EOTO Response #2

 Blog Post #10 

Reading about online influencers was quite interesting to me because of how much we see this in today’s world with the rise of social media. It’s interesting to read about how online influencers have grown into how we see them today. The fact that most of these people were just random ordinary people that eventually blew up on a platform one day and just continued to grow and expand their followers to the point where it turned into their jobs is shocking. We as a society gave all of these people the title of influencers just because we enjoyed watching whatever they were putting out for us. 

The fact that there does not need to be anything spectacular about these people for them to get where they are today is so weird to me. There is nothing you can really do to get to where these people are today because it is so random of why they are now considered famous. I think a lot of us went from growing up watching people on YouTube who would vlog their lives and just take us along with them as they went about their day and because people liked watching it they grew a following and eventually started getting paid to entertain people. 

I think of online influencers as just ordinary people who society enjoyed watching and not so much as celebrities who post on social media who had a big following before joining an app. Celebrities and influencers are completely different from one another because social media is pretty much online influencers jobs and celebrities join in because they see how they can grow their audience and make additional money as well. There is no talent that is guaranteed to come with influencers like Alix Earl for example. She gained this huge following one day just because people would watch her “get ready with me” videos on TikTok and people found her relatable and also because they wanted to be like her. It is so random with who blows up on an app and can be considered as an influencer but if you are one of the few that gets the opportunity it is a full time job that you have to realize. 

As we move forward with the world of technology we see the rise of these online influencers. This is something fairly new within the last few decades and I find it so fascinating how it continues to develop as we continue to move forward and honestly seeing how long these people stay relevant for because you never know what could happen especially when it comes to the internet and what people are interested in watching or seeing and if you cannot keep up it could ultimately lead to their downfall. I will continue to stay interested in paying attention to online influencers and seeing the opportunities that arise for them with just being ordinary people others like to watch. 

Age of AI Blog Post

Blog Post #9

After watching the video In The Age of AI, I am quite scared of the future especially with how dependent we have all become on technology. Seeing the different ways people use technology and how they plan to use it in the future is helpful in some ways but also becomes a negative thing for our world. The amount of information that is tracked by our government and what they have access to is shocking. No one thinks about what happens after you send an email and where it goes to because it can seem so harmless but there is so much information that the government can get out of that simply from your email address is scary. The more we move forward with technology it just gives even more access for people in higher places to find out whatever they want to from us. 

Privacy just flies right out of the window when we really think about technology because nothing is kept private after you put something out there. Technology companies have access to your information no matter what, as long as you are using something they own you are pretty much just giving up your rights to privacy. Everything is tracked these days without us even realizing it. Nothing is a coincidence these days with the ads that pop up on your social media feed, websites, etc. This all comes from the fact that every little search is tracked and now they are trying to match what you like with the ads that pop up. After accepting those privacy and rights agreements that you are given when you first start using a device, you are then giving away your rights to privacy. This is interesting to think about because without agreeing to those conditions you don’t have access to anything is basically what it is saying. This can be seen as a negative to using technology which is completely understandable. Although we look past it and still use technology everyday it still makes me stop and think why we are all okay with giving up our privacy especially if we care so much about keeping those rights.

Not only do we give up our rights to privacy but with how the world is moving, we are turning into a more virtual world which then breaks away from reality sometimes. It is crucial for humans to have social interactions away from a screen but as we have seen with the later generations kids are growing up completely different than how earlier generations have. More and more of daily interactions are happening online whether it is through talking to people while playing video games, talking over the phone, through social media, etc. It takes the focus away from the importance of normal in person human interactions because of how much more convenient it can be just interacting online. Even something as simple as going out shopping has changed to more people just shopping online instead of going out and doing it in person because of the convenience it brings for so many. I fear the more technology develops we will see people become lazier and also lose the importance of social interactions and develop social skills in the way we do currently. 

Of course technology has so many benefits to it whether it’s for having a more efficient way to gain information, use it for fun, talking to people virtually, etc. I could not picture my life without having some form of technology in it in some way. Technology does make things easier when it comes to school work like typing this blog post instead of having to hand write this with a pen and paper. Technology can also be a benefit for talking to people who live far away and staying connected to them through online communication apps such as iMessage, Facetime, zoom, social media platforms, etc. As long as we use technology carefully it can bring us so many more benefits but the most important thing with it is being careful and always remembering to be cautious because it stays with you forever through your digital footprint.

Technology is developing more every single day and it is important that we understand why we need to be careful and never rely on it too much or else it will do more harm than good for us and society. We need to be aware of how our privacy is no longer in existence online and that it could negatively impact us with our freedom especially moving forward. 

