Can social media be dangerous?
Don't believe everything you read.
What is media?
Media is the most influential way people form ideas and judgments about other people. Those judgments tend to usually be negative. Different forms of media, like social media and television, are how most people get their news. Social media plays a huge role in how people view what is happening in their country and in other countries. Social media is also the fastest growing media broadcasting as news gets spread really fast. Because of social media, news can travel between multiple states and countries in a split second. Since news can spread so fast, it is hard to put a filter on who is able to see the news online. Unlike television, where certain broadcasting stations can limit or filter what is being said, online news can travel to anyone basically anywhere on the planet before someone is able to refine what is being talked about. Although one downfall to all types of media is that anyone can make up stories and lie about pretty much anything. Media literacy is the ability to read and translate what the news item is. Media literacy is when you can understand what the article is and how you comprehend what the article is talking about. Media literacy can be a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. It can be a good thing because if we did not have media literacy then we would not be able perceive different messages that people are trying to convey. Media literacy can be a bad thing since people can be very opinionated and if their opinion is not right or ignored then they can make up lies and try to get other people to get the same wrong opinion as theirs.
Media Literacy
Media in our eveyrday lives
Social Media
Is Social Media a Good Thing?
This social media unit has had me question if social media is as good as it seems. We have had a lot of discussions on how social media has both positively and negatively impacted our society. I have always thought that this movement was a great thing because it helped you to connect with people all around the country, and even around the world, in just a few seconds. A person could communicate with their friends, family members, and strangers with just a click of a button. It is also very helpful in spreading news to a large amount of people very fast. For instance, some people in the United States and in other countries only know what happened in Paris with the attacks because of what they saw on social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter. Although this seems like an awesome phenomenon, this can also spark drastic negativity in our society. Since the amount of people who have been using the internet in their spare time has increased extravagantly in the past ten years, there is a higher chance for things to go viral. Videos, text messages, tweets, and posts can go viral, meaning that they can spread to a large audience very fast and sometimes out of control. Positive things like, heroic acts done by someone or a cute sneezing panda, can be a fantastic way to use social media, however, there are a lot of negative things that can go viral that sometimes causes or is the cause of cyber bullying. Cyber bullying is the act of bullying someone using technology devices such as phones and tablets, and communication tools such as, social media sites, text messages and websites. This act of violence is definitely one of the worst things that can happen on social media. I feel like most cyberbullies do not even realize that what they are doing can cause someone a lot of mental, emotional, and sometime physical pain. I think that there should be a way to prevent or at least lessen cyber bullying on the internet. In ten years, I think social media with sort of be the same only a lot better. Since technology will probably be a whole lot better than it is now, I can only imagine that people will come up with a variety of different and better social media platforms.
Social Media
Cyberbullying
Welcome to the Future.
The Commander
Audi R8 Super Bowl Commercial (Preci)
In the commercial “The Commander”, shown during the 2016 Super Bowl, Audi, known to make really nice, expensive, and fast cars, gained a lot of positive and emotional responses when revealed that their commercial was about a former astronaut who gained some life back after getting and driving an Audi R8. Audi starts of their commercial very solemnly showing an older man looking unresponsive to anything and having flashbacks to when he was an astronaut, then they showed his son saying to him “Okay Commander, come with me” which lead him outside to surprise his father with the Audi R8, followed by the father walking and getting into the car, all the while having flashbacks to when he was walking and getting into the rocket, finally we see the former space explorer looking happy again as he feels the power behind the Audi R8 and it reminds him about the days when he was an astronaut. Using an heartwarming story and background to capture the audience’s attention, Audi wants the people watching the Super Bowl to feel a passionate fondness to the old man, and maybe even the son, in order to show that their new car is a car that anyone, young or old, will enjoy to distract from any stereotypes that only a certain type of person will benefit from this car. Audi’s usual audience is American men from their 20’s to 40’s since that is the age group that love expensive, flashy, and fast cars, but with this commercial they tried to expand that audience to older men and maybe even women who say the commercial and felt a sentimental connection.
Audi R8
An Astronaut
Sadness
Trump- Pants on Fire
A day after a black activist was kicked and punched by voters at a Trump rally in Alabama, Donald Trump went to Twitter and tweeted a picture that had statistics about the number of homicides by blacks, whites, and the police. However, most of his statistics were highly inaccurate. The picture he tweeted had the following stats: "Blacks killed by whites -- 2%" "Blacks killed by police -- 1%" "Whites killed by police -- 3%" "Whites killed by whites -- 16%" "Whites killed by blacks -- 81%" "Blacks killed by blacks -- 97%”. The image shows a masked dark-skinned man with a handgun pointing at the death numbers. At the bottom of the page it was listed that Trump got these statistics from the "Crime Statistics Bureau - San Francisco". It was later discovered by many news organizations that this bureau doesn’t exist. To fully understand how inaccurate Trump was with these statistics, you would need the real numbers involving homicide in the United States. The following figures were pulled from the FBI database for 2014: Blacks killed by whites- 8%, Blacks killed by blacks- 90%, Whites killed by whites- 82%, Whites killed by blacks- 15%. We do not know the official number of each race killed by the police, however as of Nov. 23, 2015, The Washington Post put the numbers around 414 whites and 223 blacks. After knowing the real statistics and seeing how morally wrong it was for Trump to support an image that he knew was wrong, is really frightening is for the future of America. It’s horrifying that so many people believed him after he posted this. This just proves that we really need to start verifying anything that is said, especially in this campaign year because the candidates and their supporters will say anything to get ahead of everybody else. Even after the campaign is over we should not fully believe something until we have reliable facts and sources to back it up.
