Blog #7 Diffusion of Innovations

 Over time there have been many different new products to come across. A technology that I think has changed the world forever is the television. The TV has been a product that has developed and changed many times over the years. However, it has never gone out of style. All the way up to modern day, a majority of American households have at least one TV set up. 

The first television model came out in 1927 but it wouldn't be until 1939 when it became available for the public to buy and set up in their homes. 

Then in 1940, color television was introduced and immediately grabbed the attention of consumers. The invention of color television was really the turning point of the new invention and established it as a household item. 

 The first television could only show images in black and white and had a single channel viewers could watch. It was called W2XCW.  This was the first time people could watch programs from their homes and not go to the movie theater for entertainment. That was the main attraction. 

At first people were a little skeptical of the tv. It was a huge device that had to be brought into the house and took up a lot of space. It was an unknown machine and who knew if it was even going to work. It also didn't work very well. 

The pictures repeated 12 times per second, there was dim lighting on the screen and the picture flickered constantly. The programs were boring and repetitive because there was only one channel that was on. This was all still apart of the launch phase so there was a lot of time for improvement. 

The radio was the only invention before the tv were Americans could bring entertainment into the house. Now they could watch that same show in real time on a screen. 

In the 1940's, color television turned around the negative response to the first model. CBS was the first channel to introduce color programs. 

By the 40's the television had many changes that improved the quality and draw for consumers to purchase a TV. By 1947 12 million families had a TV set up in their house.

The image was clearer and most had a bigger screen to view the program. There were many channels you could flick through to find something interesting, and of course the color.

Having the TV be in color was a game changer because it felt like you were right in the studio watching the show. Everything was real and you could see how it would look in real life. Families said it made them feel more unified sitting down and watching a show together.

Using the diffusion of theory, the introduction of color was the uptake for the TV. I don't think the TV has really moved from this point. It hasn't been on a decline because there is nothing else like it. We can use phones and tablets to watch shows now, but the TV is still the biggest device to stream and watch.

 

Today the TV is still something that brings families together. They sit down and watch the new Netflix series that came out or the football game for their home team. Most people don't see a problem with the TV. There are always the people that become addicted and can't pull themselves away from the TV, but there is always a downside to technology. 

The TV has been changing with the times. Now with smart TV's you can use all the different streaming services on that same TV and change up what you want to use. You can even have apps like YouTube downloaded onto a TV. There are so many versions of the TV that it's hard for it to start becoming saturated. Different brands and styles of TV's are going to fade out and become irrelevant but the TV itself is never going to go out of style.

Blog #6 AntiWar Voices

America has always been a divided country went it comes to war. All the way back to the Civil war up until today with the war against Ukraine.

 Antiwar voices are often silenced because they go against the American Government. War brings in money and the country doesn't want that flow of income to stop. So, they go to war. 

Antiwar voices are going to convince people that war is not necessary and won't fix anything. This isn't good for the big corporations who depend on war for their income. Therefore, they silence those voices and make it seem like was is the only way to solve any issues.

In 2014, 205 guests appeared on popular news channel shows such as CNN's "Situation Room" Fox News' "Special Report" and MSNBC's "hardball" to talk about the military actions the US was taking in Iraq and Syria. 

Out of those 205 guests, 6 were in opposition to continue having US military operations in those countries. 

So many of the popular mainstream media outlets we know are not including any antiwar perspectives, only pro war. There is a new term introduced called infotainment. This refers to broadcast material that is meant to inform and entertain. 

The idea of this is to just try and get people interested in what you have to say. That being said, sometimes the information might not be the whole truth or can sometimes leave parts of stories out of the broadcast. 

It's all about what brings in the most money which is why the mainstream media wants to stay on the governments good side. 

War hits both of those categories; viewers and money. 

Military officials are on this side of the war too not just out serving the country. MSNBC was owned by General Electric which is a national conglomerate. This is a company that makes millions of dollars from war. 

