Final post

Final Post: Me, You, Technology. 

For good or for bad, the technology we have in today's society is the least sophisticated and least technological that it will ever be from this point forward, and that is scary to think about. We live in a world where humans are more attracted to the idea of online and social media gratification rather than real human connections and engagement.

In the United States, the average screen time is seven hours and three minutes. This average is up thirty minutes since 2017, and I believe will continue to rise. This statistic made me curious what my screen time is. This past week I averaged seven hours and fifteen minutes, slightly above the average. As a society, having technology attached to your hip and constantly staring at screens seems widely normalized and not even worth a second glance. 

The “Mad World Remix” is a great representation of society as a whole and its relationship with technology. It portrays the problems with people and their connections to their phones. It feels clear to me that right from wrong is being blurred in people's minds. The girl hanging onto the side of the building and everyone taking out their phone to record is an example of blurring right from wrong.

People would rather get the video than help someone in need. Shown briefly in the video is a man turning into a monster after the person steps on his foot. This is also a side effect from young generations and their addiction to technology which is they do not know how to properly represent themselves in real face-to-face interaction and conflict. These problems stem from humans not having healthy relationships with technology, but what about technology not having a healthy relationship with you? 

Technology can be your friend and can be one of the most useful tools in day-to-day life, but it comes with a cost, your privacy. One company that uses your information all of the time without you even knowing is Google. Google has an unpromoted section where it tracks and stores your purchase history, and makes it difficult for you to remove it. In an article titled Google Keeps and Eye on What You Buy, and It’s Not Alone it states, “Removing data from “Purchases” requires users to click each purchase individually: There is no way for users to easily delete their entire purchase history from Google’s servers. Removing the original emails doesn’t work either: When CNBC reporter Todd

Haselton bravely deleted every single email in his Gmail, the transactions in his purchase history still remained. In other words, unless you delete each purchase record individually, Google keeps a tally of your purchases. And there is no way for users to simply turn the data mining off.” 

After doing a Google search of “Lucas Semenza” the first websites that appear attached to my name are my personal website, my “perfect game” player profile (I needed this when I played baseball in high school), my LinkedIn, and lastly my fraternity website. I believe these websites portray an accurate and positive representation of me and I would be happy for any employer to see them. However, all of these websites do not go into what my presence looks like on social media, like Instagram. That is where you can see my life from a more personal level which is why I also make sure everything I put onto Instagram is an accurate representation of myself as well. 

With all of my friends and family residing in Saratoga, New York technology has played an impactful role in my relationship with everyone. Being so far away from the state for virtually ten months of the year, technology is the only way I am able to keep constant communication with everyone. Whether that's playing video games with my hometown friends, calling my mother every day, or seeing posts from my extended family online, it has had a positive impact on me, allowing me to stay in contact and up to date.

The bottom line is that technology is here to stay. Society as a whole will adapt to these changes and there will be new norms, it is important to not blur the lines of right from wrong because of technology.

Slideshow.

EOTO2 Reacts

 Gatekeeping and Agenda Setting 

    The presentation I learned about and decided to write my reaction post about revolves around the theory of gatekeeping and agenda setting. I found this presentation and concept to be very interesting, and it sparked a lot of curiosity in me after learning. The first thing I learned was the actual definition of gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is to control access to something or monitor it and select the information that gets released. Gatekeeping is a term I hear amongst colleagues of mine but I didn't know the actual definition. Secondly, I learned the definition and concept of agenda setting. Agenda setting is the media affecting the thoughts

and perceptions of the public. This is a term I had not heard of prior compared to gatekeeping. With both gatekeeping and agenda setting, I was given the pros and cons of both. 

Impacts

    Later on in the presentation, I learned the impacts of gatekeeping and agenda-setting on society. I had a feeling that I was generally a negative effect, and I was right. It is mainly surrounded by the power that the media already has. The media having the ability to release or not release information in whatever timely manner they choose only gives the media more power and is only more unfair to the citizens of this country. 

Affect on Me 

    Lastly, I learned more about how gatekeeping and agenda setting can and will affect my life and the lives of the ones around me. The first piece of information that can be gatekept is

information regarding politics. Not releasing information to my generation and everyone else could be crucial to how it affects me and others in the future. As far as agenda setting, this can be detrimental to the way young people like myself make decisions. This can include how one makes decisions politically or socially. 

