Blog Post #10

 EOTO: What I learned 

Starting out she gave two definitions 

"Gatekeeping is the activity of controlling and/or limiting general access to something" - Oxford Dictionary

"Hiding you interest and hobbies to keep them from growing to be "mainstream""- Urban Dictionary 

Both of these have a similar meaning one is just more general to social media. For example, you could be on tiktok watching a girl do a makeup video and she uses this beautiful lipstick but refuses to tell anyone what it is. You would see people in the comments calling her out for 'gatekeeping' the lipstick from her viewers. This term being used in this way has turn it into what we would consider a 'slang' term. Meaning it is used widely among a certain group/area of people. 

The term being originally created in 1943 by a German social psychologist, Kurt Lewin. Beginning as a widely used term in psychology starting out meaning to do "nothing but to block unwanted or useless things by using a gate". (Communication Theory)

Gatekeeping Theory has a different understanding than general gatekeeping. Gatekeeping theory is a situation where events are covered by mass media and are either 'passed through' or 'closed off' and don't get mainstream media attention. This allows for Gatekeeping Theory to fall into a role of surveillance and monitoring data. 

She stated in her presentation that Gatekeeping Theory gives news editors the ability to play the role of "Mr.Gates", meaning that they get to decide what goes on to be published/presented to the public. 

The listed pros and cons of Gatekeeping Theory that she gave were:

Pros:

-Helps to differentiate the difference between real and fake news

-Helps to make sure we are getting the most relevant information 

Cons:

-Some important information or news is never seen or heard of

-Each news outlet has the ability to pick and choose what does and what does not get published

All of her pros and cons fell into the Gatekeeping Theory and I could not find any others. 

https://www.communicationtheory.org/gatekeeping-theory/

Blog Post #9

Agenda Setting Theory 

 

    Agenda Setting Theory is the ability of News Media to influence specific/preferred topics on the public agenda. It is driven by the media’s bias on things such as. Politics economy, culture, etc. While it is used

so much today almost none of the population realize how much their opinion is actually effected by it.

    A few past examples from News Media is “Whatever Trump does is urgent, Breaking News!” And “We all know Bernie Sanders can’t win!” 

    Agenda Setting Theory can be traced back into the 1920s when it first popped up as an idea in Walter Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion. In 1922 when Lippmann’s book was published, Agenda Setting Theory was not quite a thing yet. Simply in his book he mentioned the idea of the process occurring and how he believed that it worked. However, at the time there was no studies or name for the process he was talking about.

    In 1963 Bernard Cohen was studying the process of Agenda Setting Theory, but it would not become a real Theory until 1968. 

    In 1968 Dr. Max McCombs and Dr. Donald Shaw developed the theory after “The Chapel Hill Study”. The Chapel Hill Study was preformed by them based off of the 1968 presidential election between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. The study took 100 Chapel Hill, North Carolina residents and what they thought the most important election issue was and then compared it with what the local News Media was reporting the most important issue with the election was. 

    The positives and negatives of Agenda Setting Theory are very generalized to the topic itself. The only positive is that it gets general topics and agreements of news to certain areas/groups. However, with social and news media today it is not as needed for this positive as it could have been in the past.

    The negatives are that it can influence the general public’s opinion on said topic and it can push a news story as more important than it actually is. 

    The effects of Agenda Setting Theory is that it can influence the public’s opinion in a certain direction, typically in the direction that is being mentioned. When a topic is mentioned enough it has the ability to push the public to store the information so that it is more easily recalled. Even if the individual does not relate to the subject or information given. Also it is often done with local news stations with local matters to make them more apparent than they actually are and then leaning news stations use it to push certain opinions or aspects of a political story. This allows them to keep viewers with similar morals and views. 

