The 21st Century
Media
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Have you ever found yourself using your phone or computer to find out what’s happening in the world? I think that most of us have, and if you have, then you’ve only been scratching the surface of all the different nuances of media. Media is just a broad generalization of all the different ways that society gets its news. From CNN and Fox News, to Twitter and Facebook, we use different outlets to get news and information. Tools such as computers, phones, and TVs allow us to literally have the news of the world at our fingertips. You can even categorize speech as media; after all, it is just another way of getting the news around. Sometimes news that spreads word of mouth spreads even faster than if it was on the internet. Though, some may think that it is outdated, newspapers for a long time was the major tool that was used around the world for getting information around. Even in today’s age of technology, countless people around the world who don’t have access to technology use newspapers. Another tool that I would add to the broad spectrum that is media would be music. Just think about it, how much music do you and your friends listen to in a week? More than likely, it’s a substantial amount. Now imagine if every single person in the world consumed music the same way you and your friends do. I don’t know about you but I would definitely consider using music as a tool to get information out there. The point is, that media covers so many areas that it can’t be classified as just one thing; it’s more than that. It’s everything that connects us with the rest of the world.
Kia
Kia in the commercial, “The Truth”, Kia suggests that its new vehicle is the new staple in luxurious automobiles. Kia supports its claims by imitating the movie “The Matrix”, and spouting off about how their vehicle is what “real” luxury looks like, feels like, and sounds like. Kia’s purpose is to instill doubt in the minds of car owners on whether their vehicle is truly luxurious or not, so that they will become more inclined to purchase Kia’s new vehicle. Kia uses a formal tone for young and middle aged couples who are looking to purchase a luxury vehicle.
Americans break “Fast Food Related Illnesses” World Record
Wumpini Ahmed, Current Events
Monday March 17, 2014
NEW YORK – Today, a large group of New Yorkers broke the world record for the most fast food related illnesses in a one week time frame.
A large group of New Yorkers, all part of the Manhattan Health Club, decided to go on a diet last week to cut off some pounds. They decided to go to McDonalds for the first week since they have been campaigning about how healthy their food is when compared to other fast food franchises.
Andrew Bare, a member of the club, stated, “We trusted them, so much so that we even went along when asked if we wanted to super size our orders”. Andrew, along with several of his fellow club members, received diagnoses of high cholesterol and a high blood pressure just six days into their diet.
By the time they realized what was happening to them, the mystery meat and reduced sodium fries had done their damage. It’s safe to say that the Manhattan Health Club did not love it.
How Steve Jobs merged Apple and Google
In 1995, Stanford University student Larry Page took Sergey Brin, a University of Michigan graduate on a tour of the campus. They were both in the same graduate computer science class and quickly became friends. Page settled on the World Wide Web as the thesis for his Ph.D. program after considering several other topics. He continuously worked on the project, and in 1996, Page went to Brin for help. They worked together on developing the algorithm that could count and qualify every back link on the Web. They succeeded in creating the algorithm and named it PageRank. They inserted the algorithm into BackRub, a webcrawler that they created, and quickly began collecting and analyzing results. They began with Stanford’s home page, but by 1997, the site had indexed 75 million pages; quickly outgrowing their Stanford servers. They began looking for private funding, but failed to find anyone who wanted to fund the early stages of development. Page and Brin decided to improve the product and take it public themselves. They decided to change the name of the search engine to something that better reflected the massive scale of their project. Taking inspiration from the largest measurable number, the number 1 with 100 zeroes following it; Page and Brin renamed BackRub, “Google”. On January 9, 1998, Page and Brin filled for a patent for the PageRank algorithm. After their patent was filled, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs took and interest into the search engine. Apple’s stock price had tripled that year and Jobs was looking for a way to continue the growth of Apple. Jobs wrote a check of $1 million dollars made out to Google Inc.; however, Google Inc. did not exist as a legal entity yet. Page and Brin quickly incorporated and cashed the check into their initial funds. On September of 1998, Google Inc. opened in Menlo Park, California and Google.com, was answering 10,000 search queries every day. Jobs initial investment into the company paid off in August 2004 when Google finally went public. At its closing price of just above $100, Google was valued at $27 billion when it went public. Jobs subsequently continued to purchase more and more shares of Google until he became majority owner of the corporation. He used his newfound power to lobby congressman and senators to pass a bill that would soften the United States’ antitrust laws and allow him to merge Apple and Google. On June 4, 2007, Apple and Google merged to create America’s first monopoly since the late 1800’s.
Reflection
This media Literacy class was really different and I really enjoyed it. I think that I learned some things in here, such as how to write a preci, which will help me in the near future. I really liked that the class deviated from regular language arts classes in that we didn’t have to read books that we wouldn’t gain anything from. I liked that we used schoology because it is a nice introduction to how college will be like, especially with how we had to turn in assignments online and on time. I also appreciate that there wasn’t a lot of “busy” work; things like journals and poems. As much as I hated writing them, I have to say that writing all the essays that were assigned will probably help me more in the future than all the other things that I have learned in my language arts classes. Going over and revising our essays as many times as we did really helped me improve the way I write. At first I wasn't too thrilled about having to make kinetic typographies but now that I look back at it, I think that it’s a useful skill to know how to make them. There aren't that many improvements that I can think off to make the class better except for reducing the amount of work, but that would defeat the purpose of preparing us for college and beyond. I guess I would say that we could’ve done more things that would've improved our vocabulary, but that could also just end up becoming busy work that nobody wants to do.