Blog Post #12

For this week’s blog, we were supposed to listen to the TED talks posted on your blog and discuss the content in them. The first video talks about tattoos. Just this year, I got my first and second tattoo, so this video caught my attention. The man in the video suggests that we look at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc as electronic tattoos. They give just as much, if not more information about you than any tattoo ever could. They also do not have a certain lifespan, so just as a tattoo lasts forever, as does your footprint on the internet. I thought that that was a very interesting way to look at the social media platforms we use daily. The next video was by Catherine Crump and she was talking about the insane surveillance cameras that police departments are allowed to use to gather a very detailed illustration of who they think you are. License plate readers capture images of licenses and checks each plate to see where people have gone or may be going. The government in way too involved in our everyday lives and I have believed this for a very long time before seeing these videos. I have friends who truly believe the government watches the webcams on our desktops and laptops. At first I didn’t believe them, but I have started to believe it more and more with all of this information out now on how the government spies on its own citizens. I think we need to do something to even further limit the government's power.  

Here is another article on how the government invades our privacy:

Article

Blog Post #11

For this week’s blog post, we are supposed to talk about one of the PP presentations we saw today in class. Personally, I have been without a laptop for around 3-4 months and that has made things extremely difficult for me at school where we are so laptop oriented. Unfortunately, this assignment is one where having a laptop would’ve been very beneficial. Now that the presentations are a few hours old, I do not remember them very well, but I am going to do my best to recall them. I can’t recall what group it was, but I think Sabrina was in it. I remember one of her slides pretty well. It was the one where it showed the 6 most dominant channels/networks and all of the many companies/channels that are associated with them. Mr. Dean made a point to talk about how you scroll through channels and see the many different names and think that they are all independent, when in reality they are either owned by or in business with the main 6 channels we saw in class. This stood out to me the most out of everything that went on during the presentations. I think in the future, the PP’s should be made available through blackboard, so that people who don’t have laptops or even people who wish to write their blog posts at a later time, can do so and have just as much to talk about as the people with laptops and people who wish to do their blog posts the same day. 

Blog Post #9

This week in class we talked about how the government and social media companies invade our privacy everyday. A few examples of this our when you are on your computer or cell phone and you search the internet for winter coats, after a while you will notice that there are winter coat ads on the majority of the websites you visit. I have noticed things like this over the years, but never thought much about it because I have known for years that the government monitors us all very closely, even though we may not see them do it. Nevertheless, I found it interesting to actually have a dialogue about it and see how much we can find about ourselves on the internet.

So how big of an online footprint do I have? When I first thought about this question I thought about the fact that I have been on Instagram since the age of 12 or 13 and I am now 20 and have only posted 9 things on my account. I also have not posted on Instagram in over a year. Next, I thought about Facebook. I have had a Facebook account for about the same amount of time as Instagram, but I post even less on there. I have pictures and videos on my Facebook, but were posted many years ago and I haven't posted another of myself in over 5 years. However, I know you can easily find my family members through my Facebook. The only social media account of mine that I was slightly worried about, is Twitter. I use Twitter a lot and it is by far my favorite social media platform. Even when it comes to Twitter, I don't tweet very much, at least not anymore. Up until this past summer, I used to tweet anywhere from 3-10 times a day, some days even more. Something happened to me over the summer that will forever impact my life. This thing left me with a lot of time to just think and reflect on where I wanted my life to go. During this time I thought of the many negative things I had allowed to take over my life and tweeting so much about things that people don't need to know about me was one of those things, so I worked hard to stop it and now I tweet maybe twice a week, but that was after I went months without tweeting over the summer.

After reviewing my social media accounts, you can gather that I play/love basketball, attend High Point University, take pictures, I am a member of a fraternity at school, my brother does music, and I have few friends, but the ones I have are basically family, what middle school and high school I attended, and when and where I was born. There is probably much more information that one could uncover if they were to go through all of my Twitter posts. I personally think it is insane that the government can watch us like this, but I also see why its necessary and that is to secure the country, but I don't know what from. While you can find a lot of information about me online, there is a lot less about me out there then there are of other people. My picture does not come up when you look m up on google images, which is good and there are a lot of people who cannot say the same. Just be careful out there, you never know who is watching. You can inform yourself on your rights and many other things on websites like this: Learn more about the governments internet privacy rights