So when MSNBC host Phil Donahue said he opposed the US military invasion of Iraq, his show was cancelled and taken off MSNBC.

News channels no longer care about reporting both sides of a story, they want to hear the one that makes them more money and gain more viewers. 

That means the information might not be 100% true.

Especially in times of war, companies are greedy and don't care if they are putting fear in Americans or making people uneasy about the idea of war. 

Even just this one example shows that the media and government only care about the income they will make. They want to push the agenda of the industry and its profits. The US Military looks to grow more powerful and this is one of the ways they are going to achieve that. 

I myself have never seen or heard any antiwar perspectives until looking into those two websites. I understand now why they are silenced but don't agree with the reasons. For news and media outlets to fully report a story they have to give both sides. It's not fair to the people. 

Blog #5 EOTO Reaction

 I thought all the presentations had a lot of good information that I didn't know before. I was especially interested in learning about how WIFI came to be. I know what it is and use it all the time but I never knew the story of how it became what it is today. 

Wifi actually doesn't stand for anything unlike what most people think. It's just a wireless connection. It uses electromagnetic waves to communicate data with two main frequencies. 

Wifi was first invented by a man named Vic Hayes who is known as the father of wifi. He was head of the committee that introduced the international standard for wireless networking in 1997.  

He established the IEEE 802.11 Working Group and was head of that committee up until 2000.

John O'Sullivan was also involved in creating a version of wifi. O'Sullivan was an Australian engineer. His main job was figuring out how wifi could communicate to the computers without using wires. 

O'Sullivans group then introduced the Wireless LAN. The Wireless LAN is a wireless computer network that can link two or more devices using wireless communication. 

In 2003, the speeds and connections only started to get faster. The distance that wifi could cover was also larger. During this year the 802.11 g standard was introduced. The routers were bigger and more powerful and were starting to catch up to the fastest wired connections.

In 2009 another version of the 802.11g was released with faster and even more reliable than the first model. From this point on, wifi just continued to grow and evolve and is still doing so today.

There are so many updates and changes that have happened since the original model came out back in 1997. Since then there have been around six different developed versions of wifi. We are currently up to Wifi 6e which improved on the data being less crowded and operates smoother than its predecessor. 

Wifi has completely changed the world of communications. The goal was to be able to connect people from all around the world and let them be able to connect with one another. 

Wifi has changed the way education is run, networking for jobs, politics, almost anything you can think of. It is now so easy to contact anyone from anywhere and be able to form a connection with that person whether it be professional or personal. 

EOTO #1: History of the Typewriter

 Technology in modern times has been advancing very rapidly. Every year it seems there is a new piece of technology that everyone becomes obsessed with. This was also true for the people back in the 19th century. The invention of the typewriter was something that caught peoples attention. 

Before the typewriter the only other way of recording words on paper was to write them down. The time and effort it took to do that was unbearable and wouldn't come out as neat as typed text looks. There would be men in businesses who's only job was to copy down documents or write letters because it was taking up such a large amount of time. It was a very tedious task, writing with pen, and making sure to get everything right but also be sure that it was eligible to read. 

The typewriter solved all of those problems. In the year 1828 William Austin Burt put a patent on a machine he called the "typographer". This is considered the first typewriter to be made into existence.

 In 1868, a group of men got together and patented their version of the typewriter. Christopher Latham Sholes, Frank Hall, and Carlos Glidden from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After a couple failed attempts at trying to manufacture the typewriter they were taken over by Remington and Sons in 1873.

These men worked together and were the first to release a commercially successful typewriter. They called it the Sholes and Glidden typewriter (also known was the Remington No. 1) and it was released out to the public in 1874. 

It was a revelation. The Sholes and Glidden typewriter was quickly adopted by large business corporations and was able to gain instant popularity. 

It was actually this typewriter that set the way our keyboards are set up today. Starting at the top with QWERTY and ending with VBNM. 

