Law & Literacy

The internet is perhaps the most public environment in our existence.  Once you put a piece of information online, it is on there permanently.  With technology improving every day, there are various different things that are possible that we as a society are unaware of.  Many of these things are placed strategically in the terms and conditions of many applications.  They are deliberately made to be lengthy and hard to understand so that customers overlook significant rights that are buried somewhere in the document.  The government is able to have a clear view of our private lives.  With license plate trackers and data mining, it is hard to do anything without being tracked somehow.  This is unethical in my opinion because it hinders people from acting how they normally would if they were not constantly tracked.  It restricts our autonomy and personal freedom.  For example, the Amazon Alexa is a device marketed to consumers to create conven...

I was informed about gatekeeping this morning.  Gatekeeping is essentially  the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something.  I realized that a common misconception could be that gatekeeping is just like censorship.  In reality, censorship involves  the repression of ideas in alignment to political, social or moral views.  Gatekeeping  refers to efforts to maintain the quality of information published in a given venue.  A censor involves covering up things it disagrees with, while a gatekeeper only wants to make sure the information being put out is verified and reliable. Another concept I learned about was illusory truth effect.  This is a fascinating topic because it involves manipulation of the brain.  It involves repeating key things that will eventually stick in people's heads and cause them to believe something that could be completely false.  Marketers and politicians are guilty of this....

Whistleblowing is defined as a person who exposes secretive information or activity that is deemed illegal, unethical, or not correct within a private or public organization. Whistleblowing is a c ontroversial subject. It is definitely not something you want to be known for doing, yet it is the right thing to do. A f amous, or infamous, whistleblowing case was with Daniel Ellsberg. He was an employee of the State Department in 1971 that leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret account of documents pertaining to how the United States came to fight the Vietnam War. Personally, I believe that whistleblowing is the right thing to do, but if it came down to it I can't lie and say that I would do it. If I worked for a very successful company that used insider trading, I most likely would turn a blind eye and move on. What I mean is that if it benefitted me financially to forget something I would easily do so. Ultimately not blowing the whistle in that particular situation would bri...

      Online presence is something that we should all be aware of.  What most people don't understand is how much the government knows about you simply from your Facebook profile.  I hadn't given my online footprint much thought until recently.  My footprint is most likely medium sized.  I have enough accounts with my real name that it just makes sense.   I have a Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and a Snapchat account.  Realistically, I am only regularly active on Instagram and Snapchat.  I believe that I do a good job of keeping them clean of media that should not be public.  A visitor could easily find out where I am from, what school I go to, what fraternity I am in, etc.  This is only from my profile.        After reading Richard Stokes' article on the ad-tech industry, I realize how much of our private lives are not so private at all.  The market is less about the consumer and more about extrac...

       The most important value of free expression in my opinion is the marketplace of ideas, also known as Discovery of Truth.  It is a cornerstone in our right as citizens to free speech.  It states that the truth will always win out, regardless of what people publish to try and make people believe.  Our right to publish our words is a very significant right.  Without this right, we would be unable to be public with our own thoughts.          Being required to have a license to publish at all is unreasonable.  I completely agree with Milton when he fought against this law.  There is no good reason to restrict our free speech in this way.  He mentions how there is a grapple between the truth and the lies, and that the truth will always win.  He also adds that the grapple itself makes the truth more powerful.  It makes sense that a struggle for power gives the winner more gratification and...

Our society's dooming innovation.  Through Roger's Diffusion of Innovations, we can see that cigarettes fit his model perfectly.  In the mid-1800s, cigarettes were created.  After the pioneers set this product into society, the most early adopters were Civil War soldiers.  They were used as something they could relax with after the war.  The tipping point would be somewhere between 1955 and 1960.  This was an incredibly fascinating era of our country indeed.  Everyone and their mother had a cigarette in their hand.  This was obviously before anyone knew the long-term effects of smoking (similar to the Juul epidemic now), and they became something that people would do anytime and anywhere.  The late adopters would be the younger generation that had some knowledge of their cancerous effects.  Quickly the product were saturated and brought down to a moderate level, with anti-smoking ad campaigns and people not being allowed to smoke them in...

Apple's iPod was a revolutionary invention.  It mastered the market of MP3 players.  There was really no such thing as a good portable and universal portable music player.  There was a certain hard drive that Steve Jobs realized was missing.  As soon as him and his team found it, they got right to work.  Believe it or not, the iPod received terrible reviews upon its release.  People thought that it was vastly overpriced.  However, as soon as Apple made iTunes compatible with Microsoft, sales skyrocketed.  A lot of Microsoft users reportedly switched to Apple when they introduced the feature of running Windows on Mac computers.  Customers would buy a Mac computer to run Windows, but most of them would admit to ceasing doing this after a week or so. Apple did create a breakthrough device, there is no doubting that.  However, Apple did start something else that started with the iPod.  The started a cult of sorts; a stigma th...