Final Blog Post

  From watching this video from the 1964 World’s Fair in New York to then watching this video by Julian West, it is very interesting to see just how drastically humanity’s view on technology has come to change in the age of information. I think the key word here is definitely information. At the 1964 World’s Fair, they talked about physical technologies such as new vehicles and methods of harvesting resources. Then in the Julian West video, he covers a lot of informational technologies, especially social media and other byproducts of the internet. It is very interesting to see how back in 1964 we still thought of technology as a tool. Technology was only physical contraptions you could hold in your hand to make it automate a task for you. Now, technology consists of many new intangible softwares that affect your life in ways you can’t even see. Technology has taken on a life of its own and now each and every one of us has to consider what our relationship with technology is.

My relationship with technology, like most people, is very multifaceted and complex. I love the ease of access to information and entertainment that my phone can bring me but I can also begrudgingly acknowledge that I think my phone and other pieces of technology that I own can make some tasks too easy for me sometimes. For example, I have no clue how to actually make a works cited page for the life of me because every time I have needed to make one for the last couple of years, I have gone to EasyBib.com and had it generate a works cited list for me based off of the information on my sources that I put into it. It’s not a huge skill, but I do feel bad that I have robbed myself of learning the skill of being able to format a works cited list.

I will also acknowledge that I use technology to keep me stimulated too much. Between social media, having an Airpod in my ear at all times to listen to music, and online Sudoku, I pretty much always have some distraction to fill any awkward amount of time during the day. Now I love listening to my music (I do get about a thousand and a half hours a week) but I do think that this stimulation makes it hard for me to adjust to silence or boring moments when I do not have access to my phone or laptop to distract me or give me something to do. However, this is not a completely bad thing. I think that myself, along with most of my generation, has a lot of stress on us between the increasing intensity of school and the constantly changing pressure of social interaction. Technology is a good outlet to relieve that built up stress absentmindedly and escape from dwelling on intrusive thoughts. However, I can also acknowledge that technology also definitely adds to and heightens some of the stress from these problems.

However, I do not just pull information from the internet. I also put out a ton. Much more than I care to realize most of the time. Between social media and just being lazy with my information, I know my online footprint has grown to be quite large. Luckily, I am too lazy to have accounts on every social media platform but the ones I do have I am still too lazy to update and keep track of. I really need to update and overhaul both my Instagram and LinkedIn accounts. I plan on doing this with a reel I am editing of all the different shots I have from all of the film projects that I have worked on lately. I will use this to jumpstart my LinkedIn profile where I aim to post at least once a month with some kind of significant and positive piece of information on something I worked on that month. For Instagram, I plan on keeping my current account private and keeping it for friends and family and then I will make a second one where the reel is my first post to launch the new account, which will be a public account to show off my work to potential employers and anyone else it would be beneficial for me to network with on that social media platform.

Well, that about concludes the majority of my relationship with technology that I am willing to disclose in public on the internet. As I stated, It’s definitely a give and take relationship, which is important because I need to be more mindful of what information I take from the internet and what information about me that I let it take away and give to who knows what people. It’s a scary yet exciting world out there and the Internet gives us the awesomely dangerous power to be within close contact with anyone in the world at the click of a button. This class has helped me to understand how I can regulate my information to the world and what I need to be careful of. I will be sure to keep my learning from this class in mind as I go forward in my professional life on the internet because I do not want to have that same regretful feeling of wondering where I went wrong as Julian West would have if he watched the video from the 1964 World’s fair.