Final Exam Blog

 Final Blog Post

Our Relationship With Technology and Technologies Relationship With Us 

    Growing up I had parents who were very cautious when it came to technology. Everything I used online was monitored by them constantly. I never understood the reasoning behind this as I did not understand the downsides of technology and the internet so I was always confused why I was told to be careful and could only use certain apps or websites. I was given my first iPod for my eighth birthday by my parents and I was told I could not download any type of social media and I only had access to it when I was on WiFi. I really only used it for texting my parents and playing games.

    I received my first official phone at the end of sixth grade and had to maintain honor roll each semester of school in order for me to keep it and if I failed to do so it would be taken away until my grades were where they needed to be. Even after my parents gave me my phone I was not allowed to have any social media on it and anything I wanted to download for an app had to be approved by my parents first. In eighth grade my parents bought me my first Macbook for school and that was the only purpose for me to have that computer. 

    The summer before I started High School, my parents made the decision of allowing me to have social media but all of those apps were put on a screen time limit. I had felt left out with my friend group as I was the only one who had a limit on how long I could use social media and I already felt like I was behind as all of my friends had Instagram and Snapchat since middle school and I was just allowed to use it my freshman year. Looking back at it now I am thankful my parents tried to keep me away from social media for as long as they did and know that it was not because they wanted me to be left out but instead to keep me safe and not have to deal with the bad things that can come along with social media. 

    Growing up having a screen time limit on my phone and all of my devices has made my relationship with technology a lot healthier than I think I would have had with it if I was able to be on it all the time. Not only did I have a limit, but I was also not allowed to bring my phone into my room until my freshman year of high school. I still could not use my phone past a certain time so it was really only used as an alarm during my freshman and sophomore year which helped with my sleep patterns. Something I had learned when reading an article by the Cleveland Clinic, there are many reasons as to how not using your phone at night benefits your health such as avoiding the contact with blue light that your phone produces especially late at night. It also can make you fall asleep quicker as your brain isn't staying active while you mindlessly scroll through apps and instead has time to realize you are tired and need to sleep. It has always been a priority of mine to focus on getting enough sleep at night so I can be productive and having a screen time limit has helped me maintain that and has continued even after my screen time was not being controlled by my parents anymore. 

    

    I have seen the good and bad that has come from technology from personal experiences but also through the eyes of my friends and family. With my friends I have seen many of them have a change in their attitudes about things and how they felt on a day to day basis based on something that would happen using social media whether it was them comparing themselves to others, being upset because someone didn't text them or Snapchat them that day or because of something someone had said to them through social media. Technology has been apart of my generation for a while that most of us use it to determine how we look at things and how we feel personally. Of course there have been a lot of benefits to social media and technology in general as it helps us keep in touch with one another when we are far away from each other and want to talk or see what our friends are up to which is great especially when I am at school in North Carolina and the rest of my friends are back in Connecticut and I cannot see them all the time like I could when we went to school together. Technology also helped me to connect with my roommates before school started so I knew a little bit about them before we started living together. 

    I use technology for many reasons whether it's for school, talking to friends on Facetime or just on the phone, social media, and TikTok. I constantly use my Macbook for school work for doing assignments, checking grades, sending emails, etc. Of course I don't just use my computer for work and also use it for watching movies and shows from time to time or for research purposes and especially for editing photos for the sports teams I take pictures of for work. I am constantly on my phone as well for talking to friends and family whether I am texting or on the phone with them talking about whatever we have to say at the time. One of my favorite things about my phone is Facetime because I love talking and actually being able to see my friends while I am talking to them or my family. While I am away my family loves to Facetime me so I can be present virtually at things such as birthday dinners, watching my brothers sports games while they are there or just being able to show them around my campus or whatever is going on in my life along with theirs. Whenever I visit my friends back home I love to Facetime my friends here so I can show them things I am doing or if I want them to see something that reminds me of them or even just meeting my friends I am with over the phone. I love using social media to post what I am up to so that my friends can see what I am up to but also to see what my friends are up to as well. I also love using social media to see what is happening in celebrities lives especially recently with Taylor Swift releasing her newest album, The Tortured Poets Department and getting to see the fact that she surprised us with this album by releasing 31 new songs which I would not have realized until later if I did not see her post about it. I also do love seeing news outlets, fans, and Taylor Swift's friends posting about her relationship with Travis Kelce but that is just something I enjoy personally. TikTok is also another app I love to use just to pass time by and see the stupid little videos people post that somehow intrigue me and entertain me throughout the day. It is basically the same reason I like using Instagram so I can see things happening and even get pop culture news, regular news updates and I even find myself discovering new shows, music, etc that I did not realize I would like before seeing it pop up in my feed. 