A quote from the Salt Lake Herald from an article in 1884 shows just how much the typewriter changed the face of businesses. The quote reads,"Perhaps no invention of modern times has done so much to relieve business men of the great amount of pen-work drudgery to be done in every business, as the standard Remington type-writer." 

The typewriter can also be credited for bringing women into offices and businesses because they needed to have someone trained and operating the typewriter. The typewriter came at the perfect time allowing women to start having their own businesses during the women suffrage movement.  

Even though this typewriter was the first of its kind there were a lot of practical problems that it had. The biggest concern was that it was only able to type in capital letters. It was also known as a "blind-writer" because the person typing could not see what their work looked like. They would not know if there was a mistake until they were all done and took the paper out to examine it. 

All of these problems were solved when the second edition of this same typewriter came out. The Remington No. 2 was a revised version of the first model. 

It had a shift key that would allow users to type in upper and lower case. It was the first typewriter that was mass produced and really paved the way for the increasing interest in typewriters. It came out four years after the Remington No. 1 in 1878. It was still a blind-writer like the original model but you could lift up a little flap at the top of the machine to check the paper and see how it looked.

As time moved on more and more variations of the typewriter started to come out. Shortly after the Remington No. 2 the "Underwood 1 Typewriter" came out in 1897. 

This was the first typewriter where the typist could fully see the paper and the words they were typing out. It was created by John T Underwood in 1895.

Mark Twain was the first novelist to use a typewriter. He called it a "newfangled typing machine". He fell in love with the machine after being impressed by how fast it could write words. His book "Life on the Mississippi" released in 1883 was the first book published that was fully typed on a typewriter. 

Then in 1925 Remington came out with its first electric typewriter. 

Up until computers, typewriters were the only way of neatly getting something down on paper and fast. Throughout the years typewriters advanced and got more practical. 

Typing is now nothing compared to what it was when the first typewriter was released back in 1874. We now merely tap the letters we want to write out letters, books, essay, etc. 

The typewriter changed the face of writing in America and all over the world. Without it technology wouldn't be where it is today. The typewriter was another stepping stone to the new innovations that were rising in our country at the time. 

https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/stories/science-and-technology/the-typewriter/typewriter-chapters/history-of-the-typewriter/#:~:text=Introduction,the%20fight%20for%20women%27s%20suffrage.

https://typewriters.com/blogs/who-invented-the-typewriter-a-brief-history/

https://dippingintolight.com/typewriter-sholes-glidden/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/11/16/mark-twains-typewriter-full-defects-devilish-ones-nearly-drove-him-bonkers/#

https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/56152/

Blog #3 Eight Values of Free Speech

There are many aspects to the First Amendment. It's not as simple as the right to free speech. How do we differentiate what should be protected and what crosses the line. 

After reviewing the eight values of freedom I felt number seven was the most important to me.

 Promote innovation says a society where free speech is valued is better because citizens will be more creative, energized, and interesting. 

In todays world, we can tell free speech is not valued and is actually being taken away little by little. Peaceful protests turn into riots, speeches can turn into the speaker getting attacked and hurt. This is not a world where you can speak your mind and not get in trouble. 

Freedom of speech has even been taken away by presidents. Recently, former President Donald Trump was arrested for conspiring against the 2020 election. He was arrested for talking about how he didn't agree with the results. That is a violation of his first amendment right and therefore was wrong on the governments part. 

He was also told to be silent on twitter and any social media which is a perfect example of prior restraint. That is not ok. 

During the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, there were protests and riots almost every day. It was good when the police broke up the riots before anything bad happened however when the peaceful protests got shut down violently from the police, that was another violation of the first amendment. 

That's why protesters would get even more fed up. They are trying to bring awareness to this pressing issue and get literally shot down for it. 

Doing that is not going to make them stop it's only going to prove their point and make them protest harder. 

That's why the protests went on for so long. No one was listening they just wanted to find ways to shut the protests down quickly enough so they wouldn't get rowdy. 

