Social Media and Me

With the emergence of hashtags, the way that social media is being used, has changed.  Previous to the invention of the use of hashtags, I believe that social media had a slightly different purpose.  Currently, I feel like hashtags group people into clans/tribes based on what the name of the hashtag one uses is.  For example, according to medium.com,  the most popular hashtags of this year are "#love" being at number one and other hashtags like: "#instagood", "#happy", "#cute", and "#followme" following in the top ten.  The words used in these hashtags, although they may seem insignificant at a glance, can show an individual many things about the people that use them in their posts.  For example, hashtags like: "#happy", "#cute", or "#love" can be attributes or feelings that posters want others to associate with their life.  If you're constantly using these hashtags in pictures or videos of...

As many may know, net neutrality protections were repealed on December 14th, because the FCC's Republican majority approved chairman Ajit Pai's plan.  To learn more about this subject, I looked for articles and eventually ended up on the website: savetheinternet.com.  Although the name suggested that the article was going to be strongly opinionated, I decided that I would read it anyway and see what I thought about the issue and the stance that the people running this website were taking.  What immediately caught my attention were letters in bold font that said: "What will happen to the internet now?".  I began reading, because I wanted to know the things that I should be expecting to see since I'm only a couple of years away from being an adult.  In my opinion, it is important to be aware of the world that you are about to enter as an individual without the constant help of your parents.  The paragraph stated that companies like Verizon, AT&T, and Comc...

For this blog I decided to read an article that points out the pros and cons of advertisement and then to decide for myself whether or not I think advertisement has a positive or negative impact on our society.  This article was taken off of schoolnet.org and was written by Ms. Khin Aye Cho, a tenth grade teacher from Myanmar.  She states an interesting viewpoint about why advertising is as successful as it is today.  To her, it is because advertisements offer more than just the information about that product.  I also, completely agree.  If advertisements only offered information about their product, no one would even care, and in addition to that lack of passion, people would get bored really fast, which would mean that the company wasted a lot of money on something they thought would advertise their product successfully.  In fact, nowadays, some ads get so involved in a story line that the viewer doesn't even know what is being advertised and become very ...

For one of this week's media blog posts, I decided to search up and ad, watch it, and then analyze the methods used by the advertisers to get the attention of the consumer, or the person watching it.  I decided to search up the weirdest ads and what I found wasn't exactly weird, but the company that created this ad had nothing to do with the story that the ad presented.  The ad I chose to watch was: The Rock, Paper, Scissors ad by Google Android.  The ad started out with an animated piece of paper who was going to his first day of school.  As he walked down the hallway, he saw that the hall was lined with animated scissors and his face becomes fearful.  Automatically, the person watching the advertisement makes the mental connection that paper is "less than" scissors because scissors beat paper in the game: rock, paper, scissors.  Then it makes sense in our brain that the piece of paper is scared of the scissors because we associate the story with the game....

Ever since the creation of social media, there has been a debate: is social media good or bad for you? I chose to look at an article and decide for myself whether or not social media is good or bad for me and if it is worth my time.  I went to the website: socialmediatoday.com, and looked at the article: "Is Social Media a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?".  The writer points out that there are many answers to this question and rightly so, says that there are very good and bad things about social media, and decides to take a neutral position, basically saying that social media can be good or bad, according to the way an individual uses it.  She then went on to list the main arguments for both sides of the social media argument; good versus bad.  One of the good things about social media that she decided to list was that it connects everyone.  This is such an important thing to many of us in these days where we can travel to new places, make friends and continue to sta...

Language is used in many ways and many forms, but one way is through media.  This is one aspect of language that is used very often but never really noticed by the people who read posts or articles.  Writers use different words because of specific connotations that they may have because they want to make a certain impact on the reader, however, the way that this impact is made is something that the reader, often times, is not aware of.  I chose to examine two articles on the same subject, but from different news sources.  The articles both talk about how a baker/cake artist in Colorado refused to make and decorate a cake for a gay couple because he said that it went against his religious beliefs.  The articles were called: "A cake is food, not speech.  But why bully the baker?" and: "Is the right to discriminate in the constitution? The answer's a piece of cake.".  From the titles of the articles, we can tell that they have opposing viewpoints, the rea...