Media, Law & Literacy

My parents always talk about how when they were kids they didn't have half the things kids today have now. There was no Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or even cell phones for that matter. No one was tracking their children on Life360 or Find My Friends. There was no taking pictures on your iPhone and immediately uploading it to social media. Technology and the internet have advanced drastically in the last 15 years or so. I think I have a balance between an unhealthy and healthy relationship with technology. The unhealthy relationship I have is that the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is to check my social media accounts. I go on Snapchat, Instagram, Tiktok, and Facebook all in that order. If I wake up at 10am, I probably won't get out of my bed until 11:30 because I spend so much time scrolling through social media all morning. Even though I spend a lot of time on my phone in the morning, when I'm out with friends or doing something productive I'm not gl

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been the talk of the quarantine. The purpose behind Animal Crossing is you just chill out and build a cute little island and create a life. I remember playing and being obsessed with Animal Crossing when it was on the Wii. I would sit for hours in my basement when I was 9 or even younger, playing on the Wii and on my Nintendo DS. When I found out they were releasing one for the Nintendo Switch I was so excited! Some things to do on Animal Crossing: New Horizons are fish, catch bugs, find fossils, build your house, build different pieces of furniture for your island, hang out with friends and the list goes on and on. You can donate fish, bugs, and fossils you find to the museum and any duplicates you have can be sold for bells (money). You can use bells to expand your home, build bridges across your island, buy clothes, or new pieces of furniture that you can't build. Animal Crossing is based on real-time so certain bugs and fish only appear certai

Everybody can agree that being stuck in quarantine has been extremely boring. There are only so many times you can check Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and all of the other social media outlets that are constantly talking about COVID 24/7. I found an article that talks about some things to do to keep you busy! Starting a new Netflix show is a great way to pass the time. I've watched All American, Outerbanks, and a bunch of movies and comedy specials. Another way to stay occupied is to play games with your family and the people you are quarantining with. Playing UNO, cards, monopoly, drinking games (if everybody is over 21 of course!) and Nintendo switch games are good to play with the family. I bought the new Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the switch which has been great at keeping me occupied. DIY projects are a good way to be creative and create something new. My cousin and I have been painting a ping-pong table with different logos of things we enjoy and its been really fun!

People are going crazy during the quarantine just sitting in their house looking at the same walls every day. The use of social media has increased dramatically since the start of the COVID-19 virus outbreak. Many people have been using different social media platforms to express how they feel about the virus, how the country or their state is handling it, how they feel about the President during this time and to talk about how bored they are. The downside to social media during the outbreak is that false information gets spread extremely quickly and a lot of people believe everything they read on the internet or what their friends post. We get information right at our fingertips in a matter of seconds which is nice to always know what's happening. However, people are more likely to panic when they are seeing people buy out the stores and post how scared they are. When the outbreak first happened, people were buying out all of the toilet paper and hand sanitizer in the stores which

John Milton's Areopagitica  written in 1644 is one of the most influential pieces of the right to freedom of speech and expression. The marketplace of ideas was intended to justify freedom of speech with the outcome leading to the truth. Rational citizens will believe ideas that are true and reject those that are false.  Milton wrote, in Areopagitca: “Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions: for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.” The Supreme Court took what Milton said to mean the marketplace protects the discovery of absolute truth. The Supreme Court uses the marketplace if ideas theory to show that people are rational and should have the capability to know what is true and what is false. The issue with this is that the truth today is not how it was back when the marketplace of ideas was first introduced. Today we have social media, different internet platforms, and various news broadcasts that jus

When I first hear the word "propaganda" it instantly takes me back to my middle school history class. Propaganda has been used since the 19th century. The term "propaganda" is when information is used to promote or influence an audience to further an agenda. Propaganda is primarily used in advertisements and with political parties. This was especially popular during wartimes. A popular piece of propaganda was Rosie the Riveter during the World War 2 era. Rosie the Riveter was an iconic symbol for women who worked in the factories while the men were fighting the war.  Bad propaganda spews negativity and creates ill-will towards others. For example, the Nazis used propaganda to promote their negative thoughts and views on the Jews. The United States used propaganda during the War in Iraq. The U.S dropped radio broadcasts and leaflets all over Iraq placing blame on Saddam for the torturing and suffering of the people of Iraq.  https://web.stanford.edu/class/e297a/W

