Grant Hines COM-1450-01

  Before learning about people dissenting against the government for going to war, I never realized the government was so against that when it came to free speech and press, especially when the press speaks about it. In the mainstream media you do hear talk about war, but never the opposition of it. Unless you are a person who really likes revenge, nobody truly likes the idea of war. It is costly, risks and losses lives, and ruins relationships with other countries. When it comes to the U.S. having its own people speak out against wars that we participate in or start, I really can't wrap my head around why they would want to silence them. One reason why I can think of why powerful politicians would be totally for war is because of the connection it has to money and power. Nowadays lots of defense spending goes to private contractors who pump billons of dollars into the government through contracts. If a president or other government official has interest in private defense contra...

  In the age of smart phones and readily available internet, anyone can be a journalist. In fact it is our duty to be a journalist whenever we see government wrongdoing that the public should know about. It is also important that we are citizen journalists because of the mainstream media's bias on news. By having everyday people who are not journalist by trade participate in journalism we can see firsthand what stories they are trying to tell unadulterated. We usually see citizen journalism when somebody feels like the government has wronged them because they document it firsthand and share it with the world in hopes of support. Through protest like the Black Lives Matter movement and Occupy Wall Street everyday citizens who are on the frontlines of these protest can directly address their viewers/listeners/readers about what is going on in their fight for their cause. This blog that I am writing can be considered Citizen Journalism because I don't owe loyalty to one entity and...

   The mainstream media is made up, mostly, of five media conglomerates that serve the news market in the U.S. Usually when people refer to the media they mean the sources that they get their news from, and most recently people have not had a large amount of trust for them. Since the beginning of television, media companies have been financially driven by ads, and those companies who pay to have their ads on TV have certain values that they want to adhere too. Some of these media companies, as seen above, who own news organizations will not run certain stories because it doesn't fit their agenda or makes their "side" look bad or because they want to give their advertisers want they want to hear. Not only does this take away journalistic integrity, but it also creates a monopoly. Five major companies own the vast majority of what we see on TV which means they get to control the narrative of what we see. This doesn't allow for very diverse points of view among different...

  When I first started using Instagram in the fifth grade in 2012 it had already been out for two years . Even though it had been out for two years, when I started using it nobody I knew had heard of it and nobody I knew was using it. Facebook was still the hottest social network in the market and people weren't letting up from it. Instagram offered something fresh and new, especially for millennials and Gen Z people. At that point Facebook was beginning to be taken over by the "adults" or people that were in the generation above Gen Z. Instagram offered a place where young people could quickly resort to their own space and share photos with their friends. Since its main purpose was to share photos people could put visuals to what they were thinking, and young people tend to like pictures more than they like reading words. For me and for a lot of other early adopters it was a space where I could connect with friends outside of face to face interaction and also regular cha...

  From a young age I was always taught that whatever you put on the internet will be out there forever. I never really took it seriously because I didn't think it was true. To an extent I still believe it is not true depending on who cares for whatever you are looking for. When company's like Facebook who owns Face.com have a reputation for targeting users based on their digital preferences and internet footprint, then I believe that whatever you post on sites like these is worth caring about. I also started believing more in what you post always stays on the internet when targeted ads started to become more prevalent. Everyone would always joke that the government or our phones were listening to us, but then it turned out to be true. Companies claim to only use this data to market to its users, but something still rubs me the wrong way knowing that they are listening to you. Luckily tech companies like Apple do an excellent job at assuring their customers data is private, espe...

  'The Facebook Dilemma' is a documentary detailing how Facebook willingly exposes it users data for profits. What really get me worked up was that Facebook willingly sells their users private information, but when asked about it they beat around the bush as if nothing is going on. One moment in the film that stood out to me, and made me a little excited, was when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was being interviewed at a forum  (32:52) and when asked if he how he felt about violating his own users privacy, he would not answer the question, and totally diverted the topic. For Facebook users this should be the first red flag for the social network as far as privacy, because during that interview Mark was clearly distressed and trying to avoid the question meaning he didn't have a direct answer. At this point Facebook had been around for long enough to have amassed millions of users so they were well aware of what was happening with their users data. At one point in the document...