Promote innovation comes in handy with this. If police never stopped the peaceful protests and didn't try to overtake the crowds, I think the movement would have made a bigger impact and wouldn't have been so aggressive. 

I feel that in todays society everyone is so on top of the current political news and are quick to jump on someone for something they say. Every time there is a statement from Biden or any president, people on the other side (in this example republicans) will immediately start bashing him and saying he's a bad president. Whether or not what Biden said was good or bad it doesn't matter because those people are going to attack him either way. 

If our society wasn't so focused on politics and criticizing each other so much, we could accomplish so many cool things. 

My big thing is journalists. Imagine if journalists weren't so caught up in politics and trying to say the right things so people will be in agreement with them. 

Journalists have lost their right to freely publish what they want. The government plays the biggest role in controlling what can be put in the media and what things are off limits. 

That's not what journalism is supposed to be. 

Journalists are supposed to expose the truth about the government not be on their side hiding their secrets. It's scary how if you say something that you're not supposed to know, you can easily be thrown in jail. 

A perfect example is what happened to Jim Taricani. He was sentenced to house arrest for 6 months because he refused to name the source who gave him an FBI video of a city official agent taking a bribe. 

Judith Miller was put in jail back in 2005 for 3 months. She refused to give up the source who told her the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame. 

If journalists could tell the truth and not be punished for it, I think the whole industry would be completely different. Maybe they wouldn't spend so much time writing about politics and would write about new, interesting things. 

There is so much up and coming technology, artists, writers, musicians that we could be hearing about but instead it's all about politics. 

Promote innovation is the direction I think we as a society should take. I think about how much more exciting the news would be and hearing about so many different, exciting stories would be the thing that lifts people out of a slump. 

We need to value the first amendment so we as a society can put our energy into more interesting, innovative things. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/us/protests-policing-george-floyd.html

https://archives.cjr.org/opening_shot/opening_shot_july_august_2014.php

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/reporter-judith-miller-released-from-prison

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/24/donald-trump-to-be-arrested-in-georgia-live-updates.html#:~:text=Former%20President%20Donald%20Trump%20was%20booked%20at%20the%20Fulton%20County,2020%20presidential%20election%20in%20Georgia.

Blog #2: The Supreme Court

 The Supreme Court is the most powerful judicial system in the world. It is made up of nine justices who have been selected overtime. Some justices last longer than the Presidents who appointed them. There is a lot I didn't know about the Supreme Court and watching the videos really taught me a lot about what their direct responsibilities are. 

Watching the video and hearing the nine justices talk about their first days and the first case they ever argued was really grounding to listen to. They are real people too and I think we put them on a pedestal because they are in such high positions of power. 

Ruth Bater Ginsburg was talking about how she didn't each lunch on the day she had her first case because she wasn't sure if she could keep it down. She was so nervous to start and I think that shows a real side to the justices that you wouldn't normally see.

All of them talked about that feeling they got when all the attention was on them and people were interested in only their opinions. RBG said she realized the people in the courtroom had no where to go for the next 30 minutes because they dedicated their time to be there to hear her. 

That feeling of having the power is something that a lot of justices had to get used to. Justice David H. Souter asked one of the justices that had been there before him if they ever got used to that feeling. Their response was that it takes three years. Another justice said it takes five and another said sometimes you just never get adjusted to it. 

Something I did not know about was how they decide what cases they are going to take on. In the video it said they get around 7000 new cases a year. The funny thing is they can't take on any cases they hear about and might be interested in. They have to wait for someone to bring their case to them, then the justices can all decide if they want to take it on. 

They meet and discuss afterwards too. A couple days after they hear the case and the evidence the lawyers presented they vote on their decision. After they vote, there is an opinion letter that gets written up and released to the press explaining their decision and what went into each justices idea on why they chose the side that they did. 

