Blog #12

 Confirmation bias is only seeing new information that confirms your previous beliefs.  This is something that we sadly see all the time in todays world.  People will constantly just refuse to believe that their side is wrong and will only listen to people that will fuel their beliefs.  This is something that we don't just see in politics.  I personally am a massive sports fan, and as we know sports fans can get very attached and emotional to there favorite team and players to the point where they are convinced that they are good even though that's just not the case.  ESPN analyst and former host of the show First Take Skip Bayless is a great example of that.  He has a strong dislike towards NBA star Lebron James and still thinks that Micheal Jordan who his over fifty years old could beat Lebron James in a game of basketball to this day.  He also shoots down Lebron's accomplishments all the time and refuses to think Lebron is one of the best basketball players ever no matter what he does.  You do, as I mentioned earlier, see this in politics a lot as well.  There are youtube videos out there where people are reading a quote from Bernie Sanders and saying that Trump said it and the people are agreeing with it but once they figured out that Trump is the one that said the quote they don't know what to do with themselves.   People will just believe anything they here if they think it came from someone that they support.        

Blog #11

 I personally am against Wikileaks and believe what they did was wrong.  The video that was leaked in the Baghdad Airstrike in 2007, Wikileaks used selective editing and didn't present the full story.  If you were to watch the video that Wikileaks put out, it would look like that we just started shooting at innocent civilians but in reality that isn't true.  In the video you can see at least one man holding an AK-47 and you can see anther man holding a grenade launcher.  Wikileaks used agenda setting to push their narrative to make it seem like what happened in Baghdad was a "atrocity" when in reality that's just not the case.  I think the critiques that Julian Assange has gotten for being "anti America" are accurate.  This is a guy that has leaked things on both sides and I think the reason for that is to make our country look bad regardless of political party.  I also though don't really think that Julian Assange is some sort of attention seeker and a fake journalist.  I think this is just the false realty of journalism today.  I think journalists are set in their ways and instead of accurately reporting on things they go ahead and report on things in a way that they make it look the way they want it to look.  Nowadays it's hard to find any sort of media outlet that will be unbiased and will just report the facts of the situation.  It seems like nowadays all that the media is focused on is pushing their narrative and not reporting the facts which is a huge problem in this world.  

Blog #10

 Living in the age of AI does nothing but scare me.  I know this has nothing to do with the video but it's definitely worth mentioning.  In my junior year of high school, my teacher told us all a story about how these robots created their own language that way they can communicate with one another without humans being able to understand them.  The fact that AI can do these type of things is very scary to me.  I also thought is was fascinating how in the video AI figured out how to get really good at the game of pong in a relatively short period of time.  It just goes to show how smart AI can really be.  Now the reason this worries me is because I feel like if AI can become so smart, they can become a threat to human beings around the world.  First of all they could takeaway jobs from people.  Nowadays you see people's jobs being replaced by machines all the time.  It's the cheaper option and works just as well.  As we've seen, AI is just as if not more intelligent than us so eventually as AI evolves they'll be able to perform jobs much better than humans, and it'll be the cheaper option since they won't have to be paid. and even worse they could just take over the human race.  If AI is so smart that they can create their own language in a short period of time then the sky is the limit for what they can do.  

Blog #9

 Agenda setting is a theory that was first introduced in 1972 by Dr. Maxwell McCombs and Dr. Donald Shaw.  It's the idea that the public's opinion is set by the media.  Nowadays we are always seeing media outlets and other companies constantly pushing their agenda onto people.  A good example of this is Facebook.  Current White House press secretary Jen Psaki came out and said that they were working with Facebook to censor certain content.   They're doing this to simply push their narrative and eliminate arguments from the opposing side.  You also see News Outlets all the time using people's human values and fear to their advantage in order to make them think what they want them to believe.  AN example of this is if you were to turn on CNN, they would be talking about how everyone needs to be vaccinated and that everyone should be wearing masks because we need to keep everyone safe since the Corona Virus is still very dangerous.  Then you would turn on FOX and they'd be saying the complete opposite.  They'd be saying that we need to fight back against the vaccine laws because it's a violation of our rights and we should be able to go to work without getting vaccinated.  Now the issue with this is that it makes it very hard to trust any sort of media.  All mainstream media has a bias towards their agenda and is just trying to change the public's perception of reality and they'll say anything in order to make us believe what they're saying.  

