Blog Post #10: EOTO Reactions (Misinformation and Disinformation)

    Awareness is a huge part of being in the media field. Being aware of things that could lead you wrong, like misinformation and propaganda, is an important thing that everyone should do. In my opinion, misinformation and disinformation are the big things to be aware of. 

    The difference between misinformation and disinformation is something that is important for everyone to know because it helps you understand the different ways that false information is spread. Misinformation is just false or inaccurate information that does not have any intention behind it. At the same time, disinformation is false information that is distributed with the intention to harm or mislead another person. Misformation is something that a lot of people do without meaning to. It is usually when people go around saying some information that is wrong, but they are presenting it as fact. The people who spread misinformation either get it from wrong or biased source or never looked at sources and got it from word of mouth. 

    The dangers of misinformation are that it leads to unnecessary fear, wrong interpretations of people, and misleading society. These are all important things that someone should be watching out for. Misinformation leads to unnecessary fear because when you share scary information, like peanut butter, it leads to arthritis. This could make people panicky because they are scared that peanut butter could hurt them. Another thing is that it leads to wrong interpretations of people that come from spreading misinformation. This is because someone who spreads misinformation can be seen as dumb or malicious. After all, they did spread this misinformation. They can be seen as dumb because they didn’t check their sources or look to see if what they said was correct. A person could be seen as malicious because people can see that person as someone who is trying to spread insufficient information and lead people in the wrong way. The last thing is that misinformation can lead to misleading society
. Misinformation can mislead society because it could cause a lot of people to follow inaccurate information. After all, they think it is correct.  

    The way to avoid misinformation is by doing a couple of things to check your sources as well as yourself. You should check the author or writer of the sources to see if they are creditable, basically checking to see if the whole source is creditable. You should watch that you are putting out the right information by double-checking what you are saying. 

Blog Post #9: EOTO 2 (Cord Cutting)

    Cord cutting is the practice of canceling a cable revision subscription or landline phone connection in favor of an alternative internet-based or wireless service. This could be like someone who gets rid of cable to use streaming sites such as Netflix and Amazon Prime as their primary access to TV. Cord cutting really started in 2007- 2008 because of the big three of streaming sites being released. In 2008 Amazon Unbox rebranded to Amazon Video, and that would become very popular. In 2007 Netflix launched, and Hulu became available to the public in 2008. The reasons people do this can vary, but most people agree that the cable price is the biggest reason they cut the cord. An article I read averaged that the average some were paying for a bundle that had cable in it was $217.42 per month. So it is not surprising that people want to cut that bill down. Though this is the main reason, there are others, like the fact that people saw cable as lower valued because it does not have as much stuff as streaming sites have. 

    The biggest implication of cording cutting is the end of traditional TV as we know it. This can be seen in the fact that there is an effect on the revenue that is coming in from cable TV. One article I read talked about how streaming will have a dramatic effect on U.S. pay TV revenues by 2025. The article says that the industry will lose around $33 billion by the time 2025 rolls around. That is a large amount of profit, and it could show a slow beginning to the end of cable television as we know it. I think you can look at this implication of cord-cutting as good or bad, depending on how you feel. You can see the end of cable television as a good thing because you support streaming sites more and you find it more valuable, but then there's a side that cable television is a huge industry, and it would be a huge loss.

    There are two major groups that cord-cutting affects: the TV industry and the consumers. The first group is the TV industry because cable TV was once one of the biggest money makes in the industry, and now it is slowly dying out. There was an article I read that talked about the slow fade of cable. It talked about how is one point, cable was the big thing in the market, and now it is streaming platforms. The exact wording was “media companies that once relied on cable TV are chasing streaming dollars instead.” The best example I read about was Disney and the changes they have made over the years in the TV industry. In 2001, Disney brought the Fox Family Channel for $5.3 billion, and now last year, in 2021, Disney spent around $3.2 billion on their streaming site Disney plus. This shows a change in where the money is going in the industry, which could lead to the end of cable television as we know it. 

     The second group is the consumers of cable TV, and the biggest effect that cord cutting has on them has to do with money, and it is both positive and negative. The positive is the more prominent effect, which is that people can cut their cable bills in half. People who would be paying upwards of $100 a month for the service can get something like YouTube TV, which gives the same amount of access to cable channels but for only $25 a month. This is huge, and it could mean a lot of good things for people who can't pay a lot for access to TV. The negative was a small percentage of people talking about how having to pay for so many different services to get what you could end up costing you as much as cable does. 