This process usually takes a minimum of four weeks. In the video they showed one of the letters that ended up being 80 pages long. I never knew the process the Supreme Court took in getting their decisions out to the public it was something that kind of just always happened. 

I think the most important take away from the video is the fact that they are all just people. Sometimes they make mistakes and in the video they talked about that. 

One justice said it feels like walking through wet cement and having those foot prints follow you. It's hard to be in that position of power and have your mistakes follow you. 

I mentioned in the beginning but realizing that the justices are all just people makes me feel like I shouldn't be as harsh when their decisions come out for cases. I might not agree and it will make me upset if they decide something i'm not in favor of. However, they are doing the best they can and I think we should take that into consideration. 

Blog #1: My Top 5 News Sources

 I am not someone who reads a lot of news. My family stopped watching the nightly news because it was all filled with sad stories and who wants to listen to another sad story. However, I realized that I would rather be informed with those stories rather than be ignorant and not know what's going on in the world.

Although I still don't watch the news there are a couple sources that I look at to find information about current events. 

The first and biggest way I get all my news is through Tik Tok. I feel like this app has taken over the world and more people are on it than those who aren't. Even thought its an app meant for silly videos that last 15 seconds, it has turned into something much bigger than that. I see videos on my page all the time of popular news stories and information about laws being passed. I remember hearing for the first time that Roe V Wade was overturned on Tik Tok. 

There are so many people who have accounts on TIK TOK whose sole content is just sharing news. It's a great way to find out things fast however you have to be careful with what videos you believe because some might not be true. A lot of people are just looking to gain more views so anytime I hear anything on TIK TOK I go straight to google news and find out if it's true. 

Google News is a secondary source for me. I go there to fact check anything I've heard on another platform. I feel like Google News is really helpful with providing reliable articles from trusted sources rather than just random people saying what they want. Google for anything is the place I go to for more information rather than a little clip or picture I might see on Tik Tok. I use Google News a lot when doing projects for school as well. Researching on this platform is very easy and I can always find a source for what I am searching for.  

A popular source that might not seem like a source would be other people. Talking to friends and family is one of the fastest ways to hear new information. Stories, especially interesting ones, spread like a wildfire through friend groups and families. Nothing stays a secret for long and eventually people all around the world will be talking about the same thing. I remember when Queen Elizabeth died it was like the whole world knew in a matter of seconds. My mom was the one who told me and soon all my friends were talking about it. This is a good way to hear multiple perspectives of a story and to find out new information you might not have heard on your own. Although some things can get lost in translation going from person to person, it's still such a fast way to be able to talk about current events and gain another persons perspective on the story. Friends and family can be great for hearing multiple sides of the same story.

I used to read a lot of magazines but recently I've narrowed it down to just Vogue. I love reading Vogue not so much for current events but for stories about topics I'm interested in. They are always publishing articles about up and coming designers or photographers and artists. I find that stuff so fascinating and love to see the new things going on in those fields. This cover here is a new clothing designer. Her name is Matilda Djerf and I have been following her story for a year now. It's so cool to see her now on the cover of Vogue and telling her story. 

Articles like that are what keep me interested in my Vogue subscription. There is always new content being published and they really make it a point to interview people who are making a change in the world. 

The last source I use for trending news and stories would have to be Instagram. I follow a couple of news accounts and I find that I scroll through their posts once in a while to keep up to date with content they are posting. I don't do this too often but I see news accounts come up on my explore page a lot and I do look through their articles. I followed an account called Feminist because they were posting about the 2020 election and how it would affect women's rights. They also post a lot about news in other countries involving women's rights. They keep really up to date with laws and bills that are passed concerning women's bodies and what is being decided about them. 

Instagram is not the place I would go to for current events because there are much better sources for getting fast information. However, Instagram is good at spreading awareness about issues. A lot of accounts will make infographics you can share on your story so your followers can see what's going on as well. It's a good way to get people talking and curious about what's going on. They can then find the sources that work for them and figure out information their own way.