Diffusion of Innovations

 Diffusion of innovations is a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread.  Everett Rogers popularized this idea through his book and proposed five main elements that influence the spread of a new idea. These five elements are the innovation itself, adopters, communication channels, time and a social system.  All of these make up the diffusion of innovations theory. 

An innovation that I will be looking at through the diffusion theory is social media, more specifically,
Facebook. Facebook was an app originally created at Harvard for students to judge the attractiveness of other fellow students. This was shut down after two days due to the violation of university policy. Despite this shut down, 450 people continued to go to Facesmash, which is what is was called at this time. This encouraged Zuckerberg to register the new URL for Facebook that we recognize today.  

So looking at this creation of Facebook, we can see how the diffusion theory is used. The innovation itself was created by a group of Harvard students and the early adopters were other Harvard students. The students used Facebook or Facesmash which sparked  Zuckerberg's interest in the app. At the time, social media was not around or used as frequently so this app introduced a new way of communicating. 

Due to popularity, the app started to be used by students at other schools such as Yale and Stanford. This
spread among universities is what Facebook needed to gain traction to become a popular social media app.   The rate at which the app was gaining popularity increased and by the end of 2004, over a million users were on Facebook. 

Facebook continued to introduce new parts to its social media such as "tagging" others in different posts and creating a "wall" that your friends can comment on or leave posts. These new features continue to push the app to appeal to a bigger audience. 

Overall Facebook has played a big role in social media history. It was not a super popular app at first, however, it gained the popularity it needed through diffusion. Now it is one of the most used social media apps in todays world. 

Living in the Age of AI

 "In the Age of AI" was an eye-opening video. Watching the artificial intelligence learn how to play the game was impressive in the first part of the video. I did not expect the AI to lose a game but it lost one. Usually, AI can pick up on almost every possible move or play in a game and predict it before it happens. This AI made a play at the end of the game that was unexpected and won the game. 

AI is slowly taking over jobs that used to be available to people. The people creating the technology are
trying to focus on efficiency and the best possible way to get tasks done. However, focusing on the benefits of technology is not always a good thing. This technology is taking jobs away from regular people. 

In the video, multiple people discuss the scariness of AI and how it is taking their jobs. While the rich continue to get richer, the poor will get poorer. This idea was mentioned to show how split the public is and how dangerous it is to take away the people's jobs. 

The computers that are taking these jobs are adapting and learning. They obviously work for free which saves the employer money but it does not help those that worked this jobs previously. The more technology advances, the less we need human beings filling available positions. 

Surveillance capitalism is mentioned as a safety precaution for those that use social media and technology. While we may think that we're the ones "using" social media, it is actual "using" us. Certain search engines like Google track our behavior to use this data to predict our interests. This data is used to create advertisement for each user that matches their interests. 

Google's way of predicting peoples search habits was adopted by other social media companies. Facebook started to buy data and use it to advertise certain things to its users. Behavioral prediction takes away the uncertainty of life. Technology can now predict appropriately what your interests are and how to advertise that to you. 

Facebook started to adjust peoples feed, especially during the 2010 election to influence people. They
came out with an "I Voted" icon that would help push you and your friends to vote. This little icon made an impact on over 300 people. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg has gotten into some trouble with how much data they are collecting on people. He said now that they will be developing a safety system that will protect the data of people rather than sharing it. 

AI now is visible in different technologies like Amazon's Alexa and Google's version too. They listen to everything that we say to help collect data to advertise your interests to you. Simply asking every morning "what's the weather like" is training this technology. This privacy violation is scary and unnerving. 

I think that privacy is a huge human right that everyone is allowed. When it is being taken from us or we face challenges against privacy, we should fight back. Technology is advancing faster than we can keep up, however, we can determine how much information we give out. I know that I will start to make up fake information when an application on my phone asks me about something personal. 

Antiwar

 War is defined as a violent conflict between different nations or states. People generally go to war for a variety of reasons. It has been argued that a nation will go to war if the benefits of war are deemed to outweigh the disadvantages and if there is a sense that there is not another mutually agreeable solution. More specifically, some have argued that wars are fought primarily for economic, religious, and political reasons. 

War has been a problem as long as we the people have existed. The furthest dated war goes back to 2700BCE in Mesopotamia. It was fought between Summer and Elam to keep the Elamites from invading and taking control of the Sumerians land. The Sumerians won and later constructed a great wall to keep the Elamites at bay. However, warfare pictographs of armies are dated back to 3500 BCE on walls. This means war was around before this first documented war. 

Things like war are often hidden from the public eye to prevent chaos and panic. Most of the time, war is inevitable because the government wants us to believe it must happen in order to resolve our issues with others. While we can keep our fingers crossed in hopes that war won't happen, it has a higher chance of becoming a reality than peace. 

Antiwar is defined as an opposition to war in general or to the conduct of a specific war. Websites like Antiwar.com and The American Conservative are hard to find because the government favors war. These websites contain information the government tries to silence and prevent the public from hearing. As a society, we're not supposed to speak out on war but instead, go along with what the government says is right for us. 