    Technology and social media are two very big things in my life and with that comes its ups and downs. Having parents who showed me the importance of being cautious with how much time I spend on social media helped me to create a healthy and balanced relationship between the real world and the digital world. As we continue to develop into a more digital world it is important to understand to be kind and respectful and make social media a more positive environment for everyone to enjoy and be mindful of the negative effects that can come with technology if you get carried away. 

EOTO: Gatekeeping and Agenda Setting

 Blog Post #8

Gatekeeping and Agenda Setting

Something that has become such a big thing within the world of social media especially on apps such as TikTok, we constantly either see or hear the word “gatekeeping” being used. This is being used in the context of people not revealing the name of something such as a product one may use in order to keep it from being sold out by people now buying it because they want to use that product. The definition of gatekeeping is the activity of controlling and limiting general access to something. 

As mentioned before gatekeeping has become a more popular word on social media and the people using it are in fact using the word correctly. These days when we think of the word gatekeeping we think of someone not releasing a name of a brand, product, or even a specific band to keep it from becoming sold out or becoming more in demand that it is now either hard to find or becoming ridiculously expensive. The word “gatekeeping” was first used with this definition back in 1943, which isn’t that long ago when you really think about it. It was coined by a social psychologist named Kurt Lewin. Now back in 1943 this word would not have anything to do with social media as it was yet to be a thing at that time. Gatekeeping was used in the sense of information being put out by journalists and the censored information they would put out to the public of what they wanted them to read and what the editors wanted to keep for themselves. Although it started out as just a journalism thing to do, of course social media now has a use for that word within the people using whatever app they choose to apply their “gatekeeping” on. Gatekeeping is seen more as a negative thing nonetheless by people who want to know information that is being kept from them, while the people using gatekeeping think it’s a positive way to keep things from becoming too popular and they are in jeopardy of not being able to use something anymore. 

Agenda setting can go along with gatekeeping in the aspect where we see it happen online especially on social media and used by news outlets constantly. This is something used to make something more appealing to people from what they are reading or seeing. It can cause an influence or determine a program of action. This can be done through thumbnails within social media posts or videos where words that may be intriguing and cause people to view something. It can also be used as headings within newspapers or news outlets articles they put out when they want to get the attention of an audience and will do whatever they can by using big headings with the words “special report”, “breaking news”, etc. Agenda setting can also be used within political ads, campaigns and pr with the intentions of getting the grasp of people's attention. 

Agenda setting and gatekeeping can really go hand and hand as you have the intentions of grabbing the attention of an audience and when you are doing so you may want to censor information in order to keep people intrigued and only put out things you believe will benefit you and keep out information that may hurt you and keep people from paying attention to what you are putting out. These are two key terms that we see being used more and more these days and have created a whole new way we get to see information being put out and realize how much things are censored in order to grasp the attention of people and keep it there with understanding what people want to hear and see and keeping the rest of the information kept away from the public eye. 

Privacy On and Offline

 Blog Post #7 

Privacy On and Offline

In the videos I had watched, there were a lot of issues that have affected me. I never realized the importance of being careful on social media until it hit me personally. I’m sure we have all had the talks with our parents at some point in our lives about the importance of being careful on social media but sometimes we don’t listen and there are consequences that follow. In each of these videos, there were many issues that are important and that really do have an effect on our lives especially because when you put something out on the internet it will stay there forever. 

These issues can affect me in many ways. It can be harmful with how everything online can be traced and tracked without us even realizing what is happening. There are many occasions where we either post things on social media and have some idea of how it can all be traced back to us whether it is good or bad, but beyond social media there are so many other things we don’t realize are being tracked as well. Nothing with technology is private. Even with emails that we think are private, they too collect data from us especially overtime because there is never just one single email. Data is collected through emails we send and given to the government, internet providers and email providers which we never really realize when we are in the moment of sending an email out or afterwards. By the time we realize who else has access to our data online it’s too late. Our data will live longer than we will and it can find out a lot about us that we don’t realize. We all know that the more we post or look up things on the internet, we put out more and more of our private information and now have a digital footprint that can cause more harm to us than we may realize. Technology takes away and causes us to lose control over our privacy and data. When it comes to us losing our privacy we lose the idea of it as well which can cause issues down the road and changes the entire meaning of privacy. 

