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.

Blog 3

Eight Values of Free Expression

When considering the eight values of free expression, I find that number seven, which promotes innovation, resonates with me the most. This value is closely tied to the number one value of the marketplace of ideas, which both emphasize the importance of expressing oneself uniquely. The idea behind the marketplace of ideas and the promotion of innovation is that people have a wealth of creativity that should be shared with others. I am reminded of this daily, as we need never to know what others are talking about without the freedom to share our ideas. While John Milton argued for the need for a license to publish or print, everyone should have access to the truth, and that it is unfair for the government to control what we write or publish. This is why we have the freedom of speech, which allows for discovering truth. Before this freedom, people were often afraid to express themselves, inhibiting the discovery of truth.

A marketplace of ideas puts everything out there regardless of what others think. There have been countless times when, as a photographer, I would not post a photo because I was afraid people wouldn't see how I saw it from my point of view. I decided to start posting anyway because it is an art to me, and that is what matters. Free speech also comes with fake news and propaganda. As you see in the picture above, you have the truth, but you also have hate speech, theoretical questions, and ignorance because some people believe they have the truth, even when that is not true. Both free speech and you can honestly put anything out there unless it threatens someone in power, and some people will listen. The idea of a marketplace of ideas is that people have a space to share their creativity and collaborate.

Promoting innovation is a very similar topic. It allows you to create exciting new ideas and topics to better society and yourself. I am working in social media. I constantly try to come up with creative and different ideas, and I could not imagine not having that freedom of choice and creativity. Promoting innovation is also about free speech protected by citizens who genuinely want to improve the world. The importance of free expression is often overlooked because today, we would only be able to share ideas about the latest technology, artistic creations, or even scientific discoveries if we had free expression in free speech.
Although promoting innovation and a marketplace of ideas may not be the same values, they go hand-in-hand regarding your freedom of expression and speech. We should value and honor these values and ensure we consistently maintain our freedom of speech or expression because then, we would never honestly know what people are creating in this world and what they have to say. The eight values of free expression are critical to our society today, and I hope we can all stay on one of them as society grows.

Blog #2

 The Founding Era & the Idea of America.

Before taking this class, I knew little about the Supreme Court. I know the Supreme Court was assembled in February 1790 but made the first decision in August 1791. Being on the Supreme Court is a judge's highest honor; only six people make up the Supreme Court. This is the most surprising thing I learned because I doom it be more people that could balance out the powers that the Supreme Court truly holds up. The most important things I learned from this were who currently sits on the Supreme Court, who has set them in the past, and how their decisions have impacted history. I also recognize more cases, but I thought and did not realize how big of an honor it was for a case to be brought up to the Supreme Court, including the United States versus Windsor, which changed the government's ability to benefit same-sex couples.

Blog #1

My Top Five Sources of Information 

My main source of information would have to be ESPN, as an athlete and someone who works in Sports Media it is very important to follow professional and collegiate teams. ESPN is my go-to for information when it comes to articles, stats or even just seeing predictions for upcoming games. 

 

Instagram is my most used app because companies and reporters give daily updates and check in about what they are doing. It is more personal than an article and you can get to see a different perspective online. It is also easy to connect with people from far away whom you have met and a way to meet new people and learn from them.

NJ.com is a great source for all things New Jersey. I was born and raised in New Jersey and since I am

away at school most of the year it is nice to check out and keep myself updated on what is happening. It has everything from news to everyday life to sports. The most recent piece I have read over there has been when the Powerball was worth fifty thousand dollars sold at the local ShopRite.

The New York Times is a great source of information.  The New York Times is a very trustworthy source and has a very reputable reputation. The New York Times is also known worldwide for its games including the crossword puzzle and even Wordle they do a great job of spreading information besides just articles and the news. The Sunday times have become apart of my family’s rotation and I know it is a tradition all over.

TikTok although might not be the best source of information I do believe it is my top way of finding things out. Even though I know, I cannot fully believe everything I see on social media when I wake up the first thing I do is probably check TikTok, and the same thing before I go to bed. It is a source of entertainment that most people my age depend on.