The Spiral of Silence

According to Britannica, the Spiral of Silence is “the theory that people’s willingness to express their opinions on controversial public issues is affected by their largely unconscious perception of those opinions as being either popular or unpopular.” The theory essentially exists to describe a person’s hesitation to express their opinion if they deem it as unpopular to the group they are expressing it too in order “to avoid the danger of isolation”. It was created by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, a german survey and communication researcher in the 1960s and 70s after she was found some interesting results while gathering polling statistics for the 1965 German federal election, the two main parties conflicting for power were the Christian Democratic Union - Christian Social Union (CDU-CSU) vs and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP), for a long time the two parties were locked in a roughly even 45% split both ways, but when Queen Elizabeth II made a trip to Germany to support the CDU-CSU, that party took a 10% lead, which they held onto until they won the election. Noelle-Neumann believes that this drastic change in the population was because the CDU-CSU incorrectly claimed to be the more popular party because of the Queen’s support, which increased reluctance among people to support the SDP because everyone wants to vote for the party that is going to win. From these interesting election results, she got her idea for the Spiral of Silence.

However, this election is not a simple example of the Spiral of Silence. Some easier to understand examples would be when you change what shirt you wear because you think people will think that shirt is weird or unflattering, or when you see a movie that you did not like, but you don’t say anything because the friends you saw it with all loved it. Any situation where you feel that you hold a minority opinion and then decide not to express that opinion because it is a minority opinion is a situation where you are falling victim to the Spiral of Silence. However, the Spiral of Silence asserts that the inverse is also true. People who view their beliefs as popular are more likely to voice them, and loudly too.

It is important to keep in mind that the Spiral of Silence applies to many different kinds of situations in groups. In any group large or small where a person feels their opinion could be perceived and judged, the Spiral of Silence exists. This is why it can affect an event as casual as going to a movie with your friends or something as important as an election. There just needs to exist a majority opinion that is perceived as a social norm. Some sociologists call this the “climate of opinion” (Glynn et al., 1995). Current sociologists are even researching how the Spiral of Silence affects online interactions. One such researcher is Tio Gabunia who is finding that comment sections are a clear way that people can find what the majority opinion is on each and every post. He finds that people are less likely to comment on a post where they hold an opinion that is uncommon among the comment section of the post and more likely to comment when their opinion is in agreement with the other comments. By only interacting with posts that agree with their opinions, the algorithms on these social media platforms only recommend posts that agree with the user in order to boost post interaction. This is what traps people online in an echo chamber of opinions that reinforce only their own beliefs. Due to this, the Spiral of Silence has become an important idea to be aware of now more than ever.

Below are my sources:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/spiral-of-silence

https://nlwbkq.medium.com/spiral-of-silence-mean-girls-a724ae6b964d

https://study.com/academy/lesson/spiral-silence-theory-overview-examples-facts.html

https://helpfulprofessor.com/spiral-of-silence-theory/

Online Privacy, Or Rather, the Lack Thereof

Out of the four TED Talks, the last two were the ones that really grabbed my attention. In the third video, I was not really in agreement at first with the stance the speaker, Christopher Soghoian, was taking on cell phone encryption because I thought national security against terrorism was more important than leaving a backdoor in your phone. That was until he told the story about how hackers were able to wiretap the Greek prime minister and members of the Greek cabinet in order to listen to all of their phone calls without being caught by hacking into Greece’s largest phone provider, Vodafone Greece. After hearing about that, I was convinced that phone companies should build in encryptions and firewall security measures against wiretapping in our cell phones.

However, I felt much more stirred by the fourth video by Darieth Chisolm. This is easily the privacy issue I am the most concerned about that was brought up out of these four TED Talks. Digital domestic violence or “revenge porn” as Chisolm called it is a serious issue that has become much too normalized in modern society because lawmakers have not taken a stance against it, which Chisolm brought up in her presentation. Only one federal bill has been proposed to create actual sentences for this very serious crime, which is called The Enough Act by Vice President Kamala Harris. However, there needs to be more. Unfortunately, the people’s representatives in the federal government are entirely too old to be making the decisions that they are making. It is unacceptable that there are several senators older than the television. We only just had the first Gen Z congress member, Maxwell Frost of Florida, be elected this January. With the incredibly fast moving pace of developing technology in the modern world. The government needs representatives who are equipped to quickly and aptly respond to these changes, and our current representatives are NOT those people.

