Final Blog Post

My Relationship With Technology

My relationship with technology has been changing every day. Growing up I always wanted to be famous and be all over social media and have everyone know who I am but I never thought about the negative sides of being social media famous. The pressure and no privacy is something no one ever talks about. I am a social media and digital marketing major here at High Point but not to become social media famous but to run social media accounts and try to show the other side of social media and it’s not as glamorous as it seems.

I think my relationship with technology is the healthiest but I really am trying to get better every day with my actions and time online. I do believe that technology is vastly improving my knowledge and helps better my career but I don’t think that's the case for all majors and people. I am happy with my online footprint because I have in fact googled myself to see what future employers will see and all you can find is my work here at High Point and other freelance jobs. I know never to post something on social media that I wouldn’t want my boss to see.
My online footprint is probably larger than that of my classmates because my whole job is online. I have multiple social media accounts and my own website. On this website, there is access to my social media accounts and business email

All my social media accounts are public because they are where I share my work. I have been a freelance photographer for the past four years and networking is sadly far more important than the work I can show. People assume people have better work just because they have a bigger following online. I have a personal portfolio and my own website that I regularly update with new work. I also use social media daily and sometimes more than I would like. I use Snapchat as my main source of communication because that's what most people my age have and it’s how I stay in touch with my friends and even some of my family. 

When I was younger I used to share everything online not knowing that it would stay there forever. Growing up I thought it would be okay to post an address where I was and not think about how anyone could see this information. I sometimes struggle with what information to put online because my future career is about making connections online. I would never share my personal address or email but I have a business email that I have on my website.

Outside of work, I try to limit my social media time because it is physically draining sometimes, as a former college athlete I would constantly compare myself to other athletes from other teams and even my team and ask myself why I wasn’t as good as them. Even seeing supermodels online I would see these beautiful women getting teared down by people who don’t know them commenting hateful things just because they can hide behind a screen. I think this makes people afraid to post what they want online because of cyberbullying. I think during COVID 19 people became dependent on their phones and we never went back to the same way and people find comfort in their phones.

Blog #10

One thing I learned about was whistle-blowers. Whistleblowers are people who reveal private information. The most famous whistleblowers are Colleen Rowley of the FBI and Cythnia Copper of the World.com. 

Another topic was online influencers, Influencers are people with a big following who influence people to buy things. Some people charge up to $100,000 per post to promote a brand or product. They can earn a commission rate where they get paid if people 

Cord cutting is switching from cable TV to streaming services, The main reason is price and convenience. I am a big fan of streaming services and can see how most people switch to them. My favorite streaming source would have to be Netflix.

Blog #9

AGE OF AI

It's a struggle between capital and labor 

The trump vote was a protest vote because they didn't like the way things were going. They try to personalize things to you by adapting to you.

We were supposed to be users of social media but social media was using us  

A Harvard professor wrote a book The Age of the Machine, Businesses are learning as much as they possibly can.

Companies use our data to try and guess what you would click on next, they hide this information from users. Companies like Facebook and Google use all the data from credit card scores and women's health information. They tried to try people into voting by creating “I voted stickers’

Micro behavior tracking to see personality by using their voices and commands. Zuberburg had to go before Congress to address how a UK company got his data during an election, They got fined 5 billion dollars for violating privacy 

Anyone with money can take over public, Rights- the right to know, The right to say no, Third-party block- don’t sell my information 

They have bar codes on houses to see who lives in them and what they do in China. Governments track cameras and charge private companies to watch their consumers where ever they go

58 countries are following the chinese lead in invading privacy, The world is spilt between america and Chinese technology sector

Blog #8

Social Credit

Chinese Social Credit is unlike anything we have in the United States of America. It started in the Mid-1990s when they first developed a database tracking financial information from banks. In 2004 the Chinese leadership officially approved the idea and started a social credit system, they partnered with the Credit Reference Centre and it became a nationwide credit system.  In 2009 they gave out 1000 points to all citizens and their actions would cost or gain them points.

The best way to describe what social credit is is by dividing it into two sections, one part values your financial worthiness and the other part is your social worthiness. Your financial worthiness comes from your bank statements and what kind of properties you own. Your social credit is how you act in your community and if you are helping or hurting your community. You receive a score as an individual but businesses are also affected by these rating systems because they are also being rated like our restaurants have grades based on their cleanliness typically A to F from the Health Inspector.

The best example that we have seen has been the black mirror episode “Nosedive”, in this episode everyone has a rating of 5 that is visible to everyone. The acts you do towards others affect your rating throughout the day and after every interaction, people give you a rating same as Uber which affects how people see you. The higher your rating the more people respect you. Later in the episode, her rating goes below 4.0 and she can’t even get on her flight home because the airline doesn’t want to be associated with people with low ratings. After she finds her way home she is en route to her best friend's wedding but receives a phone call where her friend tells her not to come because she would bring the average rating of the wedding party down but she ends up crashing the wedding and is kicked out and then thrown in jail.  She realizes in jail that ratings don’t matter and people can act however they want. 