Wrong Stats
Trump
Marco Rubio- False immigration facts
On January 31, 2016, a day before the Iowa caucuses, Marco Rubio appeared in NBC’s “Meet the Press” show. On there, host Chuck Todd asked Rubio whether or not he regretted being part of the Gang of Eight senators who authored the 2013 failed bipartisan immigration bill. Responding to that claim, Rubio stated "Look, I tried to fix the problem. This is a real problem. And where are we today? We are worse off today than we were five years ago. We have more illegal immigrants here. We have two unconstitutional executive orders on amnesty. I went to Washington to fix a problem." Marco Rubio is providing false information by saying that immigration now is worse than immigration five years ago. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States as seen very little fluctuation between 2010 and 2014. The peak of illegal immigration was in 2007 with 12.2 million. Many believe that this number is going down because the illegal immigrants are either being deported, leaving on their own, or dying. Also, since the number of Mexican immigrants has declining, partly from the fact that the birth rate in Mexico as fallen steadily since 1990, is one of the reasons why illegal immigrants in the US is also steady and declining. In order to know why Marco Rubio was providing false claims, you would need to know the statistics on the number of illegal immigrants in the United States for the past 5 years. Without knowing the numbers you might be inclined to believe what Rubio was saying. I think that all the presidential candidates should get their facts and number right on different things before they make a public statement on something that they might not know everything about.
Hillary Clinton- True facts on discrimination
In order to get the majority of African- American voters on her side, Hillary Clinton aired a 30- second commercial that deals with the fact that police are more inclined to arrest African- Americans for committing the same crimes that white commit. She stated, “Something is just fundamentally broken when African-Americans are more likely to be arrested by police and sentenced to longer prison terms for doing the same thing that whites do." Her statement is proved by evidence showing that blacks are 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for selling drugs than white even though whites re 45 percent more likely to sell drugs than blacks. Also, even though whites, blacks, and Hispanics have an equal chance at being stopped by a police officer, blacks are more likely to be subjected to a search during traffic stops. A study in 2013 in the Yale Law Journal proved that black males are more likely to get a higher bail and sentence in prison that white makes who committed the same crime. In order to decide whether or not Clinton’s claim were true, you would need to know the percentages and statistics of jail sentences and arrests among whites and blacks. You would also need to know the different rates of the crimes committed by whites and blacks. For instance, her claims could be proved to be false if we didn’t know that whites are more likely to sell drugs than blacks even though blacks tend to get arrested for it more. I think that Clinton is being very strategic in the way that she is expressing concern for the racism in our country, and she is probably going to get the majority African- American opinion and votes.
Proles
This passage does greatly reflect on how we are, especially people in the United States, can be easily controlled. It represents what the average American citizen will go through in their lifetime. As we grow up we are constantly being told what to do and what to think. Our parent, school, and the government have been persistently controlling our minds and instincts in order to keep us from straying from the norm. The seemingly normal thing to do in today’s society is to grow up going to school, go to college or enter into the military, or go straight into the workforce until such time as retirement. The majority of the people who are located in the United States believe that they need to be married by the time they reach thirty years old or else they will never get married. Even though we live in the 21st century it is still looked down upon to have children out of wedlock or to have children with multiple people. We tend to view people who are different from what we think is normal as weird. If you do not conform to society and society’s rules you will be talked about and be seen as a rebel. In order to keep us in control, we must be kept simple minded. Those who are seen as intelligent are typically seen as a threat to society. Although we appreciate and look up to those more intelligent than us, we also tend to feel threatened and in return are inclined to do stupid and rash things to control our place in society. Media plays a huge role in keeping us regulated and limited in what we do. There are many subliminal messages that are put into television shows, commercials, and magazines that we do not realize are put there fore the sole purpose of getting us to think about certain things or forget about certain things.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
After years of facing the torment and hatred of the Nazi Germans, from April 19, 1943 to May 16, 1943, the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto decided to fight back. In 1942, Hitler ordered the liquidation of the ghettos, and more than two million Jews who survived the mass murder were transported to death camps. The most notable case of these attacks was in the Warsaw ghetto. About 300,000 men, women, and children were transported by cattle cars to the death camp Treblinka where they were then murdered. In January 1943, Warsaw ghetto fighters fought back against German troops who tried to rally a different group of inhabitants for transportation. The fighters opened fired against the troops with the few weapons that were smuggled into the camp. After a few days, the troops retreated. Winning this small revolt gave hope to the remaining people in the ghetto that they can continue to fight back in the future. After the January battle, the Jews and the Germans spent the following weeks getting new weapons and training. In April 1943, after hearing the news that the remaining Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were soon going to be transported to Treblinka to be murdered, a Jewish man decided that they should fight back.