Antiwar

Differing Viewpoints 

    In the world of mainstream media, there are viewpoints and opinions that are simply just not covered by major news outlets like Fox News, CNN, NBC, etc. Due to this, Americans have to go to alternate media sources to get the coverage and updated news they are hoping to see in the mainstream media. One prime example of this is the viewpoint on wars. As Dr. Smith said it best, "There is never a war that the

mainstream media and government did not like." On a website like antiwar.com, they go to lengths to cover this altering viewpoint to the mainstream media. This is an example of alternative media. 

Where It Started 

The concept of not hearing from alternative viewpoints is something that stems from long before today's media. This goes back to the progressive era after the start of World War I. During this time, the Espionage and Sedition Act was in fruition, meaning citizens or government officials would be thrown into jail for

disagreeing with the war effort. This could happen for things they said or wrote. This is a mind-boggling thing to wrap my head around, considering where America has come with the First Amendment today. Due to these acts, I believe it "lit a fire" sort of speaks for the beginning of alternative media. 

Back to Today 

Bringing it back to where we are today, there is a reason that websites like antiwar.com must be sought out to find strong anti-war voices. The first reason you will never see viewpoints like this on mainstream media is because mainstream media aligns with the government. From what I have noticed in my short, time-consuming news, that is one trend I see. To conclude, altering viewpoints to the mainstream media may never be integrated on certain topics, and smaller-scale alternative media will have its place for Americans to consume their news from. 

EOTO 2

Alternative Media 

    The topic I was assigned for each one teach-one presentation was alternative media. Alternative media is defined as small-scale, politically radical media using a wide spectrum of communication technologies and formats. Essentially, alternative media is a smaller-scale platform like a website, podcast, YouTube channel, etc., offering a different opinion than you may typically see in mainstream media. Like everything else in life, alternative media has its positives, and it has its negatives. It is important to compare each pro to its con to really see the impact alternative media has.

Pros and Cons 

    On the positive side, it offers a platform for marginalized voices to be heard. These voices are typically

trumped by mainstream media, however, this should not be the case. Secondly, it provides an opportunity for communities to make their own media and offers educational and political empowerment to participants. Additionally, alternative media can serve as a counterpoint to the misinformation spread by corporate media. On the flip side,  political alternative media may contribute to less informed people due to the misinformation that can be spread in their work. Also, the ease of media production in today's society can raise concerns about the effectiveness of alternative media, as well as a lack of professional standards.

Effects on Society 

    When it comes to affecting society as a whole, alternative media covers and popularizes topics that mainstream tends to not cover at all or cover less than others. For example, mainstream media would never discuss a war they didn't support or be a part of. While alternative media outlets like antiwar.com have hundreds of antiwar articles written. So, alternative media can affect groups that are the minority when it comes to political or other world matters. This includes Political and ethnic minorities, labor groups, underprivileged groups, etc. These groups of people typically are underrepresented and overlooked. However, alternative media allows a platform for the news we consume to be more diverse and alternative viewpoints. When asked the question of how alternative media affect different groups of

people whether that is old or young, rich or poor, male or female, I believe alternative media affects every person differently based on what media they consume. For example, I was having a hard time was having a tough time figuring out what kind of alternative media I consume the most. It finally hit me that the alternative media I consume the most comes from the sports world. I use several other websites outside of companies like ESPN or Yahoo Sports to collect my information. A few examples include companies like WalterPicks, Talkin' Yanks, Jomboy Media, and several others.

Closing Remarks 

    Overall, I believe alternative media is a net win for the community. If mainstream media does not want to cover a view on a topic, someone has to provide different perspectives. I think the beauty of alternative media is it can be so personalized to what your likes or dislikes are and allows you to consume more media the way you like to. I believe multiple viewpoints on one topic create competitive thinking and challenge the reader to truly think about what they see every day on the news.

Diffusion

 

The Diffusion Theory 

One piece of modern-day innovation that I took a deeper dive into is TikTok. TikTok was released in

September 2016. Today it has 1 billion monthly active users. TikTok is not the first company to invent a vertical short-form video platform, however they are definitely the most successful in doing it. 

The first app to execute short-form, vertical video content was Vine. This platform crushed with this concept and had great success. Following that was Musically. I believe TikTok had so many early adopters because they saw the success of the brands before them doing the same product, and believed it would be as big if not bigger than those two companies. There are definitely reasons people are not adopters. One reason being people not wanting to have any social media presence. I've seen this firsthand with my father, where he wants nothing to do with any social media platform. Secondly, not wanting any of their information to be given to the TikTok platform. There have been multiple cases between the U.S. government and TikTok, and not everyone trusts the platform. 

