Final Blog - My Online Footprint

    Without a doubt, this class has made me feel more important as a human being. Not in the sense of my ego has become this great big thing, but more that I've learned that my words and personal information hold so much more value than I originally thought. I am a broadcast journalism major, meaning that I'm not afraid to use my voice and identity to represent a cause bigger than myself. That being said, I had never realized how much my openness affected my digital footprint...until I Googled myself.

    Overall, I feel that I have a large footprint compared to the average person. I have at least one account for most of the top social media platforms. Everything from Instagram to Twitter and even Linkedin, contain some amount of my personal information. On top of that, I am quite active on Youtube, and release videos of my journalistic work often. Therefore, when I Googled myself, I knew that there was going to be more information about me online than most of my peers.

    The first place I went to when I searched "Reece Harnett" was images. I wanted to see what kind of embarrassing photos someone could find of me, and luckily there were not any that were too bad. Just some old twitter pictures and snapshots from my reporting in high school. I then went to the webpage and found exactly what I expected. My LinkedIn page was the top cite, followed by about two more pages of my various accounts and youtube videos. While at first, I was not worried, it wasn't until I got to the third page that I found something that I did not like.

    About two years ago, I went to a camp where they had a file of all of my personal information. When I say all I mean ALL. On this page was a PDF file with everything from my home address to my height and weight. I realized that with this info, someone could easily steal my identity or do something worse. So I immediately called the camp and requested that they take the site down. As far as my digital footprint goes, I am incredibly glad I took the time to check what it was actually like. I have a feeling I am not the only person who would run into this problem if they researched themselves. So, I would recommend to absolutely everyone that they take a look.

    It is easy to hear this story and think that my technology use is unhealthy or that it is ruining our privacy, but almost all of the information that I found was put out there by me. I feel comfortable with what I have chosen to release and through this experience, I learned how to "clean the gutters" so to speak. Sure, there are downsides to our increased dependence on technology, but I personally am the type of person that feels like we must accept these drawbacks and learn to live with them healthily. If that means limiting your phone usage, then that should be your decision, but I feel good about my situation and actually am grateful for the technology I am able to possess.

For anyone who needs help cutting back on their technology use - Try this

Blog #10 - EOTO - Media Consolidation

    As a broadcast journalism major, I have learned to appreciate the media for all that it is. Whether it is a controversial show or a "biased" news broadcast, there always seems to be something wrong with the media in the eyes of the public. While sometimes the media gets a lot of backlash, whether we like it or not, it is something that has grown to be an integral part of our society. Media is found in almost every pocket in America, so it is impossible not to talk about it. Something that is not talked about as much, however, is the process of media consolidation.

    Beyond politics, there are many pros and cons that come with media consolidation. One positive impact is that these multimillion-dollar corporations are able to have higher budgets for their productions. Therefore, the actual quality and production value is much better than if the organizations had to fund themselves. This is also true when you think about the diversity of production. Because these companies have so many different smaller groups, they can allow each group to become more specified, offering a more diverse media menu. However, these positives become shadowed when thinking about the cons of media consolidation.
    According to Free Press, media consolidation is classified as "A process whereby progressively fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media". Right off the bat, the general definition sounds quite similar to a monopoly, and while it's not, some might say it might as well be. Over the last century, the amount of media organizations have gone from the hundreds to only about six as of today. Obviously, this is a drastic change and one that brings some concern along with it.

    The biggest concern of media consolidation is the fact that the nation's news outlets are only controlled by a very small number of companies. Therefore, if one of these company owners supported a particular political figure, they could sway an incredibly large portion of the media in support of this politician. One recent example of this was when Sinclair Broadcast Group announced a deal to buy Tribune Media. By buying Tribune, Sinclair would have owned more than 200 news stations and would have been able to broadcast its conservative-leaning news to about 70% of the country. Luckily, this deal was terminated before any news stations were handed over to Sinclair.
    While it may seem as if the media is a diverse culture of differing viewpoints, this is an illusion because ultimately, everything is under the jurisdiction of only six viewpoints (And some of them aren't even very different from each other). Not only are these companies giving a false sense of diversity, but they are also hiding the fact that they do not care about the public interest. At the end of the day, the companies are only making the rich richer and empowering the powerful (I really liked that statement from one of my peer's presentation). These companies are worth upwards of 500 Billion dollars altogether and it would not surprise me if this number only increased. As much as I love the media, my research into media consolidation has given me a whole new perspective and I hope that my peers and others learn to see the media under this light as well.

