Media Law

I think it is scary how much the government can figure out about a person just by looking at their web history or where they go. A lot of people do not know this, but we lost all our privacy rights with the Patriot Act of 2001. This act allowed the government to listen in on phone calls and monitor every aspect of life for everyone in the "search" of terrorism within the country. So, it makes sense to me that phones and computers nowadays are made for the purpose of spying on us. My friends and I make jokes about it all the time when we play video games together. For instance, I named the FBI agent or whoever is in charge of tracking me Josh tell him to stop listening to me or make jokes about him listening in. I also think that the license plate tracker thing is a bit unnecessary because most people carry their phones on them and phones are personal trackers. So, to me it just kind of seems extra, but I understand because then the government will know who drives what vehicle...

The video is very surprising because they go into great detail about the clear usage of these technologies that the big tech companies are using to invade our privacy and all other sorts of things. Before watching this video, I had already known that this stuff was happening over in China, but I did not really know how it was happening and the video showed a lot of insight into how things work over there. What scares me the most, is the fact that there are a lot more places already trying China's social credit system than I had originally thought. I think is very alarming because once you start putting labels on people, bad things tend to happen. This has happened over and over throughout history; Hitler and the Jews, Sunni and Shia, and the Uighur's in China. Once you give that kind of power to the government, you already lost because you forfeited your rights away and the government then controls everything. At the end of the video, they were talking about how the Chinese com...

According to the Meriam-Webster dictionary, propaganda has three separate definitions with the first one being, "A congregation of the Roman curia having jurisdiction over missionary territories and related institutions." The second, "The spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person." And the third, "Ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause." Propaganda today is mainly in reference to political material; however, it started out in a religious context. The Congregatio de propaganda fide (“Congregation for propagating the faith”) was an organization established in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV to further Catholic missionary activity. The word propaganda is from the ablative singular feminine of propogandus, which is the gerundive of the Latin propagare, meaning “to propagate.” The first use of the word propaganda, without the r...

  I think that it is hard to say what makes a good innovation because of the ability to have access to such innovation. The only reason I say this is because back when computers were first invented they were too big to be inside of a household until desktop computers were invented; even then it took a while for every household to have at least one desktop computer and that was only if they could afford it. The same thing could be said for cellphones because at that point everyone had a home phone with an answering machine or a pager with readily available payphones. With that being said, the first couple of designs for said cell phones were big and clunky and again, not readily available until later. Cell phones nowadays are more easily available and the means of production to produce them are more advanced than when they were first invented. So, I think that is a bit ambiguous to say who was an "Early Adaptor" for some innovations that were more available to some than others...

I think one of the main reasons it is hard to find websites like these is because big tech companies, like Google, do not want that kind of information to be easily available because they do not want people to know the truth. There is an information war going on right now between China and the U.S. All the big tech companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter are all based in China because if they become state-based, which they already have, they pay no corporate tax; which is why Trump lowered America's corporate tax. We all know that China censors what its people can see and what they say. We also know they are currently culling their Muslim population and have children working in sweatshops for cents, but for some reason, everyone just seems to look past that. These companies have strong ties in China because they are based there, so it makes sense that they would be heavily influenced by China in the sense that they would make what they promote more easily available than the ideas ...

  Up until about the 1440s, it was uncommon for people to own books or let alone read. Only the church, libraries, wealthy people of the time would have owned them and really the only people that could read them. This is because, at the time, most books were written in Vernacular; which was like common Latin, and only those smart enough could read them. That is until Johannes Gutenburg invented the Printing Press; which allowed for the mass production of books in multiple languages, so everyone had access to read. The Printing Press came out during the height of the Renaissance era, which allowed the works of great writers to spread throughout the world quickly and easily. Johannes Gutenburg was just a man with a dream; that dream being that everyone has the same access to information that should be common knowledge, but is not because they could not read back then. However, with the invention of the Printing Press, it made it a lot easier for people to get the education they need ...

  Recently, there has been a lot of censorship and banned accounts on social media platforms. Twitter, more specifically, is one of these big tech companies that is involved in this censorship that breaks the first amendment. The internet is an everyday tool that people use for countless things and everyone has the right to use it if they have access to it. Everyone is free to have their own opinion protected by the first amendment; which means people should also be allowed to share their opinion on these social media platforms. However, these big tech companies think it is okay to censor people's opinions while promoting others. Recently, Donald Trump was banned from a lot of these platforms; and even more recently the country of Nigeria banned the use of Twitter after the platform deleted their President's tweet. In response to this, Twitter said, "The internet is a human right and everyone should be able to freely use it" (paraphrasing). Think of it like this, Twit...