Mordecai Anielewicz, a 23-year-old living in the ghetto, declared that the remaining Jewish people should resist getting into the transportation railroad cars. Anielewicz and other young Jews organized the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Z.O.B), which means Jewish Fighting Organization. The Warsaw ghetto uprising officially began on April 19, 1943 when the German troops, under the new leadership of Heinrich Himmler, entered the ghetto with intent of deporting the Jews to the death camps. 750 Jewish rebels, armed with a few pistols and 17 rifles faced more than 2,000 Germans armed with tanks and flamethrowers (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” 1995). Since the Germans underestimated the impact and fighting abilities of the Jews, they were forced to retreat. A few days later, the Germans came back to the ghetto with more firepower than before. Under the command of General Jürgen Stroop, the troops started to burn down houses and buildings that were being inhabited. On May 8, the ZOB headquarters were captured and a number of fighters and leaders, including organizer Mordecai Anielewicz, were killed in the battle. On May 16, Stroop announced that the fighting was over. He said his forces had captured 56,065 Jews and announced that he was going to blow up the Great Synagogue on Tlomack Street (which was outside the ghetto) because of the fact that “the Jewish quarter of Warsaw no longer exists” and as a symbol of victory (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” 1995). In the end about 300 Germans and 7,000 Jews were killed and about 7,000 Jews were transported to Treblinka.
Even though this resistance did not go as planned, it still provided to be a great motivator to the Jews and others fighting to stay alive during this time period. This revolt proved that anyone can fight back and have an impact on the outcome of the situation, no matter how small it is. 1984 can compare to The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising because the characters in the book are involved in an revolt even though it doesn’t make a huge impact they believe that they are doing a great thing and inspiring others (like Winston) to do the same. In 1984, the resistance is very slow paced since the people involved want the government to change, but they know that it won’t happen overnight.
"The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising." Jewishvirtuallibrary.org. N.p., 1995.
Web. 18 Apr. 2016.
Media Literacy course
Throughout the semester, my views on media literacy have not changed much, but I have grown to be more knowledgeable about the different types of media and the impact that it has on society. I still believe that we are too dependent on social media and other types of media, but I also believe that we as a society need social media, news stations, magazines, and newspapers in order to learn more about what is happening in our country and in other countries around the world. Social media is always going to be a constant part of our lives, but we need to learn how to control it and not let it control us. In this course I learned that there is a deeper meaning and truth behind most advertisements and to not always believe what you read online or hear on the news. You should always fact check the source where you got the information on the story, so you are not gullible to everything. I also learned that the way you tell a certain message is extremely important in the way people portray the content and understand it. This class is different than all of the other language arts classes that I have taken because it was more focused on the students and how we felt and interpreted certain things and less about the material and strict lesson plans. We also did not have any vocabulary words that we had to memorize and take quizzes on, so that was pretty great. The one thing that made this class different was the relaxed setting. It was very easy and comfortable to share stories about our lives and particular things that we believe in. For the future I would change how often we had socratic seminars. Those were really fun to participate in and it could help shy kids, like me, break out of their shell a little and actually talk in front of the class without it feeling super formal.
Can we Auto-Correct Humanity?
Social media and other forms of technology were originally designed to help society connect with friend, families, and even strangers across the country and across the world. Platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat were constructed so that we can associate ourselves with our friends and eventually they were used by celebrities as a platform for connecting with their fans on a more intimate level. However, as we start to talk more on social media we are slowly losing our communication skills in real life. We are starting to talk in text and social media slang instead of broadening our language skills. In order to make sure that this doesn’t continue in the future, we need to make sure that we put down our phones and laptops every once in a while and actually have a conversation with a real person in real life. It is quite sad when you are at a restaurant with your friends or family and nobody is talking and instead everyone is on their phone. We can definitely control our social media addictions, but it is a matter of if we actually want to control it or not. There are many people who believe that they don’t have a problem with social media and that they can stop anytime they want to, but the problem is that they don’t want to stop anytime soon. The issue is that if you take away the phone of a person with a social media addiction then they might not be able to communicate with other people for more than an hour before they want to check their Snapchat and Instagram. Many people develop self-esteem problems because they value what their social media accounts say about them other than real people. I know people who have based their beauty on the number of likes that they got on a certain Instagram picture. I am going to harness the power of social media by trying to put my phone down every once in a while and actually talk to people face to face. I don’t feel like I’m addicted to my phone because I don’t particularly like to text or talk on the phone, I much prefer talking in person. However, I do need to stop checking social media whenever I get bored.