Zoe's Guide to Media Law

       After listening to all of the presentations, I decided to write this blog post about Instagram. Instagram is a popular social media platform that allows its users to share photos and videos to their feeds and interact with their followers. Launched in 2010, Instagram soon dominated the game. Originally the app was not called Instagram; it was initially called Burbn. This was absolutely fascinating to me, an app that I use every day, and it is a very big part of my life that was created because of alcohol.       Instagram officially launched on October 6, 2010. By December 2010, Instagram had one million users. Two years later, in a record-breaking transaction, Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion. Instagram has made a significant impact in our lives. It created an entirely new category of social media. Instagram is now even a job title. Have you ever heard of a social media influencer? Well, that started because of Instagram. In addi...

     As of recently, technology has become something that most people physically cannot live without. Personally, I cannot imagine my life without it. A couple of years ago, I got all of my technology taken away. The only time I was even allowed to touch a computer was when I was at school in class or doing homework at home. My parents took away my phone for six months, and I was off social media for two years. I then realized how toxic social media was in my life that I was happier and more confident in myself without it. Before this experience, I would say that my relationship with technology was not healthy at all. Honestly, I abused it. Currently, I would say that my relationship with technology is much healthier. I now know how to use it appropriately and my limits. Especially now being in college, my phone holds my entire life within it. It has all of my banking apps, GPS, and most importantly, my calendar. When it comes to my news updates, if I didn’t have my phone...

     Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a dream or figure of the imagination. It is real, and it is here. We may not realize it, but artificial intelligence is all around us. The video we watched in class focused on the game Go and its AI counterpart AlphaGo. AlphaGo is a computer software that plays the popular game Go. The game was very popular in China, Japan, and South Korea. Although many people believe AlphaGo is just another board game gone digital, AlphaGo really is not even a game at all. Go is not just a game; it is how you learn strategy. The process has almost a spiritual component to it. According to the video we watched in class, South Koreans say that Lee Sedol is the world’s greatest Go player. In the video attached below, you can watch Sedol attempt to beat Google’s AlphaGo software. AlphaGo's AI system was created to be unbeatable. The artificial intelligence within its program analyzes its opponent and figuring out their opponent's move before th...

       More and more, technology is slowly taking over our lives. As the years go on, technology has advanced to the point where everyday tasks can now be done with the click of a button. As human beings, our privacy is something that we expect to be kept, well, private. As technology develops, so does the risk of our information being exposed. The internet is fantastic; it makes research easy, it makes getting answers convenient.            In recent years, Facebook has come under fire for selling user information to companies. When it came down to it, Facebook began to use the invasion of our privacy as a business model. They did not care who got hurt as long as they make money. When you create a Facebook account, you are basically signing a "shrink-wrap" contract, where you are forced to adhere to Facebook's terms of service without having any power to negotiate. It is basically one big power struggle. In addition, Facebook makes...

       The mediasphere has severely dominated modern society within the past few years. From online influencers to whistleblowers. The media sphere has dominated headlines all over the world. Specifically, social media influencers. For this blog post, I will be talking about an essential part of the mediasphere. The mediasphere is like a container that "contains' certain aspects of media within it. Things such as mainstream media, whistleblowers, even citizen journalism are just some of the ideas that make up the mediasphere.       Unless you have been living under a rock, you probably know what an influencer is. Starting with those like Casey Neistat to Jake Paul and David Dobrik to teens like Charlie and Dixie D’Amelio, society has been taken over by social media personalities. Even though I mentioned all these names before, you may still be wondering, "what is an online influencer?" The website Sprout Social defines online influencers and influ...

          The Diffusions of Innovation is a theory created to explain how, why, and at the rate that new technologies were introduced to society. For this blog post, the technological innovation I am going to focus on is the cell phone. According to communicationtheory.org, diffusion can be defined as "the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system” (Development Communication, 2014). The result is that this new technological theory will be adopted into our social system. This theory works by its "adopters" into five separate categories. The five categories include pioneers, early adopters, early majority, late adopters, and laggards. Through these five categories, Rodgers Diffusion of Innovation can be implemented.       The cellular phone has dominated the technology industry for more than thirty years. As of today, there is not a single other technology that ha...