Media Law & Literacy - Summer 2021

 Ryan Smith While everything from the TED Talk videos seem scary at first, when you step back and really think about it, there's really nothing to be afraid of if you're a law-abiding citizen who doesn't mad bad decisions. The one thing that did really upset me more than scare me was the fact that the government has hundreds of pictures of your license plate wherever you go during your everyday life "just in case". This angered me a bit because it completely forgets about and/or ignores the "innocent until proven guilty" principle, except it's even worse. That ideology is only for when someone is accused of doing something wrong. Taking dozens if not hundreds of photos of people's license plates when they are completely innocent just sounds extremely wrong. The fact that they save them "just incase they ever do something wrong" seems extremely predatory and takes away from your privacy. Moving from an invasion of privacy to a protection

 Ryan Smith I went into watching In the Age of AI  with the mindset of "I think I'm going to learn some things from this film, but I don't think I'll be shocked or scared by anything" and I was mostly right. I did learn a decent amount from the film, but there was a thing or two that concerned me in the film. One thing that I found really interesting that the idea of self-driving cars actually started with a golf cart. Talk of self-driving cars has been going on for a while now with companies like Tesla and it was super cool to learn that detail. One thing I was definitely not happy learning about was the anti-jaywalking program in Shenzhen that has a database of every person matched to a face that will publicly shame you to everyone. It makes me fear that other communist/fascist countries in the world have similar technology to match every person's face to an identity and completely take away their freedom. On a different note, an argument that some use for w

Ryan Smith The Twisted Malice of Echo Chambers Today I want to talk about Echo Chambers, how dangerous they can be, and how easily they can be used and exploited with a few tactics, mostly in the context of Twitter. While I mainly will be talking about echo chambers, I will be briefly bringing up a couple of the other terms that were possible choices due to them being tactics that help maintain echo chambers and will lead to a better explanation. An echo chamber is defined as an enclosed online space in which you only find opinions equal to your own and nothing else. You may understand what the definition of an echo chamber is now, but how do they stay intact? One of the tactics used by Twitter echo chambers is blocking. While it may seem very straightforward and obvious, here is how that works in depth. If someone has a differing opinion than someone in an echo chamber, and that person is blocked by them, they can no-longer see or reply to the tweets from the person in the echo-chambe

 Ryan Smith I originally didn't want to do my post on this topic because I was worried that other people in the class would also do their post on this topic and felt that it would be too common, but instead of worrying about what other people are doing, I decided to do it anyway and make this post the best I can. The smartphone is something that the majority of people take for granted nowadays, but let's be more specific. When the iPhone was released in 2007, it was unlike anything we'd ever seen before. A phone, internet browser, and MP3 player all in one device was insane for the time. To some, people in the United States who don't have an iPhone or smartphone in general can sound crazy, although that is an extremely shallow mindset, because there are some reasons why someone may not want one. One very obvious one is that someone may have one of the smartphones from the competition like an Android. It's decently well-known that Android phones can do more than iPho

 Ryan Smith For a while, I struggled with how to put what to say for this post, but after about 2 days, I realized that this is supposed to be an opinionated post, and there isn't a "right answer" like something like the EOTO post. So personally, the reason why I think that we don't see many people with anti-war mindsets in current day is because so much other stuff has been going on. 2020 was an almost if not unanimously hated year, and it seemed like something new was going on every single week to make our lives a living hell. There were talks of a possible "World War 3" at the very beginning of 2020, but as soon as the coronavirus hit and everything else started happening, a lot of people forgot about that possibility due the sheer amount of events, I know I did. Another reason why we may not have as many people with strict anti-war mindsets compared to 100 years ago could be that we don't have a draft anymore. If people want to sign up for the milita

 Ryan Smith For my technology I'll be teaching about in my post, I wanted to talk about something that almost everyone if not everyone in the class has used, but may not know the history of or the inner workings of, that being the Nintendo Wii. The motion controller that gave the Wii its name did not have its origin in gaming, but instead in aeronautics. The technology was first developed by a company named Gyration, and was only pitched for gaming 2 decades after its creation. Funnily enough, just like Blockbuster refusing to buy out Netflix and later regretting that decision, the exact same situation happened when it came to the Wii. Tom Quinn, Gyration's CEO, pitched his technology to Steve Balmer, Microsoft's CEO at the time and he loved the idea, but the Xbox team felt the exact opposite, and the opportunity was lost for Microsoft. After the unsuccessful pitch to Xbox, Quinn pitched his technology to Sony, which had the same outcome. The Playstation team were also not