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 ...

Ryan Smith When thinking about a current event to talk about for this post, I didn't want to cover something like the Black Lives Matter movement or the storming of the capitol as they seemed too far back and I wanted to talk about something very recent. The BLM movement was last year, and the storming of the capitol was in the very first week of this year, so I chose something going on in this current month, and that is the censorship of all holidays at schools. While this isn't a nationwide event at the moment, it very well could be in the future. Starting June 10th, 2021 every holiday in the academic calendar will be removed and be replaced with "day off" to prevent offending anyone. Not only does this cause confusion, but it's actively destroying freedom of speech in order to protect people's feelings. This culture that we've grown into is extremely detrimental to society because it teaches people to censor things they don't like so they never have...

Ryan Smith When talking about the 8 values of free expression, a lot of the different values stood out to me, to the point that I couldn’t just choose one as the focal point for me. When reading each of the 8 blurbs and trying to think of them in a certain context, one that screamed out at me was social media. What once started as simply a way to connect with others online has become a cesspool of exclusivity, double-standards, and mob mentality. This is going to be a handfull, let’s start off with Value #6: Promote Tolerance. In recent years, people on social media have become so incredibly closed-minded to the point that they can never change their mind on anything, it’s actually sad. The people claiming to best the most inclusive people are actively taking away freedom of speech, which meshes well with Value #4. I understand being against people using slurs, but people will find a way to complain about anything someone has said nowadays. Using blanket terms like “hate speech” detrac...

Ryan Smith What did you learn about the Supreme Court that you didn't already know? At the very beginning of the article, it states that the Supreme Court was going to meet for the first time on February 1st, 1790, but they had to delay it to the next day because of scheduling conflicts. While not a very important detail compared to the rest being discussed, this blurb at the very beginning added a slight comedic hook to encourage me to read the rest and may have done so for others as well. What is the most important take-away point about the Supreme Court? While it's something that I've already known for a long time, I think the most important take-away when learning about the Supreme Court is that it's an incredible risky move to make by going there. You want to take your case to smaller courts first to get the outcome you need and only only go to the supreme court as an absolute last resort. If you fail at the Supreme Court, then there's nothing else you can do a...

 Ryan Smith In recent times, I've tended to stray away from current events and I don't seek out news and information. A lot of this behavior has stemmed from the past year and a half, but the Coronavirus actually isn't a huge reason why I've been avoiding news. Sure, it contributed a bit, but there was just a bunch of other events during that time-frame that really made me sick of current events and made me completely disconnect. I don't use any kind of social media either, be that Twitter, Instagram, etc. It's because of that that the sources of information I do have are sources that I don't necessarily want, but can't avoid. #1 - Word of Mouth This one is pretty obvious, but of course due to the nature of the source, there's no real way to reference or link it. A lot of the time, someone will just come up to me and say "Hey, Ryan! Did you hear about ___?" Yes, there may be a bit (or possibly more) bias coming from the person giving the in...