Final Blog

 Our Relationship with technology 

My generation has been using technology ever since they started school Of course it wasn't as advanced as it is today but as a child I grew up with having technology at my fingertips. Nowadays, technology is taking over everything. I work at a preschool with children ages infant through five years old. It's crazy to say that these children are given iPad time starting at age two. This type of stuff can affect the way a person acts forever. Giving children the opportunity to play with technology such as tablets at such a young age is going to make them reliant on technology. I feel like I am pretty obsessed with being on my phone. I was given my first phone in third grade solely because my mom wanted me to contact her when I needed to be picked up from my competitive dance classes. As times went on and phones got more advanced I got my first smartphone which was an iPhone in 6th grade. I always had an iPod touch before this that I never wanted to put down. Now at age 21 I always have my phone in my hand and I sometimes can never get off of it. 

Would I call my relationship with technology healthy? Honestly it really depends on the moment. There are times that my relationship with technology can be extremely beneficial. Technology is the route to all my school work. During the corona virus outbreak we relied on zoom and our computers when we couldn't attend in person classes. At that point in time without technology I am not sure how we would attend school. Even without the pandemic the computer and the internet allow me to be creative and research different information for school. In this scenario I would say I have a healthy relationship when it comes to my academics and technology. Then, there are times where I lay in bed and sit on my phone hours on end scrolling through TikTok. This is when I have an unhealthy relationship with technology. I obsess over being on my phone and I get addicted to scrolling through social media. I think technology consumes a lot of my time and that is a huge issue. Once I start online shopping or browsing on social media I cannot stop. Technology takes up an absurd amount of time in my everyday life. Sometimes I consider going off the grid and just shutting off my phone for a few days because of how often I am on it. Sometimes especially when on the internet I question whether the information I am reading is true. There are so many websites with inaccurate information and I never know what's true or not. I do worry about this because the world we live in is so corrupt and it is scary to think that anything can be posted anywhere. 

When it comes to my friends and family I think the positive effect of technology is communication purposes. There are so many different ways to communicate like through text, call, and everyone's favorite facetime. This is super beneficial for long distance friends or family members that we don't get to see too often. On the other side of the fence, technology sometimes interrupts in person communication. For example my entire family will be out to eat and half the table will be distracted on their phones and not pay any attention to the family. Same thing goes when hanging out with friends, it's very common for us to lay in bed on our phones scrolling through social media rather than talking to each other. Technology in this aspect is ruining our in person communication skills. We are reliant on talking through a screen that when it comes to being in a group setting we are losing our ability to interact. 

The online world especially when it comes to social media can also cause so many people to feel depressed and anxious. Seeing images of people you wish you looked like or seeing videos of people at parties you wish you were invited to can leave a negative impact on mental health. FOMO has caused so many people to check social media more than they would on average just to see what's going on at the event they weren't invited too. 

I currently use social media a lot. I've learned how important it is to keep my socials appropriate and clean because future employers will be looking. My online footprint reflects truly who I am as a person. It shows the highs of my life and the things in life that I love. My online presence is pretty big. I like to keep an up to date profile of my life online. The first thing that comes up when I google myself is my linkedIn. This is very beneficial for my future employers so they can see what I do and what my LinkedIn profile looks like. My old Facebook profile pictures also pop up on google images. I really don't think these impact my online footprint because there is nothing wrong with them and they can't cause anyone to think differently of me. 

Privacy

Internet Privacy

Little do we know the internet like we know it is stealing all our information. We trust sites like Facebook and give all of our information but do we actually know where our information is going. We see advertisements for items we have been texting about or even just talking about and we wonder how the internet got this information. It is said that the internet is an electronic tattoo.  There is a company online called face.com that has millions of peoples faces recognized from social media and the internet. This company was taken over by Facebook. Once something is posted on the internet its never gone even if it is "deleted" The internet is such a corrupt place that takes your personal information and does whatever it can with it. With features like face id and touch id our phones store our finger print and facial recognition and we have no idea where its going.  We also type our credit card numbers into different online stores everyday. Theres always an option to have your credit card information saved on the website. That means your computer and that stores has your card on file and can do whatever they want with it. Another thing that we would never know is that cell towers have cell tower dumps where it shows who has been using one or more cell tower at a time. There are so many times where we don't realize how the internet can be a not so safe place. We need to be cautious about what we want to post and publish online. 

EOTO Post

 False Information 

Media Consolidation

Media Consolidation is the concentration of media ownership. News sources are falling in to the hands of less and less companies. This is when one company takes over multiple different companies. This is very unfortunate because fewer individuals or organizations are control increasing shares of mass media. Giant corporations own more and more of our news media everyday because of media consolidation. So many people everyday are losing there jobs because of media consolidation. Im the 1970s the US government tried to save media diversity and prevent media consolidation from happening. They put rules in place where corporations are discouraged from owning to manny newspapers or television stations. Now since we get our news online there is still media consolidation today. In 2016 five huge companies owned 37% of local television stations. Media consolidation is cutting journalists from there  jobs and gutting newsrooms across the nation. The FCC has not done anything to expand media consolidation and ownership.  Companies like Comcast are being affected so bad that they would rather spend billions of dollars to kill off there competition then enhance and build their networks. In the media industry there is a state of oligopoly or monopoly. 

In 1983, 90% of American media was owned by 50 companies. There are six media giants controlling 90% of what we read, watch, and listen too. GE, News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS have taken over so many different companies. This consolidation of ownership and power in media and removes vital elements from the marketplace. The entertainment industry gets extremely hurt due to media consolidation. 232 media executives control the information diet of 277 million Americans. That is 1 media executive to 850,000 subscribers.  The consolidation of mainstream American media is a tragedy for this country. We used to get angry about how less then a hundred companies owned a lot of what we read and listen too. Now hat number decreased to under ten which is a huge problem for all media companies. Even the newspapers we read are part of some national chain. The local news channels are now owned by giant corporations who's uses those channels as a product of revenue. Also the radio we listen to is manipulated by multiple companies who tweak every tune before it is played.