Blog Post #8: Is There Really Any Privacy

    The question that we find ourselves asking nowadays is whether there is such a thing as privacy online. It is scary t think that you can never truly have your privacy if you are on the internet. I watch a couple of TED Talks about privacy on the internet. It makes you nervous about going on the internet and doing anything. The one TED Talk that made me the most nervous was one by Juan Enriquez about the similarity between your internet life and tattoos because it really made me think about how permanent what you do on the internet is. The comparison is pretty scary because you do not think about it when you are on the internet, but anything you do is forever out there, and it's really hard, if not impossible, to get back. Though this was not the only issue raised in these TED Talks, there was a talk about how the police can track you using special cameras, which is also terrifying. Overall watching these different  TED Talks, you really put in perspective different kinds of security issues and privacy issues that come from the internet.

    The effect of these issues is the same for everyone, and that is a lack of trust in the internet and fear of what could happen. I believe that now that these issues are becoming more talked about, it seems to be causing a lot of fear among people about the internet. I say talked about because I think these issues have always been there, but it just seems that nowadays, we talk about it more. I was reading an article about Americans and privacy, But it's all about how Americans are more fearful of their lack of privacy on the internet. A graph in the article says that 62% of Americans believe that companies are collecting their data, and 63% believe that the government collects their data every time they go on the internet. This article says of her all this level of distrust that is becoming more prevalent in people nowadays.

    The real question that I think should be asked is what we can do and what should be done now. For the part about what we can do, I think it's just being more careful with what kind of information we are giving out on the internet and to who we are giving that information. It's also very similar to what we talked about in class; just be careful with small things like clearing your internet history. I think we can look to the government and what they should do to keep our information more private online. Even though we know it's not entirely possible, I think what they should do is stop collecting data on people without the knowledge of the people that they are collecting the data. I read a piece by Cameron Kerry on the adoption of a baseline privacy framework for consumers in the U.S. He proposes making something called the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. One of the things it would state was that “have a right to expect that companies will collect, use, and disclose personal data in ways that are consistent with the context in which consumers provide the data.” I think this sort of thinking would lead us in the right direction to wear privacy needs to go, especially on the internet.

     I think privacy is an issue that needs to be discussed more, especially in terms of the internet, and I think we as a people need to do a lot more about it. 

Blog Post #7: Diffusion of Innovation

What is Diffusion of Innovation?

The Diffusion of Innovation Theory was created in 1962 by a sociologist named Evertt M. Rogers. This theory tries to explain how over time, innovations or ideas are spread through a certain population. The diffusion of innovation is usually shown in a graph where you can see that there are five different groups that people can be split into when it comes to the spread of ideas or innovation. These groups are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggers, each of which means show a different part of the spread.

Now let's look at innovation through the lens of the Diffusion of Innovation Theory. The innovation I want to look at is PC or personal computers. A short history of the PC is that the first PC came out in 1975 with the release of the Altair 8800, the company that made the Altair 8800 coined the term “personal computer.” Though it would be in 1976 that the first of the well-known apple computers were made by Steve Wozniak and then only a year later released, the Apple II was the most advanced PC to date. The pioneers in the Diffusion of Innovation Theory are described as the first to try these new inventions or come up with these ideas, and they are usually described as risk takers. The innovators make up 2.5% of the population. For the PC, the pioneers would be the inventors of the early forms of the PC, like Apple and Commodore, who were all the competitors in this field at the time.     The next group of people would be the early adopters, who are the opinion leaders of the group or trendsetters who are comfortable with new technologies or ideas. The early adopter makes up 13.5% of the population. The early adopters of the PC were described as college-educated workers that lived in metropolitan areas and whose jobs probably had to do with IT or computers in some way.

    The early majority is described as those who adopt these new technologies after it was been proven to work by others, and they make up 34% of the population. By the time 1982 rolled around, PC would be in more homes than ever. A magazine article from the year after estimated that 1 million PC were bought in 1982, in the U.S alone. Also in the 90s the iMac would be a be huge selling around 800,000 to people within the first five months. These seem to be two of the first big waves of PC buying in the U.S.

    The next group of people is those who are wary of change and only tend to adopt it after a majority of people have; this is the late majority. This would be anyone who got a PC past these two waves when it moved into the 2000s with the release of the Macbook Air in 2008 because this is passed those initial PCs.     The final group of people is the laggers, who are the hardest group to get to adopt new technology or idea; they tend to be very skeptical and unwilling to change. This group, for the PC, are those who still don’t have PCs, or if they do, they do not use them very frequently. I think this of people is very small because it's kind of hard not to use computers at all in this day in age, but there are definitely people out there that refuse to use the internet and PC by proxy.