This plays a huge affect on different segments like race, gender, and sexuality because nowadays media is using minorities to gain more votes in elections.  News stations are constantly talking about how certain political parties are against things like same sex marriage, women getting paid the same as men, and equality of 
minority races.  When mainstream companies push this they're gonna get large groups of people to side with them.  Agenda setting also has a large impact on me.  Nowadays the people in my generation have no interest being friends with you if your political views are different then theres because media outlets have painted a picture that the opposing viewpoint is just so terrible which has completely divided GenZ.  Now obviously there are still some people out there, like myself, that don't care about your political views and don't treat it as a personality trait but the people that do view your views as that do exist and there's a lot of them.  People like that just simply make it a lot harder to make friends.   Also everyone in my generation is constantly on social media which is where you see a lot of political bias.  Like I said earlier, social media is choosing what to show us and what to take down in order to push their agenda.  When you have a bunch of young adults who just believe everything they read seeing that, they're going to eat it all up and believe every single word of it. 

Blog #8

 The reason that we don't see anti-war people in the mainstream media is because the media is trying to push their agenda and anti-war thoughts are against it.  It's the same reason why on CNN republicans are hated and and they rave about how great the democrats are and on Fox news they rave about how great the Republicans are and how bad the Democrats are.  Every media outlet has there own narrative and they will continue to push that narrative and thats it.  That's why it's so hard to trust the media nowadays.  It's hard to tell if they are just telling you what you want to hear and not reporting both sides of the story or if they are actually telling you the truth.  An example of this is the video we saw in class about the Baghdad airstrike in 2007.  The website Wikileaks were very selective in there editing and made sure to slow down the video to show us the men carrying cameras but they didn't take the time to put out that at least one of the men in that group was carrying an AK-47 and another one of those men were carrying a grenade launcher that was clearly visible as the weapon ran about two thirds the length of the man's body.  When I first watched that video it looked like they just opened fire on a bunch of harmless people but if you do more digging you'd see that these people were a threat and were holding deadly weapons.  

Blog #7

 The technology that I found the most interesting was the carrier pigeon.  Before hearing about them in class I didn't even think they worked and they would just give letters to pigeons and thinking it would go where they wanted it to go.  I found it interesting that they would breed these pigeons knowing they would fly back to there nests with whatever message they planned on delivering.  The person that was most responsible for making this a popular thing was Genghis Khan.  Khan built a massive network that spread all across Asia and Europe.  Carrier pigeons were used throughout most of the 19th century and were even used a bit in WW1.  

Lastly I wanted to talk about the printing press.  Now I knew what the printing press was but I didn't ever think about how much of an impact it had on society around the world.  The printing Press is one of the most revolutionary piece of technology ever.  It helped make news travel faster and more accurately,  it made it easier to gain access to books and newspapers which helped get the literacy rate up,  and paved the way for how we get our news to this day.  It did this by introducing the era of mass communication, which is something that is still evolving to this day.  Now we get news communicated to us by way more than just newspapers.  Now we get notifications on our phones giving us news, and we can watch news on television and all of that wouldn't be a thing if it weren't for the printing press.  

Blog #6

 The rise of Instagram is unlike anything we have ever seen before.  In just one day Instagram went up to number 1 on the photography category on the app store in the United States.  Why is that?  Well I'll tell you why.  First of all, Instagram very user friendly.  The interface of instagram is very easy to navigate, interactive, and pleasing to the eye.  It's a very simple thing but a good way to get people to download an app.  The most important thing though is that Instagram fulfills human desire.  Instagram caters to human's desires to get attention.  The features that Instagram has like how easy it is to upload and how convenient it is to receive likes and have others comment on your posts makes it appealing to people.  

Now there are some people out there that don't want instagram because of how much it caters to peoples desire for attention.  Some people are just completely against Instagram due to the fact that people are just always posting the highlights of their lives and are just seeking validation at all times.  Instagram can be a very toxic place.  When people are constantly seeing other people posting about having a good time and being happy it can really put someone down.  The reality of it is that a lot of those people that are posting on instagram that seem super happy aren't actually as happy as they seem and they are actually quite sad people but need to present themselves as happy to the outside world.  People also get hooked on Instagram and spend way too much of their

time on their phones.