Blog #9 - Diffusion Theory in Newspaper

    Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations Theory is one of my favorite topics we have covered in this class so far. I find it incredibly interesting to be able to quantify the change of an innovation's popularity using a simple graph. However, I was unsure of what I wanted to put into the graph until I remembered my EOTO of the newspaper. The newspaper has gone through a long life of changes and adaptations in order to meet the needs of the people using it. Nevertheless, it is easy to see the curve of influence that the newspaper has had.

    The early adopters of the newspaper utilized it for its ability to give them up-to-date news on events happening both locally and remotely. Before the newspaper, people were using newsbooks, which were not timely or easily accessible to the normal person. While early on there were many people using the newspaper, it wasn't until the first amendment was created that it brought in the early majority of newspaper users. The fact that the news was both unbiased and entertaining made many people want to buy the paper each day. 

    As popular as the newspaper was for many years, it has started to move into the laggards faze due to the fact that news is consumable in many other ways. People no longer need or even want physical newspapers in order to get their daily updates about the world. I don't believe physical newspapers ever had a major downside to them from the beginning, but rather, they just got lost among the new innovations of today's online-dependent world. 

    When you look at how long the newspaper dominated the media world, the positives of the technology overwhelm the negatives. Not only that, but the business of journalism will continue without the physical paper. Online newspapers are the newest adaptation of this technology and I believe this is only the beginning of a range of new ways to consume the same things you would find in a newspaper. Not every technology is infallible, but the newspaper shows that even as it gets less use, it can adapt and grow again.

I encourage you to check out this site, as it shows some of the evolution that I referenced.

Blog #8 - EOTO Peer Presentations

    It isn't often that you get taught new material from your fellow students. However, after going through the EOTO presentations, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed them. My favorite and the most impactful for me was the presentation done by my teammate Nic Francis. She did her presentation on the technological advancement and impact that Google has had on society. Something that she mentioned was that this was an incredibly hard thing to fit into a short presentation based solely on the fact that there is so much to talk about. Nevertheless, Nic was able to go through both the history and impact of Google effectively.

    Google was first created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Both of them were college students at Stanford University who wanted to create a new American tech company. Their main goal was to create a more efficient web browser because the current ones were not useful enough for them. The search engine at the time was called Web Crawler and it had about 4000 websites on it. For reference, Google now has 4.45 billion websites present on their search engine. Obviously, that's a pretty drastic difference!

In the last 22 years of its existence, Google has racked up some pretty impressive statistics:

• Search index over 100 million gigabytes large
• Dominates over 92% of search engine shares
• Google owns over 200 companies
• 90% of internet users use Google
  

    While these statistics are impressive, the even more impactful fact is that Google is only growing and getting bigger. It was recently bought by Alphabet Inc. of which owns hundreds of companies already. Google owns hundreds of successful companies such as Youtube and Android. Meaning that its reaches of impact go further than just helping you find out where the closest coffee shop to you is. Personally, a company this large is scary to me, but even with that thought, I would not have a lot of the things I do without Google.

Blog #7 - The Progressive Era - Antiwar

     After reading through some of the articles on ANTIWAR.COM, I came to the conclusion that I do not know enough about both foreign and domestic war issues. I had already known this based on the fact that I do not usually seek out that genre of news, but this made it even more evident. That being said, I did find it odd that these kinds of articles are not "advertised" to me as often as I would anticipate they would be. This could be because of my lack of searches and online interest in them, but I have a feeling it is because of something much bigger than personalized advertising.

    First off, I believe the government has gotten much better at silencing those whose viewpoints do not align with the image they want to portray. The simple fact that I have never even heard of these websites or the articles that they broadcast shows that these viewpoints do not agree with what the government wants us to see. One article that I had no idea about but struck me as important was one regarding the Logar Suicide Bombing. In this article, the author quotes from Acting Minister of Interior, Hayatullah Hayat. “Overall, the Taliban is a group that has foreign support. Any attack and killing that are occurring here, without any doubt, the Taliban and their backers in the region are behind them,” said Hayat.