I use a wide range of social media sites. Currently, I have accounts on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Tiktok. I post more on Instagram and Snapchat because those are the main sites I go on consistently. I really only use Facebook for my sorority because of our executive council posts updates about events and schedules on there. I post a little bit on Tiktok but I mainly just watch videos of my friends and celebrities on it. My Instagram is filled with pictures of myself, my family, and friends. I also post a lot about when I had cancer to bring awareness to Leukemia and to show other patients that they can beat it just like I did! I never made my cancer "private" because while I was going through my treatments, there was a Facebook account made with over 1,000 members in it for people to send their love and for my family to give updates about my health and progress. I would constantly talk about the ugly side of having cancer that not many people know about. People who h

CNN has announced that Facebook will start removing and censoring certain ads from President Trump's re-election campaign. People are upset with Facebook for allowing President Trump's ad's to run because they believe it is causing confusion around the official U.S. Census. The U.S. Census is used to count every single person in the United States and how many of each people live in each state. The Census is used to determine how many seats are needed in the House of Representatives in each state. Facebook is being slammed by the Democratic party for not fact-checking the ads and claims that Facebook is letting the ads run because it benefits President Trump. Some of the ads read; " This survey is ESSENTIAL to our team's 2020 campaign strategy. We need Patriotic Americans like YOU to respond to this census, so we can develop a winning strategy for YOUR STATE,". The survey that was sent out asking about people's opinions on President Trump and their feelings

Motion pictures allow people to tell stories and express themselves through images and videos. The mid 19th century is really when photography was introduced to the world, especially during the Civil War to document the battlefields during that time. An English photographer by the name of  Eadweard Muybridge took a series of pictures showing a horse in full gallop on October 19, 1878. He was hired by Leland Standford, who was a well-known horse breeder because he wanted to prove that when a horse is in full gallop that the horse will lift all four hooves off the ground at once. In order for the public to view these pictures in a "video" like manner, they were given instructions to view them through a zoetrope. A zoetrope is an old fashion way of viewing moving images by displaying a sequence of pictures showing progressive motion. There is a light in the center of the device and you spin it which depicts the "moving" image on a wall or any flat surface. After watc

My name is Sarina Vito and I'm from Long Island, New York. I am a strategic communications major. I currently don't have a minor but I have been thinking about minoring in social media marketing. I came to HPU because my best friend, who is one year older than me, goes here and when I visited her freshman year I fell in love. After HPU I'm not entirely sure what I really want to do with my life. I know I wanna move back to New York but I don't really have a set mindset on something specific. When I was 18, I was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia. AML Leukemia is a cancer of the blood and bone marrow meaning I had cancer everywhere in my body. I had to have four rounds of chemotherapy and a life-saving bone marrow transplant. The bone marrow was donated by a stranger in Germany. I had no idea who he was and he had no idea who I was. I wasn't allowed to know who he was because of a certain law that prohibits donors and recipients to have any information on each ot

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Standford University. Google has the most popular email server in the world with more than 1.5 billion active users. Behind Google, Youtube is the second-largest streaming service and has over 1 billion videos watched every day. Youtube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in 2005. The impact of youtube is that it creates an entirely new medium for entertainment, it allows many companies to advertise their products and allows people to upload videos and express themselves. Ex-Google employees Evan Williams and Biz Stone in 2006 created Twitter. Twitter is now an "up to the second" news source today. Twitter allows users to post whatever they want about however they feel. Some cons are that the platform has gotten a lot of people in trouble before because of their careless tweets. However, it is also easy for people to go viral which could boost someone's career. Facebook is another widely popular social

The first amendment was passed in 1791. It states that US citizens have freedom of speech, freedom of press, and freedom of religion. The first amendment also "protects the right to peaceful protest and to petition the government. It was passed when President George Washington was first put in office, during his first two years.  While the first amendment  provides a great deal of protection to us, there are a few exceptions in which we are not protected by the first amendment. Just a few of them include but are not limited to child pornography, obscenity, true threats, and fraud. When using your right to freedom of speech, press, and religion "applies only to restrictions imposed by the government".  Today, people utilize their rights given to them by the first amendment through social media, during protests, and face-to-face in person. Over the past many years, there have been several controversial scenarios dealing with the first amendment rights not being prac

With social media becoming more and more prevalent, the issue of people posting their thoughts and opinions and it is becoming more and more popular. For example, one person can tweet their opinion. Whether it be about politics or sports, or anything. If someone sees the tweet and disagrees with it, oftentimes they will tweet back or respond to the tweet with their own opinion which can trigger an intense back and forth battle. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is now retired made a statement saying that "social media is among the "most important places...for the exchange of views". What he means by this, is that people are far more likely to share their opinions now via social media than any other platform.  The Packingham vs North Carolina case in 2017 was a prime example of how social media and the internet are the "biggest battlegrounds for free expression both nationally and globally".   The government has already tried to censor the free