Blog #5

 The thing that I found to be the most alarming is location information.  The fact that the government can now track where we've driven and what places we've been to do create a portrait on how private citizens interact is very alarming to me.  I have been to places that only close family and friends have known about to to now realize that the Government knows that I've been there makes me feel a little bit creeped out.  I also think it's very weird how they take pictures of us just simply standing in our driveways.   This 100% affects my family because there is a license plate scanner, one of the most used pieces of technology used to figure out where we've all been going, right near my mom's work that she has to drive by everyday.  This makes me wonder if they have any pictures of my mother in our driveway.  I think that the government needs to crack down on this.  They shouldn't keep tabs on us like this and shouldn't be allowing police departments to keep a database on where we've all been.  The way we can protect ourselves from this is simply speaking up.  If enough people speak up to our city councils, we can get them to create laws that prevent this from happening.  We can get them to allow the people that have done nothing wrong to live with privacy while continuing to allow police departments to track the people they are looking for.   

Blog #4

 

The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who worked for a company called CERN.  Cern is, "not an isolated laboratory, but rather the focal point for an extensive community that includes more than 17 000 scientists from over 100 countries." It was originally invented to share automated information between scientists in Universities and Institutes. They never intended on it going any farther than that until they realized how amazing the World Wide Web was at sharing information for one another. That's why on April 30th 1993, CERN released the World Wide Web to the public.  The first public website ever created was info.cern the site was a very basic white screen with black arial text that simply just told us how to navigate the web. At first there wasn't a web browser that could be used and then there was one that was developed by Time Berners-Lee as well. The search browser was called NeXT which has a ton of the same qualities that are still used in web browsers today, and it also gave you the ability to modify pages from inside the browser making it the first web editing skill on the World Wide Wed.

As we know, the World Wide Web has had a massive impact on us to this day. It makes it much easier for us to communicate with literally anyone in the world, and allows us to share and receive information much easier between friends, families, and news corporations. Now despite all these good things, there are also people out there that believe that the World Wide Web has had a very negative impact on society. The reason for this is because with the World Wide Web comes things like security breaches, cyber theft, and internet addiction which are three things that have had a bit of an impact on my life and people close to me. For example, some guy from China hacked my parents email about 5 years ago and got the password to all of their accounts. The guy ended up spending over $400 dollars on their Amazon account. After a week my parents finally got the issue resolved until the hacker came back and did it agin, restarting the entire process. Another example is one of my friends saw a cute picture of a dog on Gofundme and the owner didn't have enough money to pay for the dog's surgery so my friend donated $20 to go towards the dog's surgery. The next day my friend got his debit card information pulled and had a $70 charge on his account on some random music website that he never visited before. Also nowadays you see a ton of people, specifically millennials that are nonstop on their phones constantly scrolling through social media. Although social media isn't all bad, it definitely hurts our skills to socialize with others. These three things along with other consequences that comes with the Web like fake news and cyber bullying is enough in some people's eyes to say that we'd actually be better off without the World Wide Web.

Blog Post #3

I think Individual Self-Fulfillment is the most important value of the Eight Values of Free

Expression.  I'm a big believer in freedom of speech.  Without it we wouldn't be the people we are today.  Free speech allows people to express themselves freely which helps build character and really just turn us into the people we are.  When given the right of free speech we can do anything with it.  We can do bad with it by putting others and ourselves down or we can do good with it by fighting what we believe in, and spreading positivity which helps make this world a better place.  You see a lot of people on social media that are trolling others online and spreading negativity, and then you got a lot of people that do the opposite and promote charities and all this other stuff.  Free speech is a privilege that we have and it's up to us on how to use it and how we use it will play into our identity.    