    As a first-world country, these tragedies are not seen as our problem because they are not Americans dying in them. The bigger problem is that American troops are leaving these areas that need help the most. Just because these places do not offer us any profit, we feel that we can leave and then broadcast to our own nation that it is the right thing to do. All the while, extremist groups grow and continue to kill innocent people. I first felt guilty for not knowing about these issues. I think I should do more research on topics like these, but at the same time, I am angered by the fact that the news I consume does not even attempt to include this. The government knows that young people are able to make an anti-war change, just as they did in the past, and that is why we must learn to make this movement much larger than it is.

Blog #6 - Technology Analysis: Newspaper

    When we were deciding on which piece of communication technology to present on, I wanted to make sure that mine was something that was incredibly important to the world. Therefore, I chose to do my project on newspaper. Whether you read it or not, newspaper has been a part of human life for a long time. It has evolved and adapted to the changing world and through this, it has become an integral part of society. I personally have and do only read the newspaper through online sources. Even though people from older generations (my dad) don't think this is the correct way to gather news, I believe it is the only way news is going to be broadcasted from now on.

    

But I digress.

    The history of newspaper is quite long and a little all over the place. Joad Raymond, in his book titled The Invention of the Newspaper claims that the newspaper, as we know it, was only created in the early 1700s. Before then, news was transferred by other forms of media. News in general has been a part of human existence since the Roman Empire. Town criers lined the streets telling the tales of both local and remote things that had happened. It wasn't until the mid 1600s that people realized they should write the stories down and just pass that around. This was the time of the British newsbooks and while they were still news articles in writing, they were not classified as "newspapers" due to the rate at which they were produced...slowly.

    It wasn't until 1702 when The Daily Courant was released, that the first newsbook was created without a cover. This form of the newsbook soon became known as a newspaper. This newspaper was the first to fight for the rights found in the First Amendment (even though they were British). It was the basis for which the first American newspaper, The New-England Courant, was created by James Franklin (Ben's brother) in 1721. It wasn't until 1791 that the first amendment was created, allowing newspapers to become much more open and able to report on issues without worrying about consequences.

    From there on, newspapers began to spring up all over the country. Britannica claims that it was the hottest new trend of the early 1800s and it's no wonder why. Newspapers like the famous The New York Times began to tell stories that were both entertaining and informative. Not only that, but they could do this under the freedom created by the first amendment. Through time, the creation of muckraking and yellow journalism began to unearth the hard truth of corrupt governments. Newspaper was the main vehicle for this information, which made it incredibly important for civilians to have.

    Newspaper still has the same importance that it did throughout the last few centuries. Along with spreading knowledge, newspaper increases literacy, advertises for businesses, and has been thought to increase self-esteem by starting a daily routine. While it has changed a lot throughout its lifetime, newspaper has made quite an impact on the world. It may not be the most popular form of media today, but I believe it is still one of the most important.

Blog #5 - In the Age of AI

    It's no surprise that artificial intelligence has caused such a massive conversation to pop up around the world. Simply the definition of A.I. is enough to make you question the existence of it. According to Investopedia, AI is classified as "the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions". I had some knowledge of AI before watching the video, but now that I have watched it, I have a whole new perspective on bringing AI into our day-to-day lives.

    I personally believe that the increase in any technology is a positive impact on the world. Sure, it may have some flaws that make it seem unhelpful, but ultimately, any addition to innovation is a good one in my book. In the video, one of the biggest pros was that of persoanlizing our lives. We even spoke in class about how you can be talking about something on the phone and then you'll begin to receive ads regarding the topic you were talking about. This can be seen as making our lives more efficient, or it can be seen as invading our privacy. Although I love to see technology grow, I have to agree with the video that this is too far.

    This problem is also found in national and online security. The advanced technology from AI of facial recognition is found and used by many companies. Organizations like Facebook then sell that data of our lives to other companies and even the government. One aspect of privacy that the video brought up was the fact that with a single camera, the government could gather exactly who you are in less than a second. Not only is this scary to hear about as a citizen, but it is even more scary when you think about the fact that this is only going to get worse if it is not stopped. The problem is I don't think it ever will.