COM 1450 - Fall 2019

For this blog post I am supposed to talk about a topic that was discussed in another  groups  EOTO presentations. One topic that interested me was gatekeeping .    Gatekeeping can be defined as  the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something. And when speaking in terms of media and broadcasting it is the filtering and/or withholding information from certain groups of people. It is something that I knew of but never put time into researching it. I always thought it was an inherently bad thing but it’s not always bad. There are a lot of factors that play a role in determining what is broadcasted; things like your geographical location, the time of year, and other current events. For example, people in  North Carolina  aren't going to be told the weather in Hawaii because it isn't relevant to them.  This is why  the news is centered around Donald Trump and what he’s doing and not what t...

Media consolidation can be de fi ned as  the concentration of media ownership into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals or corporations. It is a growing issue because in 1983 90% of American media was owned by 50 companies, now that same 90% is owned by a handful of companies. An example of media consolidation is Disney owning  all of  the large networks like ABC, ESPN, The Disney Channel, Pixar,  Lucasfilm , and Marvel. They own  all of  these major networks and control what can be shown on them.  Why should you care about media consolidation? Well because for one thing, people are already losing faith and trust in mainstream media and news. The fact that these major news companies aren't even their own entities means that the people controlling them get to decide what is shown and what isn’t. The people that run these networks only care about money and making a profit, so they are only going to show things that help them accomplish...

In class we talked about how the government and the companies that run social media sites invade our privacy every day . It was something that I felt like I always knew but it was still eye opening when we talked about it. I had just never made the connection on my own. We talked about things like your phone or the Amazon Echo listening to conversations and then promoting ads for things you were just talking about. It’s a little scary and makes you want to live off the gird when you think about it.   I decided to look at my online  presence , I have heard of people losing jobs or internships because of things they have said in the past and I figured now would be the best time to look back at old posts and old tweets and delete anything that could be damaging to the image that I want to put out.    I first went on to my twitter account that I have had since 2014 when I was in high school, so it was bound to have some ignorant posts on there. I searched s...

In class we did the Com Tech Timeline Challenge which included technological advances that greatly impacted communication but excluded some heavy hitters because it ended at 2007. Some of those heavy hitters being Snapchat and Twitter.    First is Twitter, I think the reason that this app blew up is because of the ease of access to information. Celebrities and major companies have twitter accounts and the great thing about the website is that people can talk directly to these big celebrities and big companies. And it works the other way around, celebs and companies can get instant feedback from people on twitter. I remember being hesitant to join  because of the fact that  anyone could have access to my tweets or to me and the implications that come from that. Now it is probably the most used app on my phone.   Next is Snapchat, I remember this app being in the news when it first came out and people were very skeptical of it. The idea of taking a...

All eight values of freedom of expression are important in their own way and work together in order to help citizens express themselves how they please. I won’t say one is more important than another but the one that I find most meaningful and inspiring is the promotion of innovation.   Promoting innovation allows people to be more unique, to think outside the box and not to be constrained to the conventional ways of thinking and doing. Promoting innovation creates a space where people can feel comfortable to be different; and with that comfort comes motivations and support from others to create and do things in interesting ways. Without innovation, we, as a nation, wouldn’t be nearly as advanced as we are now. One example I think of when I think of innovation is Elon Musk and his company Tesla and SpaceX. I think he is the embodiment of innovation and is truly an example for the rest of the world for what promoting innovation can do. The idea of a self-driving car sounds ...

It seems like for the past couple of years privacy and companies selling your information to third parties has been a topic that has never left the news. And understandably so, it’s scary to think about all the people that have my personal information and  all of  the things they could possibly do with it. This has been going on for a while now, but it is only in the past couple of years that companies have started being more transparent with people about how they are gathering, storing, and using your information. Now when you go to a new website, most of the time a pop-up will come up telling you that the site collects cookies. These pop-ups are only to notify you and if you don’t want cookies being collected then your only option really is to not use the site. In a recent iOS update, iOS 13, Apple implemented a system where Siri would record and collect the interaction you have with her  as a way to  help improve Siri’s accuracy. After installing the updat...