I think that the government tries to silence antiwar civilians because there are benefits from war. For example, war can strengthen the economy. It can provide jobs and help manufacturers to thrive that produce war materials. Next, there is a huge technological advancement by the end of each war. After World War II, we had fully functional planes that did not fully exist by 1900. Lastly, it creates a part of history that shapes the world. All of these factors are what influence the government to love war.

It is odd that the government goes to a great extinct to silence antiwar voices. Usually, when one tries to silence another, it's because one is guilty of doing whatever the other is trying to say. This may be the case with the government and antiwar civilians. 

In conclusion, the government silences the antiwar voices because they genuinely enjoy wartime. With war comes many benefits for the government. The more war that exsists, the more money the government is making behind our backs. As long as we have antiwar civilians, we as a community have someone that is willing to stand up for us. I fully support the antiwar voices and think they should continue to do their job and play their part in society. 

EOTO Technology Presentations: Google

Life without Google seems unrealistic in today's age. I know that whenever I have a question, Google is the first thing I use to find an answer. More than 70 percent of worldwide online search requests are handled by Google, placing it at the heart of most internet users' experience. It's been around as long as my lifetime, however, the older generation knows what life was like before. While I may not remember how the invention of Google impacted the world, I learned more about history through my peer's research. 

Google was created in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The term "Google" was a misspelling of Page's plan to name it "Googol." By mid-1998, they started to receive outside financing. After raising around $1 million, they based their office in Menlo Park, California.

Once Google became the client search engine for Yahoo in 2000, business started to take off. By 2004, people were searching on Google 200 million times a day. This growth continued over the next twenty years. At the end of 2011, Google was handling some three billion searches per day. 

In the chart to the right, you can see the comparison of Google to other search engines in 2012. Google was averaging 1,168 million searches compared to others. Yahoo was only averaging 292 million. This is a huge difference between these two well-known search engines. 

Google became such a commonly used term to the point that it entered the dictionary as a verb in 2006. The term "to Google" became a popular expression meaning "to search the internet."  

Google started to create new additions to its platform. In 2005, Google Earth and Google Maps first came out. Then in 2006, Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets were introduced. Google Chrome was invented in 2008. Next, Google Drive appeared in 2012 as a way to organize some of these files. Lastly, Google Classroom came out in 2014. 

Overall, I learned a lot about Google that I didn't know before. Prior to the EOTO presentation, I knew Google was a search engine. Now I know it's quickly developed into much more than that and at an impressive rate. Google is the most popular search engine today and its earned this achievement through time and hard work. 

The History of Motion Pictures

Motion pictures have been around since the first one was released in 1878. They have gone through many drastic changes that have improved movie experiences throughout the years. Movies went from black and white to color, from no sound to being able to feel the movie, and from basic graphics to intense computer-generated imagery. Time has played a huge factor in the advancing field of motion pictures. The longer we have had to become comfortable with technology, the better movies have gotten!

The first ever movie was called The Horse in Motion. It was a groundbreaking black-and-white short film.
Using multiple cameras, they captured each shot and then placed all the images together to create a single motion picture. 

British American inventor, Eadweard Muybridge worked for Governor Leland Stanford. Muybridge was in charge of taking pictures of Stanford's horse by using a camera that could work quickly. They decided to set up a series of twelve cameras to do the trick. In October 1878, the Scientific American published this series of pictures with instructions to view through a Zoetrope. Muybridge decided to place these individual images on a rotating disk before projecting them onto a screen through a lantern creating the first motion picture. 

This first movie proved that creating these moving images was possible. A year after creating the first movie, Muybridge invented the Zoogyroscope which allowed him to present photos to an audience. During this same time, French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey invented the Chronophotographic gun that could record twelve photos a second. These two inventions are considered to be the basic concepts for projecting motion pictures. 

Shortly after in the 1880s, the first motion picture camera was invented. Louis Le Prince shot several short films on his invention. Some of these films include Man Walking Around The Corner, Roundhay Garden Scene, Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge, and Accordion Player. 

Thomas Edison and his assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson are often considered the inventors of the first motion picture camera. They worked to invent the Kinetograph in 1888. This camera imprinted around 50 feet of celluloid film at the rate of 40 frames per second. Shortly after in 1894, they created the Kinetoscope. This camera works more traditionally than we're used to by running on a continuous film loop with incandescent lighting. They opened up Kinetograph Parlors to the public so everyone could enjoy these film screenings. 

A Kintescope exhibition in Paris inspired the inventors of the next motion picture camera. In 1895, Louis and Auguste Lumiere introduced the Cinematograph. It ran 16 frames per second, was hand-cranked, and weighed only 20 pounds. A famous Lumiere film called Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory was the first film they created on this device. 

Movies created a new version of entertainment that changed people's lives. It became a popular past-time to attend a movie on the weekends or a fun date night idea. This source of entertainment influenced lives all over the world. By 1914, several national film industries were established. Some of the dominant industries were located in Russia, Europe, and Scandinavia. The more that people started to pay to see movies, the bigger the industry grew, and invested more money into production, distribution, and exhibition. 

