Month: April 2020

Just as quickly as this semester came, it has now passed. Over the time I have spent slaving over textbooks, procrastinating on assignments, and just making the deadline for the biggest assignment of the semester I have learned and have grown from this experience. At the beginning of the semester, I was very optimistic about what the semester is going to hold, I was reaching for the sky. But unlike usual I did not fall short of my goals and my expectations, I persevered and came through. I reached all of my goals as of right now. Once final grades come in then I can breathe and actually look back and see if I made all of them come true. So far my goal of getting a 3.5 GPA is still a possibility, I feel comfortable where I am standing going into finals, but then again that could change. My next goal was to get an internship in sales. Because of the current pandemic, I don’t know if that will happen. I have applied for many internships but the majority of them have been canceled. I have two possibilities remaining and I am keeping my fingers crossed. My last goal was to be a better person today than I was yesterday and I feel like I have done this.

My Goals were not impossible but they did require a lot of work. For example, I have never been a smart student, I have always had to work twice as hard just to pass the class but for some reason, everything finally clicked this semester. I buckled down and got my grades up and learned more about myself as well as my schooling. It required long hours of reading and writing my notes. I figured out that if I go to class, take good notes, and rewrite the notes while going through the chapter after class helped me study and be more prepared. For my internship I applied to every position I could find, I did not care whether I was not the perfect fit for the description, I still applied because the worst they can say is no. Therefore I got a lot of opportunities to interview, but sadly, the majority of my internship programs were canceled. I am now hoping one of the two remaining internships work out so I can gain real-world knowledge. Lastly, I wanted to be a better person today than I was the day before. This one was actually the most inspirational one. This is a line my grandfather used to preach to my family about but I never understood it until I got to where I am today. I have been helping out people who need help, and I have been more open to people. I have donated my time as well as my knowledge to help others who need it most.

Paragraph 3: How will these goals help you after our course concludes?  This can apply to Spring 2020 or goals that are farther into your future plans (i.e. future internship, job, or career path).

The goal hat I believe will help me the most was being a better person today than I was the day before. This will help me in every aspect of my life. I will be more approachable and more likable which in turn will open up more opportunities for me. This will also help me become a better person overall. My GPA goal was set because it was something I have never done before. It was something I knew was possible just never had the drive to get it done. Lastly, my internship will provide an experience that I need for the rest of my life. This course helped me understand the importance of appearance whether physical or in words and how just the smallest change in your appearance will make the difference. The knowledge I have learned from this course it will help me pursue my sales career.

In today’s society, people are busy and don’t have as much time as they need to do their own research on important current events. Because they can not read every article on what is happening in the political spectrum, the buying power of the dollar, and foreign relations they rely on media outlets to explain the importance of these issues. The media has gained influence by getting the information they deem important to the viewers. Some people in the world that are like me, don’t have time to do their research so the majority of the news they hear about is what the media tells them. This can be beneficial but also can leave the public blind to the actual important topics. In today’s politics, the term Fake News has been through around more than a ball in an elementary schoolyard. But I am not going to refer to it as Fake News, but instead opinionated news because the people who are writing the information typically have a bias. And this bias feeds the emotions of the public who can make rash decisions on topics they do not completely understand. For example, the free college tuition is a big one that a lot of my peers enjoy hearing about and sounds like a great idea, but where is the money going to come from. The answer is in your taxes, so instead of paying for your own college, you will be paying for everyones with your increase in taxes.

As a result of our busy lives and lack of brainpower, we all have a personal agenda. This personal agenda is essentially “a small set of issues that’s most important to you at the moment”(368). The media understand that we have a lack of attention so they do their best to keep the important topics in the headlines so you click and read on while the ‘lesser important’ topics are shoved in the corner. Because of this, the media agenda is decided based on the “importance that the news media assigns to issues at a given moment.”(369). As current events change so does the media coverage to best adapt to the changing tides. But the most important topic is Agenda-setting. This is a widely adopted hypothesis that “over time, the media shapes the public agenda… [through] telling us which issues to think about…which aspects of those issues are most important… [and] how different issues are connected to each other”(369). 

Being educated in politics and current events has never been more important than in today’s day and age. We are always making decisions that affect the entire world on a daily basis and yet it is controlled through the media. When the media tells you what issues to think about this is actually a beneficial side of media. They will do their best, to tell the truth about the topic as a whole. For instance, is a new bill is introduced into congress that affects the majority they will tell you the bill and what it does, but on some occasions, they do not mention the entirety of the bill. They are going to tell you all of the benefits, but they can also leave out some of the key drawbacks of the bill. One bog topic is a living minimum wage, which sounds like a good idea, but what the majority of media outlets leave out is this is how inflation is caused. As well as the possibility of losing a lot of jobs because the employers are now looking for more qualified workers or even replacing them with automated machines. This natural bias in media leaves the public feeling educated but in reality not truly understanding the depths of the topic. The media 

Marshall McLuhan was a philosopher who dedicated a lot of his time to study Media Ecology. His theories made me recognize that some of society’s failures are due to technological advancements. Today, if you go anywhere you ill see people buried on their phones. If you visit a college campus you are bound to see multiple people on their phones completely oblivious to what is going on around them. Believe it or not, the older generation is just as bad as the younger generation. Although advancements in technologies are what keep our society moving forward, they can also be the very thing holding us back. People tend to see the entire world through their one eye, the eye of the phone and do not value in-person communication or even do their own research on important topics. They get all of their information from social media and influencers.

Media ecology is “the study of different personal and social environments created by the use of different communication technologies”(311). Although evaluating the different media ecologies can be challenging but are not impossible. You first must understand how the environments are created and how they affect the individuals using the technologies. Mr. McLuhan loved to use metaphors when he was describing the influence of media and how they can be misleading he claimed that ” For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by a burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind”(310). This is important to understand because “we focus on content and disregard the medium”(310). But when it comes down to understanding the content, it has “as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb”(310).

To correctly understand Media Ecology and how technology affects society as a whole we must understand how it is used. Media is essentially anything that man has invented that aids in the speed, range, and communication process. A medium is any kind of media but it is broken down into one specific channel, such as a book or website. This is important because it provides different perspectives and also can reveal fallacies. When studying different people and the environment they interact via technology certain traits become evident. If you focus on today’s day and age, some individuals have concluded that we have lost our interpersonal abilities while others say that technology has improved it. Yes, some have lost the ability to hold an educated conversation, but we have gained the ability to communicate over long distances and even across the world thanks to technology. By focusing on the content itself rather than the way it is communicated, part of the message is lost because the content means nothing outside of the medium or the way it is delivered. In essence, the medium is just as important if not more important than the content itself. If the content has remained constant but the medium has changed over time you know have a completely different subject even though it seems similar. The content is just the icing that makes the cake (the medium) look pretty.