    Personally, Agenda Setting Theory needs to go. It should be a thing of the past as with the news and social media we have in todays world. People should be able to form their own opinions in todays age, however, we know how the government and world is, they would never want that. 

https://online.alvernia.edu/articles/agenda-setting-theory/

https://study.com/learn/lesson/agenda-setting-theory-politics-examples.html

https://media-studies.com/agenda-setting-theory/ 

Blog Post #8

    Privacy is such a large part of today and it is continuing to be pushed past a boundary that most people don’t know about. It basically affects anyone today that has a phone, uses an ATM with a camera, drives, or, even watches from a streaming service. Some form of their life is out there on the web or in data and they may not even know about it and that is the scary part. Take the Ted Talk about driving and law enforcement keeping tag numbers and locations. While it started as a way to keep everyone safe, those in power decided to use it as a way to keep tabs on everyone but never informed anyone that this was happening. Had I not watched the TedTalk, I would have never known and yet I am from a small town where cops are around all the time.

    While this can affect those on a small level within towns and cities, the global side is even darker. Using technology that is meant to read tags to watch people going into mosques or watch people at non-violent protests is a massive abuse of power. Local government can only do so much to handle that especially if they don’t know what is happening themselves. And take the phone companies building ways into wiretapping phones into the updated versions of phone companies. They built access-ways into the phone itself to make their life easier yet never told anyone it was happening. It’s not mentioned in one of the TedTalks but it has been shown online; you can say keywords or questions around your phone and your phone will start to show you post or suggestions based on what the phone heard while you didn’t realize. I shouldn’t be able to talk about baby clothes and then a few days later, get baby clothes posted on Instagram. That alone is a violation of my life and my privacy that I have no control over. It comes at a time when the government may need to step in and say when enough is enough. And yes, no one is truly listening in on my conversations as a college student from North Carolina, and they are busy actually listening to terrorists or those involved with illegal activity but there is nothing stopping them from listening to me anyway.

    The best way to protect ourselves from this invasion could be to just go off the grid, get rid of the phones, credit cards, etc, and just walk into the woods… but that isn’t logical. I believe that even just being aware of what is happening to our privacy and happening with our phones is just the way that we can even start to protect ourselves and change what is happening. Reading the privacy information for each social media, each service that we sign up for, and just knowing what exactly technology can share without us our knowledge is just the first step towards working toward more privacy from technology. 

Blog Post #7

    I want to talk about the iPhone (which I think a lot of people will be talking about) when it comes to the Diffusion theory. The iPhone caught on so well because it was one of the first phones of its kind. I mean a full touch screen that had no extra keyboard, flipping action, and so many extra apps made it this brand new, updated, and “welcome to the future” gadget. I think the release year is the way it became so successful. 2007 is right when those that were born without global technology (generation X) are now having children (millennials) that were able to see both sides of an early version of global technology, i.e email, dial-up, etc. With the iPhone 1 being the jumping-off point, it gave way to a larger section of the early majority and late majority because it was such a popular gadget that “everyone had to have”. But the thing that made it so popular with everyone also made it difficult for others to accept it. 

    Those born in the silent generation and even some baby boomers still refuse to have an iPhone saying that they don’t need anything new or they just don’t understand how everything works now that they have updated it so much. Back to the diffusion theory, iPhones are now everywhere so there is no way that we haven’t reached the full saturation of market shares meaning that, in theory, those that have the innovations should not change but yet people upgrade to iPhones who have never had them all the time and even those that have iPhone continue to update to the newest model. The one thing that makes iPhone stand out from other phone companies is the fact that they upgrade every year with a newer, better version but I also think that this is one of the negative consequences. The fact that by updating the phones every year, they start to phase out older models which then leads to some people not being able to keep up with the version and being iced out by the iPhone if they can’t afford to keep up with the new models. The iPhone 14 is estimated to cost 800.00 just as a basic version. 800.00 is a lot for some people and they may not be able to afford to spend 800.00 on one phone when that may be their rent. 

    While iPhone isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, I believe that if the upgrades don’t slow down or the cost goes down in some aspect, then iPhone won’t be able to keep up with itself and the positive aspects that it has given to the connection of the global technology.