To Participate or to Not Participate 

The choice to participate or not participate in a brand, trend, product, or service is one that consumers have to make every day. For me, I weighed the pros and cons of using TikTok. In the pro category, it is a platform where the company I work for conducts a majority of their advertising and how their service gains popularity. Two, it is an entertainment platform. I enjoy being able to lie down and scroll on TikTok.  These two factors outweigh the negatives for me. However, for other people, I could see the positives not outweighing their negatives. As TikTok continues to grow in popularity, it will continue to impact millions of users, and late adopters will continue to grow. 

EOTO Personal Presentation

The Typewriter 

 For the Each One Teach One project, the technological advancement I covered was the typewriter. Unlike other options chosen, this was a topic I really did not know a whole lot about which allowed me to gain lots of new knowledge about. In my research, I learned information about who the inventors are, the impacts they had on the way people communicated, what the typewriter led to as far as technological advancements in the modern day,  the issues it was trying to solve, and some negative impacts the typewriter had. 

Communications impact 

The first commercial typewriter was invented by Christopher Latham Sholes, Samuel Soule, and Carlos Gidden in 1867. During this time period, people were in need of a way to communicate more efficiently. In the current time period, written letters were the best way to communicate. The problem with this is it was slow and could have errors throughout. Thus the typewriter was created to help solve these problems. As time passed and the typewriter made its way into offices and homes around the country, the electric typewriter was created in 1920. With the electric typewriter, it was much faster and more efficient for its users, a positive impact on all parties involved. I believe the advancements it made in communication are the is the most important impact the typewriter had during its time period.  

Organization Benefits and Job Opportunities 

As the typewriter became more popular, it was used more in business settings. With the typewriter, businesses were able to utilize the typewriter to more uniformly and efficiently organize themselves, rather than all handwritten papers. They were able to standardize letters and documents which was greatly beneficial. Another important factor with typewriters was their durability. Originally typewriters were built out of heavy metals, making them very durable but maybe not so mobile. As the product evolved, slimmer and more portable designs were created. Not only did the typewriter help businesses, but it also created job opportunities for individuals in the workplace. The ability to type became a valuable skill to have, businesses now needed typists and secretaries to assist them. Typewriters were a common item seen in businesses for the next 100 years. It seems safe to say this invention had a major impact on the way communication and document standardization is in the modern day. 

Negative Effects 

Throughout my research almost all of the impacts the typewriter had were positive. Interestingly, one negative effect I did not account for was the noise in which the machine made. Each keystroke made a loud click sound. This could lead to a disruptive environment when multiple people are all typing away at once. I still see this problem in the modern day of people clicking away on their keyboards, so it looks like this effect is around for the long run. 

The Falloff 

The falloff of typewriters began in the 1980's. During this time period, the rise of personal computers surged, as well as the word processing system that came along with personal computers. This obviously was bound to happen to the typewriter as technology continued to advance, however, I believe the typewriter was a major stepping stone to how we type and communicate with each other today.  

Post 5: In the Age of AI

 The Age of AI 

Background 

During our class, we watched the first hour of the "In the Age of AI" documentary. Within the time we watched, the video discussed multiple different aspects of the impacts of technology on jobs, humans, and data, and overall challenged the world to adapt to the new world we live in, one full of AI. 

AI is Changing Our World 

The first example of AI changing our world comes from China. China has made impressive technological advancements. Something I learned was these advancements China has been making will put them ahead of the United States by 2025, and the most advancement in the work by 2030. I was blown away by how fast China moved from minimal AI use in their society to where they are today

with multiple billion-dollar AI companies. They went from not having credit cards to shopping at stores where they use face recognition as a payment method. One of my biggest takeaways from this example is the lack of privacy. We now live in a world where it is nearly impossible to have total privacy, especially now in China with facial recognition. As much as this is a takeaway, it also is the thing that frightened me the most after watching this documentary. 

AI is Not Perfect

Later on in the video, the documentary highlights AI and technology replacing tasks that humans would do for jobs. One scenario they took a deep dive into was a family who are truck drivers. Their family have been truck drivers for generations, and they discuss the challenges that they face with AI, as well as the challenges AI faces with them. The idea of a driverless truck is something that has been in conversation, however, I believe there are multiple outside factors that point in the direction that it would not be possible. 

Whether you like it or not, AI will be a part of businesses and our lifestyles for the rest of our lives. It is now our opportunity to adapt and change to the environment around us.