy concerns. People have been hesitant about what information to put on any platform because of their digital footprint. Some people do not want their lives spread over the internet or any information being shared about them to other people. There might be some nonadopters to social media, but very few. Some reasons might be lack of internet or lack of technology. Others might want an online presence at all. There could be many reasons one does not have social media, but usually, only in specific cases does that happen

Even though social media has been one of the most altering innovations to society, there are a lot of downsides. Some significant downsides are depression, anxiety, self-esteem, privacy, and data issues. The adverse effects social media has on mental health is tremendous. The suicide rate has significantly increased since social media has been introduced as a norm in today's society. There has been some significant loss of privacy regarding how hackers can get into your social media and find a lot of personal information. Even though social media has a lot of adverse side effects, there are still a lot of positive impacts it has on the world.

In conclusion, the diffusion theory provides helpful information and steps for understanding how social media has spread and impacted society. The diffusion theory helps explain how social media grew so fast and how you can examine any innovation using the steps I described earlier. People need to remember to use social media responsibly so that all adverse side effects do not start happening to their users. 

EOTO #2- Reactions

This EOTO opened my eyes to new terms and concepts I had never heard of. The three most exciting presentations for me were agenda-setting, gate keeping, and citizen journalism. 

 Agenda Setting is the idea that the news media covers the stories we should pay attention to. Agenda setting shapes what the public thinks because it controls what the public sees. There are three types of agenda setting. Public agenda setting is when the public determines the agenda; media agenda setting is when the media determines the agenda; and policy agenda setting is when both public and press influence agendas. These groups diverse agenda-setting to show people what they think is important and relevant, leaving no room for personal opinion. Aside from the media controlling what you see, agenda setting has significant side effects. The media wants to control what you think, even off the news; they can influence you to feel like they do. Some negative association with agenda setting is that it makes some issues seem more important than others. All stories should be equally covered in the media, but this does not happen. Agenda setting strongly holds over what people think, say, and spread. Something else that I researched that goes along with agenda setting is framing. 

Framing is the idea that news media shape the story according to its biases. Framing refers to how the information is presented to the viewers. Media tries to throw all different things at you so that you can think like them. It can also trick you into misleading information, and they can lie as well. The media framing information has a significant impact on how people receive this information. Framing also shapes people's opinions and minds about an issue because, usually, the media only shows one side of the story. The media favors one side and only wants to portray that side to people. Anything type of news you receive can be framed and probably is. Nothing anymore can go without some bias because today. Everyone feels as if they need to pass their own opinions for the information to matter. In reality, all people want is the hard truth, yet some prefer not to know the whole truth. Framing can impact someone's emotions, values, desires, needs, etc. Lastly, framing dramatically affects how people receive, process, and respond to information.

Gatekeeping in regards to media law refers to the process of how platforms, television stations, newspapers, and how they make decisions on whether or not to include specific information or not. These decisions are based on different factors, but ultimately they make the decisions that are going to help them the best. Systems of gatekeeping result in creating hierarchies. Gatekeeping can lead to corruption for those who are trying to get influenced by the media. Gatekeeping can influence political and cultural norms. Even though gatekeeping can be seen as really bad and like the people are being withheld information, it is a crucial function in the media today.

Citizen journalism is when ordinary people create pieces of writing that they are passionate about. Citizen journalism is performed through social media platforms, blogs, podcasts, and online platforms. Citizen journalism is to stand out from the crowd and try to create an impact. Citizen journalism is a response to professional journalism. Citizen journals provide honest opinions and experiences; they can share their voice and say what they want. Since citizen journalism, there have been so many more diverse and "out of the box" pieces that have never been seen before. People write these blog posts only to use them to improve their writing skills and also to help raise awareness of topics they are concerned with. A lot of times, people will talk about issues that mainstream media can not talk about. This gives people a comfortable say in how they feel. There are adverse effects of citizen journalism, like the lack of resources. Citizen journalism is criticized for being biased, incomplete, and not helpful. Another negative factor about citizen journalism is its need for more accountability. They are not held to the same standards as mainstream media journalists. Overall, while citizen journalism is very beneficial for viewers to see different types of media, users of citizen journalism should be careful to ensure they are getting reliable information. 

EOTC #2- Online Influencers

With the internet taking over in the last decade, a new world of things has opened up. With a whole new world of communication, one of the biggest things that have been dominating is online influencers. There are various online influencers, most famously on Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, and Facebook. Some types of online influencers are bloggers, journalists, activists, and a vast group of “social media sensations.” There are five types of influencers, Mega (more than one million followers), Macro (500k followers), Mid-tir (50k followers), Micro (10k followers), and lastly Nano- influencers (1k followers).