It’s interesting to see how much the internet affects us today with the amount of privacy we have left from it. As much as we love to rely on technology especially with how the world is moving today, it causes issues for many and overall affects our privacy we have as people. You never realize how this will affect you until it comes to something bad happening which can happen at any moment. 

Anti War

Blog Post #6    

            There always seems to be talk that America’s society has this fascination with the idea of a free democracy filled with freedom of expression and thought, and yet everywhere we look there is some spin of bias put on information in one way or another. Major news networks across the United States stray from that idea of freedom of thought and expression as these sources we find ourselves using the most are filled with their own bias which takes away the whole point of freedom of thought. It seems as if we only focus on news outlets such as Fox News and CNN. Both of these examples are heavily filled with bias whether it be from a Republican or Democratic perspective and it is very rare that we will find a mainstream news outlet that is bias free. The same idea goes for publication companies that are categorized as major news outlets as well such as The New York Post, New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Of course all of these sources get the same information out for their viewers and readers, they all have their own way of doing so depending on where their bias falls on a specific topic. 

The most obvious opposite news sources we have named are CNN and Fox News. These two news companies have completely different views as one is perceived as the heavily liberal news station and the other, the extremely conservative news station. Although both of these news sources cover the same topics, the way they view them are completely different and because of that it attracts a specific type of audience to their network. Because of the high amount of relevance that surrounds the democratic and republican parties it causes controversy when it comes to these news outlets. This keeps both of these news sources relevant by the bias they bring because as much as people hate to admit it, they like to be fed information in the way they believe it should be heard and they don’t want to hear otherwise. We claim our society prefers unbiased sources but that could not be farther from the truth. If that were the case we would see more biased free news sources in the mainstream news outlet categories instead of the same sources circulating constantly.

Whenever we see other sources release information that seems to be out of our society’s norms they are deemed to become irrelevant and pushed to the side. We see an example of this when looking at the Antiwar and The American Conservative websites. In today’s society, we promote ideas and information that fit in with a certain category of individuals whether we are referring to conservatives or liberals and try to promote ideas and information that correlate with their views and when they do not, we tend to ignore it and pay no attention to the information. Although these ideas are seen to fit with conservatives when it comes to the American Conservatives website, it still is not seen as relevant information for a major news outlet like Fox News to cover because it focuses on a variety of subtopics and not so much on the major ones we see the larger outlets cover more often. We also see other outlets be pushed aside just because of the difference of opinions or solutions they give. We really only focus on the main societal norms when it comes to news sources and anything that strays from that idea becomes irrelevant and therefore forgot about. 

History of Bluetooth

Blog Post #5

 Bluetooth was developed in the late 1900’s and quickly gained mass popularity in consumer devices. After the radio was invented, Ericsson’s MTD company wanted to find a way to expand the functionality of mobile phones since they had been growing rapidly in popularity at the time. Soon after the company decided they wanted to expand that functionality, their manufacturer started to develop a technology for several years that aimed at freeing computers, phones and other devices from the wires required to transfer data between them which Dr. Haartsen was able to actually create.

In 1996, industry leaders from Intel, Ericsson, and Nokia had met to discuss how this protocol could be standardized between short-range radio technology to support connectivity and collaboration. Jim Kardach had suggested that because the wireless protocol needed a name, they should use a code name before formally naming this protocol. Kardach thought of naming the protocol “Bluetooth” after reading about Harold Gormsson who was a famous viking who was given the nickname “Bluetooth” because it was believed that he had a rotting front tooth that had appeared to be a blueish gray. 

Harald Gormsson was famous for uniting Denmark and Norway, and because Kardach thought that was similar to their work, which was trying to unite cellular industries with short- range wireless links which led to Jim Kardach suggesting “Bluetooth” to be the official name for their invention which is what they ended up naming it. 

Two years later, Ericsson assembled a group of computer and electronics companies, known as the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. This newly established group was formed to bring the technology to the consumer market. In 1999 the first hands-free mobile headset was launched along with the first Bluetooth 1.0 specification. Twenty five years after the first ever launch of Bluetooth, we now have Bluetooth 5.0 which is two times faster, has four times more range, and eight times more capacity. 

Bluetooth has changed our society in ways that benefit how we can communicate through technology such as how we talk to one another through mobile devices. Bluetooth has evolved over the years from starting out as a headset to now smartphones, refrigerators, light bulbs, hands free car systems, etc. 

The invention of Bluetooth has revolutionized how people communicate with one another on a daily basis through technology. Without this communication technology in our lives, the world would not be as connected through the internet as we are today.