It was a fantastic invention to change the way we see films and entertainment, however, had a huge impact on live shows. The movie industry hurt the theatre and actors who put on shows. Actors and actresses lost their jobs and theatres shut down. More people wanted to see go and experience a movie shown in a theater instead. Today, when we go to see a play it feels more authentic than watching a movie. This is because of how much movies have taken over the entertainment industry. 

Movies started off small and barely a few seconds long. Now we sit in a movie theater or on our couch for hours at a time. The evolution of movies is important to look at to understand how the entertainment industry has grown. 

Speech Theories - Human Liberty & Freedom of Speech

The First Amendment protects our freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is defined by Google as the
right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint. Freedom of speech covers more than just talking aloud. This includes the right not to speak, to use certain offensive words and phrases to convey a political message, to contribute money to political campaigns, and to engage in symbolic speech. 

In today's world, we have a new version of "speech" that congress has not covered. It is a difficult and unique situation in the 21st century. Social media is today's newest form of communication that reaches many people within minutes. Even though the First Amendment protects our right to speak, social media censors what we are not allowed to say. 

Most social media platforms have a set of guidelines that you are required to accept before using the app. These guidelines contain information about minor safety, bullying, harassment, copyright material, and violence. Of course, it's important to try to protect each other online, but how far is too far?

TikTok allows users to mute certain words or phrases in their comments to prevent inappropriate texts. Does this go against freedom of speech? Or is it okay because it's a privately owned application that individuals download freely? It may seem to violate the First Amendment, however, because of the guidelines against harassment, these acts are protected. 

Last year, former United States president Donald Trump tried suing Facebook, Google, and Twitter in a class action lawsuit for banning him on their platforms. While he deems this action unconstitutional, they reason that Congress cannot lawfully encourage private persons to censor speech if Congress is constitutionally forbidden from doing the same thing. Because Facebook, Google, and Twitter are private companies, they cannot violate the first amendment. Trump tried to argue that social media companies have increased from private status to "state actor" status, however, that point didn't help him in this particular case. 

Personally, I have faced censorship on social media and felt like it was a violation of my First Amendment rights. I often create my own content and post on Instagram and TikTok as an influencer. Posting frequently has opened my eyes to what is considered to follow "community guidelines" and what does not. If I try to post a video in a cropped shirt or bikini like many other influencers, my video is removed. This seems unfair because others can post what I cannot, however, TikTok uses terms like "minor safety" and claims to remove the content for other safety reasons. The users that get away with posting freely are the same people who have millions of followers.

 Although I'm not physically saying anything in the video, I believe the message still speaks for itself. I think creating content is a form of expressing yourself. This form of symbolic speech through self-expression is why it follows under the First Amendment and more specifically freedom of speech. 

As a U.S. citizen, it's part of my duty to speak up when I feel my rights are being taken. On social media, there is only so much you can do to try to stop censorship. You can appeal a video and deem it to follow the guidelines but you still have to wait for the platform to accept it. It's a difficult situation and there isn't really any single individual with who you can email or try to communicate about it. 

I believe to fix censorship on social media, someone should be put in charge of that position. Each company should have someone who deals with censoring others online and try to avoid it at all costs. As long as there is no hate speech, harassment, or bullying going on, there is no valid reason for removing the content. 

U.S. Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest federal court in the country and the head of the judicial branch of government. As a member of the Supreme Court, their job is to evaluate laws and decide if it is constitutional or not. These nine justices also have the power to check the actions of the other two branches of government - the executive branch of the president and the legislative branch of Congress.

This information is not new to me, however, there are some facts that I was unaware of before learning more about the Supreme Court. For example, in the early years, the Supreme Court originally decided to meet on February 1, 1790, but due to transportation issues, the meeting was pushed back to the next day. When they met, they didn't discuss any cases but instead focused on working out organizational procedures. This was a shock to me because I expected the first meeting to discuss cases, not procedures. However, it makes sense that cases couldn't be discussed without order and procedure to do so. 

The most important takeaway to understand about the Supreme Court is it has the power to ensure people have equal justice under the law, and thereby, also functions as guardian and interpreter of the Constitution. Each law must go through the Supreme Court in order to be considered just or unconstitutional. It is the living interpretation of the Constitution and its role is to serve as the voice for the American people. 

The most shocking information I learned about the Supreme Court is about the Chief Justice. In cases where the Chief Justice is a member of the majority opinion, the justice has the authority to assign who will write the court's opinion. I didn't know this prior to when I learned about it because I didn't consider what would happen if the Chief Justice is a member of the majority opinion. This information was shocking because I didn't acknowledge this situation. 

The video made me realize how powerful the U.S. Supreme Court is. In the first minute of the video, the Supreme Court is called the most powerful Judicial body on earth. Their power rests on public faith in their independence and impartiality. 

I wish to learn more about the Supreme Court because I haven't had the opportunity to research these topics on my own. Prior to taking this course, I had not thought to study our government and it's role in our everyday lives. I now realize the role politics play in my life and how important it is to understand your rights as an American citizen. Moving forward, I plan to show more interest in the news and government activities.