Online influencers are meant to reach large audiences of people who can convince them of whatever opinion they are trying to convince you of. They can also try to sell you something or learn more about you for their gain. Online influencers started with “mommy bloggers.” They create blogs and share their everyday life and tips and tricks for your children; a massive wave of mommy bloggers make millions a year. Another big way that online influencers have started is Tiktok. Today, there are a million online influencers on Tiktok, but their identity has changed. Now influencers only care about making money and usually will try to steal your data to target you better. Once they have you data they can then start targeting you. Influencers will sell/promote products to their followers without telling them they are being paid to do so. Influencers will trick their followers into believing that they really use their products in their everyday life, but really just lie about it to make more money. This colossal wave of Tiktok influencers skyrocketed at the start of COVID-19 because everyone was spending all their time sitting at him. They found this a perfect opportunity to take advantage of people.

I will mainly focus on political influencers because this is a media law and literacy class, but recently political influencers have been the next “big wave” of influencers. With online influencers, an increasing amount of information is always trying to spread. Political influencers try to spread mass media and influence your opinions through popular social media platforms. Some viewers might not even know they are influencers, yet they still get heavily influenced politically without knowing it. The best type of influencers are the ones who seem the most “real” They are trying to help people understand why their opinions are better, while not saying that yours are wrong. Some ways that these influencers influence people is by providing a board overview and personal content. The more personal an influencer is, the more the followers trust them. By viewers thinking that they know this influencer on a deeper personal level, they are inclined to listen to them, which is just another way they manipulate you.

An example is issues about the LGBTQ+ community. A political influencer takes advantage of these situations to explore the people who follow them. They try to manipulate people into thinking they are just influencers and not trying to sway their opinions or votes. One way they trick people is by only talking about politics in every few posts, while all their other posts look like regular social media influencers. Sometimes these influencers will start as everyday influencers, and after gaining a following, they switch to politics. Yet even though some political influencers try to manipulate their followers, many influencers try to post for the betterment of their community. They want their voice to be here, and social media is the fast way to reach large groups of people.

Online influencers have changed one of the ways that society gets information. Even though there are a lot of manipulative influencers that only care about money, there are also the same amount of positive influencers trying to be positive role models to the younger generation. It affects society in everyday life and has changed how people have been influenced over the years since it is mostly on social media platforms that people get heavily influenced. It affects all different types of people. Some are more beneficial than others, but how you can use them to your advantage really matters. Overall, online influencers have affected my generation the most, a positive outcome because of how much more information and opinions we can access. 

Living in the Age of AI

This was one of the most interesting and informative videos about A.I. I did not know much about artificial intelligence until the recently popular "Chat gpt" came out. "Chat gpt" is an A.I. platform that answers anything you ask; I only know about it from how popular it is for college kids to use. I have used "Chat gpt" not to write my essays but to help me brainstorm or develop a better outline. It is a helpful tool, but I can see how it could easily be abused. Even though "Chat gpt" was released in November of 2022, there are many more A.I. platforms just like it that came before it, and other platforms can do many different things.

The video showed me behind the scenes of the A.I. and how it could affect the future for better or worse. They mention that we are just in the early decades of A.I. and that it will be a multi-decade adjustment period to get used to A.I. and its capabilities. A.I. is creating automation which is a substitution for capital for labor. A.I. is swaying towards all of the jobs that have a routine that will get automated, and only the people at the top will be making money. For example, "A.I. is the ultimate tool of wealth creation." Something interesting is that women primarily represent the routinely based jobs or transfer data etc., meaning women would be out of a job a lot faster than a man due to A.I.

Another thing that they mentioned was "surveillance capitalism," which is when the private human experience is called a free source of raw material that can be fabricated into predictions about human behavior. There was a story about a man with a friend who worked at Google. They casually talked about him asking the Google employee how much they know about him, and he replied, "You would be surprised how much we know about you.” They can tell your thoughts, desires, dreams, friends, wants, and much more. This is called "digital exhaust," which means wherever you search, it leaves digital traces so that it can know your behavior. Spoken interfaces like "Google Home" and "Alexa" are consistently among the most significant A.I. breakthroughs. As one of these devices is always listening in your house, it gets smarter every day to cater to you. While this might seem reasonable at the time, they are always trying to target you. One of the most significant moments of "surveillance capitalism" was Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica was a scandal in 2018 that tried to sway people to vote one way and manipulate voters. They obtained data from millions of Facebook users without consent through third-party apps, and used their data for their political benefit. This caused a massive conference for Facebook and changed how they sell people's data. This made people feel like their privacy was not protected.

One of the most concerning things in this video was when it talked about all of the surveillance in China. The government installs cameras on every major street they say is used for jaywalking, but it is a reminder that the state is always watching. They can identify people and stalk them through their daily life. It keeps data from everyone and has so much information, even about how you walk.