Unfortunately, our freedom of speech is slowly getting taken away from us.  One place where freedom of speech is barely tolerated is social media.  All social Media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and so on are taking down posts that go against their agenda.  An example of this is how current White House press secretary Jen Psaki has admitted to colluding with Facebook by taking down things that they consider false information.  Social Media started just being a platform where we can connect with friends and see what's going on in our friends and families lives.  Now Facebook is a platform that is working with the Government to take down things that the Government don't want up.  It's frightening to see how all these "Big Tech" companies are so powerful that they even silenced our sitting President at the time.  Seeing how Big Tech has this much power is very frightening.  At any given time you could be silenced by Big Tech and won't be able to speak your mind anymore.  This is a violation to our freedom of speech and if we lose our freedom of speech completely, it will deeply hurt our country by making the American people robots that are programmed to have the opinions that our government wants us to have.  

It's very important that we stay true to ourselves and always maintain the courage to speak freely.  We must fight the censorship so that way we still have the ability to live the life we want to live.    Without Free speech, we will just be a bunch of sheep that are controlled by the Government.  

Blog Post #2

 I was unaware that the Supreme Court actually works in private.  Most court cases are very public so whenever I hear the word "court" I think of a public trial.  Never knew that the Supreme Court works in private.  I think the most important thing about the Supreme Court is that they are primarily responsible to the law and to uphold the constitution.  Unfortunately, we haven't always seen this when it comes to trials.  

There have definitely been some instances where our justice system has failed us at times and people have gotten away with things they shouldn't have gotten away with.  It's important that the most powerful court of them all upholds the constitution and gives everyone a fair trial.  This video really made me respect the Supreme Court.  There has been so many times in my lifetime where people have been either wrongly accused of something or have gotten away with something due to not receiving a fair trial.  When it comes to the Supreme Court I feel like that isn't going to happen.  The Supreme Court's number one duty is to sustain the Constitution.  The Supreme Court also takes on the biggest cases possible so after watching this video I can definitely say I have gained a lot of respect for the Supreme Court.  

Blog Post #1

 The first place I go to in order to receive news on sports would be Bleacher Report.  Bleacher Report is an app that gives the latest news updates on literally everything sports.  The way it works is you create a profile, and choose from a long list of things that you would like to be kept up to date with.  Personally, I'm a huge fan of baseball, basketball, football, as well as boxing and MMA.  so I choose to be updated on news from all those sports as well as my favorite team and fighters for each individual sport.  You can even go as far as getting updates on things such as sports video games or new basketball sneakers that will be coming out soon.  It's a good app that I recommend all sports fans to download.  

The place I go to in order to get news about whats going on in the world is The Daily Wire.  The Daily Wire is one of the fastest growing media companies in the country.  They have well know media personnel like Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles and so on.  The Daily Wire for the most part is a conservative news outlet but people like Candace Owens bring people on her show that'll argue the other side of things which is why I like the Daily Wire so much.  Its's very hard nowadays to find a news outlet that argues both sides and I think it's very important for media to do that more often so that the people can form their own opinions.  

Another place I go to get my news on anything in terms of sports, world events, and pop culture is Youtube.  Youtube in my personnel opinion is the best way to get news if used correctly.  There are a lot of different people on Youtube that talk about things going on in the world and a lot of them aren't credible.  It's important not to get your information from some random person that has only a thousand subscribers because those are the people that are most likely supplying you with bias information.  All big organizations like the Daily Wire for example have a youtube channel that post videos that are exclusively for Youtube.  It's pretty much just another way to receive news from every big organizations about literally anything.   

Another app I use to get news is Instagram.  Kinda like Youtube, Instagram if used correctly could be a good app for all sorts of news.  Personally I use Instagram to get news like when my favorite movies will be coming out, when certain albums will be released, and to hear clips of my favorite athletes interviews.  Some of the accounts that I follow for news like this are ESPNmma, Rap, Netflix etc.   I think Instagram can be good for world news as well but a lot of people, especially young people, tend to just believe anything they see despite it not coming from credible sources so you just have to be careful with where you get your information from on Instagram.                                      

Lastly, I get most of my news from my parents.  My parents are much more in tune with whats going on in the world today so whenever I hear about something I go to them in order to get more clarity on the subject.  My parents watch a lot of TV and  listen to a lot of these political figure's shows, like Candace Owens, Mike Lindell, Tucker Carlson, Tom Llamas etc.  They listen to a lot of experts on both the right and left side which helps them form there opinion which is why I like hearing what they have to say when it comes to politics.