Media Law and Literacy

  I thought that the AI video was really interesting. It was a strange combination of impressive and scary. I thought that the way China is using facial recognition as a way to pay for things is really fascinating. If scaled enough it could rid the need to carry around a credit card. My only concern is that if someone hacked into whatever system is used then they would have access to everyone’s financial information. Another thing that I thought was interesting were the automated trucks. Self driving cars is one thing, but self driving semi-trucks are a whole different story. All of the footage that was shown in the documentary was of the truck driving straight down a nearly empty highway. It made me curious of how well it could handle back roads or tight warehouse entrances. I was also shocked at how young the inventor was. Jumping back to China, I thought it was cool how integrated the systems were. It was almost scary how intertwined the AI network is, specifically regarding fac...

  Personally, I think that US antiwar news is not featured on major networks because there are not a whole lot of current breaking stories. Another reason is that there is a history of heavy government backlash when the public makes any major conflicting movement that does not follow their agenda. I’ll go over my first thought first.  From what I have seen/can remember in my lifetime, major news networks are nationalistic and try to avoid backlash. This means that they will steer clear from government aggression and avoid taking sides on certain controversial topics. This is why you never see a news anchor or reporter say anything extremely negative about the Black Lives Matter movement. You would never hear an anchor say that the BLM movement is a waste of energy and that they should just deal with unfair treatment. That anchor would be dead within a week and the network would be blacklisted. This same idea goes for military activity. There were a ton of antiwar rallies and p...

            I wrote a paper back in high school about the world wide web so I was happy to have learned more through our class presentations. The world wide web was created back in the late 1980s by Tim Berners-Lee. Tim worked for a company called Cern which as he called it an “extensive community” of thousands of scientists from all over the world. Since Cern was such a big company, it was a struggle to share information between coworkers. They needed a fast and automated way to share their findings and research with not only each other but also outside groups like universities and institutions. Hence the creation of the world wide web. The plan was never to expand the world wide web past the scientific field. However, once they realized its potential they opened it up to the public.  The first website made public was essentially an info screen that told users how the web worked and how to use it. This website was creatively named info.cern. Th...

      The concept of the Diffusion Theory is how new communications technologies’ market share grows and shrinks based on popularization over time. The theory breaks the market share curve into 5 distinct segments to categorize people who use the new technology based on when they started compared to the size of the market share. The graph makes it a lot easier to understand. The “new” technology I will be reviewing is a very small and unknown app called TikTok.I’m choosing to review TikTok because I do not have the app.  TikTok launched in 2016 and was developed by a Chinese company called ByteDance. Most of its early users or “adopters” were in china. TikTok had its first user spike in late 2017 when it acquired a rival platform called Musical.ly. When Musical.ly was acquired it had over 200 million users and just under 50% of its app usage came from the US, all of which were transferred over to TikTok. Having adopted all of Musical.ly’s American influencers...