Lastly, some positive benefits of A. I. are that there is no human error. These machines can not make mistakes and lessen the chance of error by so much while also doing it faster. A.I. is also beneficial for humans. While I know many people who use it to cheat, you can use it to shorten your workload. It can help you come up with ideas or help you plan something out; it makes people more confident in their work. If A.I. is used properly to help humans, instead of taking over humans, I think that artificial intelligence will be very beneficial to our world.

Reflection on EOTC #1

I loved listening to my classmates teach the class about groundbreaking technologies. Learning about technologies I know were essential to me yet had such a complex history was fascinating. Learning about these critical technologies gave me a broad overview of the greatest inventions. Some of my favorite ones I knew about were emojis, the radio, and the telephone. I use these three things every day without hesitation, and I have no idea what it is like to live without these inventions. 

Ben was the first presenter in the class, and he, by far, had one of the best presentations. You could see he had a lot of knowledge and passion for this topic, which is one reason why I was so interested in it. Emojis were first used in 1862 by President Lincoln when he was giving a speech. He used the emotion “;),” yet it is still heavily debated if he meant to put that in his speech transcript. 

Later in 1999, a Japanese artist named Shigetaka Kurita created the first one hundred seventy-six emojis as an easy way to communicate emotions. After Kurita, many companies tried to copy them, the most famous in the United States being Google and Apple. Emojis have forever changed communication because of how much an emoji can say without words. A fun fact is that a whole book was written in emojis by Moby Dick!

The radio, known as “wireless telegraphy,” was invented by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895. It changed the way communication and entertainment would be in America forever. The radio allowed for the transmissions of news, media, politics, etc., to be committed over long distances, letting people get the latest news in real time. It allowed people to listen to music anytime they wanted to and could travel with music. Without the radio, the public was never in the know until days later, when it would appear in the newspaper. If the radio was never invented it would have taken much longer for the television, mobile phones, internet, social media etc. to be invented, if at all. The radio impacted American society in every way it could and transformed how people communicate. 

Lastly, I enjoyed the presentation on the first-ever telephone. Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call on March 10, 1876. Before the first phone call, Bell got the patent for the telephone on March 7,1876. He then went on to created the Bell Telephone Company, which is now known as AT&T. I learned that Bell was heavily involved in the deaf community, which was one of the main reasons he created the telephone while getting his ideas from Samuel Morse’s telegraph. At first, Bell tried improving the telegraph with his knowledgeable background in sound and music. He was able to create “multiple telegraphs.” Which could send multiple signal and sounds at the same time over the same wire. It changed America for the better and revolutionized communication. It opened up a whole new world of communication. It had a significant impact on the way the world lived every day and most people in the world reply on telephones for their jobs, communication, news, politics, business opportunities and much more.

The Progressive Era

 The ANTIWAR.COM website made me realize many things I did not know before. It gave me a new world of information I had never been exposed to. I had never seen a website like this, and at first, it was tough to navigate because I had no idea where to look. It is different from the typical website I would go to for new information because I usually go to primary sources like CNN.com, Fox News, or The New York Times. It gives you so many different viewpoints I do not see in my regular news sources. I could be on this website for hours because there is so much information in each section. Although this website is not just factual, it has a lot of bias; I enjoyed exploring new websites like this.

While visiting The American Conservative, I found numerous new articles and information I had never been exposed to. I do not fully understand everything on this website because I am not very invested in the media news world. The government tries to censor what we see and how we receive it. I now understand why I have never been to either website because I am not the target audience. A lot of times, I will click on the first few options I search for, yet I get the information that I think I want. Yet, going through both websites made me realize that I should scroll and keep scrolling to find different opinions and voices and then look at the same ones. It is very beneficial for me to see a lot of different viewpoints and then make my own instead of looking at websites that are all the same with the same view.

To find an antiwar voice website, you must search and dig because the government does not want anyone looking at those websites. They have ways of shutting down and blocking it from the public so the people can not be influenced. It is hard to find websites like these because the government does not want the public to be against war. Another reason it is hard to find these websites is that the government does not want to look bad or be publicized as anything wrong.

We, as the people of America, are very used to the same mainstream websites that usually all have the same opinion. We should start using more websites like these to get new viewpoints for a better understanding of the whole subject.

The Invention of the Pencil

 In 1795, Nicholas-Jacques Conte, a scientist in the army, invented the pencil for Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot. At the time in France, graphite stopped getting imported, so he asked Conte to make a pencil that did not rely on imports. The word pencil comes from Latin for “little tail .”It was called this to resemble the fine brush for painting using camel hair. Before the modern pencil was invented, people used lumps of lead. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Jan van Eyck would use a silverpoint drawing technique involving various types of metalpoint.