Comics Through the Diffusion Theory

Comics have been a prevalent form of media since the 40s, so how does the Diffusion of Innovation Theory by E.M. Rogers explain their rise to popularity? In order to understand the Diffusion Theory clearly and effectively, please view this article by Boston University or the graph below. In summary, the Diffusion Theory explains how an idea or invention becomes accepted by a population.

When an idea or invention is first released, only a small number of people know about it. These people are called innovators or pioneers. These people include the creators of the innovation as well as people brought in to test it. For comics, its innovators would be the publishers and readers of “The Yellow Kid in McFadden’s Flats,” which is considered to be the first proper comic book from 1897. They published this children’s book in this fashion because it was cheap to mass produce and distribute. The next group in the Diffusion Theory are the early adopters, who are the people who recognize innovation as a way to better their own ideas and business. The most notable people of this group for comics would be Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster who created Superman. They would forever associate comic books with superheroes and raise comics as medium to a new level, which would bring a whole new audience; these people would be called the early majority. 

In the Diffusion Theory, the early majority are the 34% of the population who begin using the medium after it has been developed. This is the group that makes something popular. In between the early and late majority is the tipping point, which is the point at the height of the chart when the population has been cleanly divided into two groups: those that use the invention and those that do not. In the world of comics, these two groups are incredibly important because this concept of early versus late majority is what creates the idea that older comics are worth more. For example, if you own the first issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man” that becomes a statement that says, “I was there back when it began. I was a fan even back then.” In the comics community, there is an unspoken yet agreed upon rule that being a part of the early majority is a badge of honor. 

However, there are still many people who do not read comics. The Diffusion Theory calls those people “laggards.” Laggards are the resistors who choose not to use an invention because of a hesitance of change. Comics still have a lot of laggards out of the population, but this is because of the unique reason that comics have a long and confusing history that overwhelms most people when they want to start reading. Comic companies are constantly trying to find a way to simplify the process of beginning to read comics in order to tap into this last untapped group of the population and convert them into new fans.

Why Are Antiwar Voices Not Heard?

While reading through the news story database ANTIWAR.com, I learned some very interesting things about the US government’s involvement in many of our recent wars. Both sites were filled with stories that I had no clue were even going on in our world today. For example, I found this article by The Libertarian Institute on ANTIWAR.com, NATO Tests AI Submarine Drones During the War Games, that shows one example of how emerging Artificial Intelligence technology is revolutionizing yet another facet of modern life. However, this is one part of the world that I do not think AI needs to be involved in. Have “War Games” and “The Terminator” series taught us nothing?

In all serious, this is a piece of technology that is incredibly dangerous and scary enough that the head of NATO’s cell for protecting undersea infrastructure, Lieutenant General Hans-Werner Wiermann, stated to Bloomberg that the test; “sends a deterrence signal to the enemy, be it Russia or somebody else.” Clearly, this new AI submarine is meant to send a warning message to Moscow.

It is pretty clear just from ANTIWAR.com's website that it is not a mainstream news website. However, its intensive research and ability to pull from many different sources makes it a great site to get information on a wide variety of many different stories. However, just from their name it is clear that they have a specific and clear position that they take. Yet many news sources are able to have a clear bias and still be successful as a new source. Then why does ANTIWAR.com have such a hard time breaking into the mainstream as a well known news source? Why don't any anti war voices have a place in the mainstream? It seems that every mainstream news source has certain positions they always have to take, whether that source is from the right or the left.

Learning About the Mail System

During the EOTO presentations, I learned a lot about the creation of the mail system from Quinn Bailey’s presentation. The mail system is so old and so prevalent throughout the world and human history that I have never even bothered to consider researching the history of the mail system. According to one of Quinn’s sources, Britannica, its earliest references in historical documents actually date back to ancient Egypt around 2000 BC as well as in China about a thousand years later under the Zhou Dynasty, which was the longest lasting dynasty in Chinese history and lasted nearly eight hundred years. That means the mail system is only roughly 500 years younger than the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

After talking briefly about the inception of the mail system, Quinn focused the scope of her presentation on specifically the creation of the United States’ mail system, which has much more well documented history since it is much more recent. Massachusetts was the first colony to have a mail system in 1633, but it was not until nearly a century and a half later that the country had its first postmaster general in 1775, who was Benjamin Franklin.

