Media Law & Lit[eracy]

Print considered a dying medium in today's tech-dominated world. It's ironically considered how one of the most important inventions in human history is going out of style. 600 years ago in Europe, an emerging literate middle class was calling for more books being produced. However, in 1000 years the process of creating a book hadn't changed. A single book would often take up a year, and most of the books being printed were done by monks by hand. These books were privately commissioned due to being high in price, but often beautifully illustrated text and images.  The middle class could not afford to pay these prices nor did they have the time to wait. Block books were another popular choice, a sheet of wood would have cut out letters which then would be inked and pressed onto a piece of paper. This was less expensive but very time-consuming.  A new way of printing had to be invented, one German man was genius enough to find that new invention. Johann Gutenberg was a ...

Emojis, we use them daily to communicate from texts, emails, and social media posts. These colorful icons, though, have a far more humble a simple beginning as emoticons. Emoticons got their name from emotional icons and were invented on September 19, 1982. At Carnegie Mellon Univeristy Computer Science professor Dr. Scott Fahlman saw a problem in the newly emerging computer forum landscape. Establishing the tone of posts, especially on forums, hadn't yet been mastered. Dr. Fahlman suggested that people use a smiley face :-) to mark joke posts and a frowny face :-( to mark serious posts. Fahlman students like the idea and used it in their emails, which spread to other universities, which led to more people using them online. Today the school still celebrates the invention of the smiley face with cookie they hand out every September 19th. Students felt that it was a great way to address emotions and tone in the computer landscape. It would allow them to express quickly and c...

Antiwar.com and The American Conservative are 2 online political publications. The 2 site content consists of both "left" and "right". Both sites describe themselves as liberal, hoping to combat the idea of having to be purely one way or the other. Which in today's political landscape is rare. Even on the news and media, it seems that you have to be either democratic or republican. The media make it feel as if there aren't other political parties yet there actually quite a few that never seem to get such a spotlight. Admittedly the Republican and Democratic parties are the largest parties at the moment. Since the number of the parties is so much smaller their parties can't make as much of an impact.  It's not surprising as it's easier to define the world as black and white than acknowledge the shade of grey. However, if the media didi could help a lot of people who aren't fully satisfied with either of the major parties.  The 3 next bigge...

   2019 Facebook has had several issues with user security and data privacy. Zuckerberg ended up having to testify in court about Facebook's selling of user data. However, this wasn't the only Facebook that had a user's private data issue, specifically with the user's phone numbers. One of the ways a user can signup and login into their Facebook account is through their phone number. Facebook had apparently kept all these phone numbers on an unsecured cloud database. On September 4th the database was discovered online. Facebook had previously claimed to have scraped this data. One of the phones found was actually Mark Zuckerberg's and CNET managed to dial the number to get to his voicemail. This database was about a previously removed feature where users could look one another up through phone numbers on the platform. The database shortly was no longer public reachable, and no one came forward with making it public. This little hiccup is a warning for al...

Edit 3/3/2020 This post is currently being revised...