Graphite was first discovered in North England accidentally by Edward Acheson. It looked like coal, yet would not burn, and It was very soft. It was so soft that it needed something to hold it. The first wooden holder was born and could efficiently fit the graphite. The first pencil factory opened in 1832, named Banks, Son & Co; now it is called Derwent Cumberland Pencil Company.

Making a pencil first required “roasting a mixture of water, clay, and graphite in a kiln at 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit before encasing the resulting soft solid in a wooden surround. The shape of that surround can be square, polygonal, or round, depending on the pencil’s intended use. The hardness or softness of the final pencil ‘lead’ can be determined by adjusting the relative fractions of clay and graphite in the roasting mixture”. People loved the pencil because you did not have to have any worries as you did with a quill pen. It did not spill ink and was a lot clearer and darker. One of the significant advances is that it was erasable; even though the eraser was not added to pencils until 1858, you could erase the graphite with bread crumbs!

The pencil changed the world and how we communicate in many different ways. It gave ordinary people the ability to write, helping bring about the Renaissance; they could now have the ability to write down and come up with new ideas. Some other ways are that people can directly send letters to anyone they want, which is much cheaper than other options. It solved many problems for the everyday person so they could not do what only the rich could. Quill pens were hard to make because the feathers were from different birds. The ink was hard to make and unavailable for some people. The pencil made it easy for anyone to come up with new ideas, and with the pencil came a lot of new inventions because more people could brainstorm ideas and write anything down on a piece of paper.

However, the pencil created a huge negative environmental impact on the country. Pencils have a significant role in the cutting down of trees. Eighty-two thousand trees are cut down yearly to make 14 billion traditional wooden pencils. That might not seem like a lot to you, but think about that every year, along with people cutting down trees for paper, firewood, etc. Another environmental impact pencils have all the factories pencils are being made at. They have so much pollution contributing to the world, along with the trucks and machines needed for making the modern pencil. Even though this was later in the decade, the eraser materials are very non-environment friendly and challenging to make again. 

Overall, the pencil was one of the greatest inventions bringing so many new inventions along with it. If we did not have the pencil as early as we did, the world would be a very different place. 

Eight Values of Free Expression

The First Amendment provides that Congress make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise. It protects freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. There are Eight Values of Free Expression: Marketplace of Ideas, Participation in Self-Government, Stable Change, Individual Self-Fulfillment, Check on Governmental Power, Promote Tolerance, Promote Innovation, and finally, Protect Dissent. 

While reading the article, Promoting Innovation was crucial for me because we would not be who we are today without it. It makes everyone feel allowed to be different and express themselves freely. It gives people the initiative to succeed in their personal goals. These share everyone's different values in life and can help people find new interests/talents every day. It allows you to explore whatever gives your interest freely. One of the most important values I came across was to Protect Dissent. America would not be the same at all without it because there would be no one that would be allowed to stand against the Government or higher authority. If different minority groups did not ever go against the rule, we would still have no rights for African Americans, Women, LGBT+, etc. There would never be any protest for “unpopular” views or going against what people thought were the norms at the time, “it is your patriotic duty to criticize the government.” Criticizing the Government is not a bad thing. It is what makes us the country we are.

Some values that connect with me are Individual Self-Fulfillment. This helps people, especially me, be true to themselves and not be afraid of who they are. You can be of any religion, sex, or sexual orientation, and you can still express yourself however you want to. If you are not the “norm,” you still have the same rights as everyone, when it was not like this. If we did not have this value, we would not have the essential human diversity or free speech we have today. Something else that is personal to me is Stable Change. This primary value allows you to change something safely and effectively. It states that citizens should be able to speak their minds, or they can resort to things like violence. It is a benefit for the Government to hear such complaints so that they can try to fix the problem before it turns into something bigger. One of the values that resonated with me was Promote Tolerance. Reading “A more tolerant society is a better society” made me think about how that is true in many ways. Things become a lot easier when people do what they are supposed to and do not resist or fight back. On the other hand, that also leaves little room for diversity and the uniqueness of everyone and their opinions. I agree that freedom of speech teaches us many different lessons and is needed for a prosperous and functional society.

Something happening in the real world that connects to the Individual Self-Fulfillment theory is TikTok. There are a lot of famous people on TikTok that are famous for doing very controversial things. They only want to attract specific audience groups, yet it still works because TikTok is excellent at knowing your target audience. If we did not have Individual Self-Fulfillment, these famous TikTokers could not freely explore their own identity or freedom of speech. Another example corresponds to the Stable Change value. People publicly talk badly about the Government, the president, Congress, etc., which would never be allowed in another country. In America, people are allowed to complain and want to change aspects of the Government. It helps the Government here, but that could even be illegal in other places.

Overall, it was very informative to learn about these values as I already use them daily, just didn't know I got that freedom that other do not have.