From there, Quinn gave an overview of the history of the US postal service. A couple of the events that stuck out to me as particularly interesting were when the Constitution declared that Congress has the power to set up post offices and roads for mail delivery in 1788, when the first mail stamps were made in 1847, when charging rates were changed from distance to weight in 1863, and when zip codes were created in 1963. I find it incredibly interesting to see how all of these small details that define our modern day mail system were added one by one over the years to create the system we are so familiar with now.

How Netflix Conquered the Transport of Media

 Netflix was made on August 27th, 1997 when two friends Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph wondered if a DVD would survive a trip through the mail, so they made a simple dare for themselves to find an answer to their question. They mailed themselves a DVD, found it returned to them unharmed which gave them a brilliant business idea. This is how Netflix began as nothing more than a simple website for people to rent DVDs through the mail but from there it blossomed into so much more.

However, this process was one of small steps and continuous hard work which continued to prove rapid success. Their decisions to create features like a review system for customers after they rented a movie and the ability for customers to make lists of their favorite movies were invaluable to Netflix’s quick success, as shown by their over one million subscribers after just six years of operation. This pool of people then expanded to five million in only three years after that. These days, Netflix is the name brand for at home movie streaming but streaming was not even a feature of Netflix until 2007. This was immensely successful for them as the only other names in the game back then were Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, both of which launched around the same time. Five years later, Netflix had quintupled their subscriber count again to twenty five million. If you thought that was impressive, currently Netflix sits as the top over all other streaming services in terms of subscribers with a whopping 238.39 million subscribers. This is more than Disney +, Hulu, and ESPN+ put together, which Disney did do with the Disney+ bundle.

However, has the rise of Netflix left a positive impact on the world? First off, you have to acknowledge that the success of Netflix has brought about the rise of most of the streaming service and free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) industry. With the rise of this industry has inevitably come the death and decline of several other industries. Most notably is video rental service stores such as Blockbuster, which have now famously become a relic of the late nineties and early two thousands (with the exception of the last bastion in Bend, Oregon). Next has come the slow decline of movie theaters. Even Dartmouth has begun to look into this trend and they have found via an online survey in 2022 that 41% of respondents rarely go to see a movie at the theater. The main two reasons they cited as to why streaming services have just now begun to win out the battle against movie theaters is the massively increased usage of streaming services during the Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that a monthly Netflix subscription is now cheaper than a single movie ticket. Although it would be sad to see movie theaters disappear, some could argue that in the United States’ capitalistic system, it is our very competitive nature that stronger businesses with better products will cull out the weak ones. Therefore, it is up for you to decide: Is Netflix a better product for distributing movies and TV shows and therefore deserves to be on top or has it become the Walmart of the entertainment industry, eating up little ma and pop movie theaters that cannot compete with their better prices from mass media dispersal? Personally, Netflix has won me over with some of their many Netflix originals. I know I appreciate them a whole lot for making “Stranger Things” and “The Umbrella Academy,” even their worst creations, like “Tall Girl,” have given people all across the globe something to entertain them for just a couple hours.

If you want to hear about Hastings and Randolph’s success story, you can read from it from this part of the official Netflix website: https://about.netflix.com/en

My other sources are here:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/net-worth

https://www.hollywoodinsider.com/streaming-services-theaters/

https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2022/10/trends-streaming-services#:~:text=Over%20the%20last%20decade%2C%20interest,and%20damages%20the%20industry%20irrevocably.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/01/08/netflixs-first-ceo-on-reed-hastings.html