The different ways your credit can go down are different for companies and individuals. For companies, things that could affect your ratings are whether you paid your taxes on time, if your product meets standards, if you have the needed licenses to operate your business. Business scores can affect their ability to expand or even get a loan from a bank. As you see pictured below they treat it as a game. Some good deeds include donating blood, doing charity work, and praising the government online. Other deeds that help your community or better the government would give you a better score. You can lose points by doing the opposite such as hating on the government online, cheating online in games, or getting caught in person stealing. There are also rewards and punishments for having a higher/lower score. Some rewards would be upgrades on hotels and airplanes, faster promotions, and even tax breaks. Some punishments would be public shaming, can't apply for jobs or loans, and limited access to events.

Blog #6

The Progressive Era 

The role of dissent helps minority viewpoints on legal issues. The near rule is very important in some cases it was interesting to me how Trump comes up in this because when I think of the first attempt I think it was only cases a long time ago. The three expectations of the Near Rule are 1 obscene, 2 threatening national security in wartime, and 3 threatening to incite violence.  

I think the mainstream media nowadays tries to stay neutral and not try to get their opinions about topics like war in their articles so that more people will read them and listen to what they have to say. ANTIWAR.com is very straight to the point and makes sure to state the facts as they receive them. The top stories are Backing off Hostage Talks and War in Iran, these are typical stories you would see in mainstream news because some reporters don't want to cross the line when they talk about war and death.

The American Conservative has similar headlines like "Biden: Survival of the Unfittest" . Just by the title you can tell how the article is headed. I  think the reason we don't normally hear about these websites is that most popular websites stay neutral in their opinions. 

Blog #5

EOTO Reflections

I learned a lot of new information from my classmates, the first thing that stood out to me was Peyton when they talked about the first camera phone. Samsung was the first phone created in Korea. You could only see the photos if you looked into a computer. At first you could only see twenty photos at a time. 

Another thing I learned about was the invention of the newspaper which was originally a form of communication useful to society. America had the first paper in 1690 and had some issues until 1791 when the freedom of the press came along. 

The final thing that stood out to me was the Carrier Pigeons. They were bred and trained. They have an internal magnetic compass and a homing system. At this time the easiest way to send information was by foot or carrier pigeon and they acted like today's drones. They are still used to this day, the last reported time was in March 2023 when they were smuggling drugs across countries. 

EOTO #1

Twitter 

Twitter was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. The first ever tweet was from Jack which is pictured below. Dorsey is also the creator of Square, he never finished college because, in his senior spring he had the idea for Twitter and dropped out to follow his dreams.

The company Odeo which was a search website for audio and videos but was supposed to be a podcasting company is where the other co-founders met. Noah Glass came up with the name for Twitter but was later kicked out of the company in the early 2000s because of greed Evan Williams was his original founder and thought Glass was going to take all the credit. Biz Stone worked at Blogger with Evan Williams and they both worked there until Google bought it in 2003 and they moved over to Odeo. Evan Williams started out working with his father teaching people about the World Wide Web and later worked for various blogs and computers before working at Blogger.com and Odeo.

The original idea of Twitter was a text messaging service that you can only use up to 140 characters in a message.  When the app first launched Stone was in charge of marketing and sold it as a a new form of communication. It would be similar to a text message but cheaper and easier to connect to more people.

Twitter became popular at the South by Southwest Conference which is an annual meeting of businesses in film, media, and music that all meet in Austin, Texas. Going to this conference their number tripled from 20,000 to 60,000 tweets per day. Hashtags became a big thing on Twitter when TV shows and even celebrities. Hashtags became very popular and went hand and hand with Twitter.  2009 Twitter started to grow even more when Oprah Winfrey created an account and talked about it on her show. NASA even had astronauts using Twitter from outer space. 

Twitter started to become more of a news site when the news of Steve Jobs first broke on Twitter in 2011 and now people in other countries will use Twitter as their main source of communication during protests and wars. Politicians now also have Twitter to talk to and speak to everyone at once, Barack Obama was the first President to openly use and announce when he won the election.

Twitter had a few rough years after it went public in 2014 and had some competition with Facebook and other sites like Linkedin. The business struggled like most things during COVID-19 and never recovered when the server was hacked. Rumors were going around that someone new would come in and take over and that's exactly what Elon Musk did in 2022 when he bought the company for 44 billion dollars. Musk changed the iconic logo and name of Twitter and the bluebird to X. X is supposed to stand for the Everything app. He saw this app as more than just birds tweeting and could see how big this app could be in the future. He already launched a way to have live streams, send longer messages, and even broadcast videos. Musk named his first start-up X.com which ended up becoming Paypal. Some negative effects of this are adding options like shopping and subscriptions took away from the main goal of the page when it began to be a messaging service that everyone could use.