Final Blog Post

I grew up watching technology change the world around me, so I almost feel as if I grew up alongside it. As I got older, technology grew at a pace that I didn't realize was possible. Technology has had such a big impact on my life, as well as so many others in my generation. But everyone has a different relationship with technology, with some having more negative experiences than others. Luckily for me, I feel that my personal relationship with technology has been a positive one.

One of the ways that technology has most impacted my life is the ability to connect with family and friends no matter where I am. Using applications like FaceTime, Messages, and Zoom allows me to talk to the people I love when I am not physically with them, which to me is so special. I remember when I used to live in London, and I would call my family back in America to stay in contact with them and plan visits. Had my family and I not had this kind of technology to contact them, we would have only been able to talk to our extended family in America during Christmas and summer holiday when we visited. Even when I moved back to America, I was able to use these tools of communication to stay in touch with the friends I made in England, who I still talk to today. It makes me so glad that I can contact all of my favorite people in an instant, no matter how far apart we are. 

Another aspect of technology that has had a positive impact on my life is how easy it is for me to get information online. Search engines like Google has made so easy for people to get information on any topic they want to know about, whether it be for sources on a school project, how to make a certain food, or even asking how old a celebrity is. In my case, it has been the biggest help in school, especially for research assignments. Because of the internet, I am able to discover new information on certain topics and have a better understanding of what I am learning. There is so much information people can discover online, which has been greatly helpful to everyone.

With that being said, not all aspects of technology are positives, as there are many ways technology can be misused to cause harm to others. The most prominent way being the dangers of losing our privacy through technology. In recent years, it has been discovered by the public that just about everything from our phone calls, online search history, and anything we do online are being watched by the government. What is so scary about this is that the government actually tracks all of our texts and phone calls, despite us wanting to keep them private. This was discussed earlier in this course in a Ted Talk from speaker Christopher Soghoian, he discusses the ways the government taps into our phones through wiretapping them, giving them the ability to listen to any private conversation we may have. As I mentioned before, having the ability to talk to my family when apart is something I truly value, so to think that there are people listening to every conversation we have is very scary, and can ultimately cause harm to innocent people if used maliciously. 

Another negative side of technology is the way it began the trend of cyberbullying. This is a huge issue that has become very prominent in recent years, with multiple kinds of cyberbullying arising. Any place online that has a form of contact such as text, social media, forums, and games can be used to cruelly target someone, in some cases without them even knowing who you are if done anonymously. As a result, this has become one of the main reasons that the suicide rates teens and young adults have skyrocketed since the invention of social media. In 2017, it was discovered that suicide has become the second leading cause of death for Americans aged 15 to 24. But this issue can go even beyond bullying, and take a much darker turn. The invention of technology has also allowed for practices like revenge porn to be done, which causes extreme harm to the victim. Having intimate photos or videos be released online as a form of revenge is a horrible breach of privacy that I could only imagine is terrifying to go through. Luckily in recent years, both cyberbullying and revenge porn have had laws made to make these actions criminal offenses, but this still doesn't put a stop to either. Before we had online forums like what we have today, neither of these issues existed, but because technology has grown so much over the years, people are able to use it to hurt others and even drive them to the point of suicide.

Technology's rapid growth over the past few decades has both positive and negative affects on people's lives. While my experience with technology has luckily been mostly positive over the years, I also can't ignore that there are many others who have a more negative and harmful experience. The relationships we all have with technology is truly based on the person, and what they have experienced in their personal lives. 

Anti-War Voices

Calls to end war in the United States have been around for many years, gaining prominence during the Progressive Era and the First World War. However in recent years, these anti war sentiments haven't been shown in the media, despite how prominent they are in modern society. This poses the question as to why. Why aren't anti-war voices being shown in the media? In my opinion, I think the reason for this dates back to the Espionage Act of 1917. 

When World War I began Many Americans were against the idea of joining a brutal war that was on another continent, and had nothing to do with us. Initially the government appeared to agree with this, and the US was kept out of the war for the first 3 years. However when Woodrow Wilson was elected as president, this changed. Not only did he officially declare that the United States would enter the war, but he also saw Congress enact the Espionage Act, which made it illegal for anyone to speak out against the war. This was a clear violation of the First Amendment, yet thousands were arrested under this act. While the act luckily isn't in affect anymore, this silencing on anti-war voices from the government still happens today. 

There are currently multiple websites that speak against war, including antiwar.com and  theamericanconservative.com. The articles on these cites talk about the ongoing wars across the world, and how harmful they truly are. One such article discusses how the United States has been pushing the war in Ukraine to continue, and that the government is actively spreading a false narrative to the media so that the war appears justified. But despite there being so many cites talking about current wars, they never become big enough to become mass media in the United States. This seems to be a form of censorship on the part of the government. While the government can't legally silence them for stating their opinions, they can take steps to make sure that they are swept under the rug. Major news sources don't discuss any sort of anti-war sentiments, only discussing the matter if they were the subject in a known protest. These bigger news sources are the ones the government highlights to the public, covering up the lesser known sources that have different opinions. 

Our media is much more censored than people tend to realize. The sources that stay aligned with what the government wants people to hear are the ones that will be shown to the public. Those who don't, such as anti-war based websites, will be more covered up from the public eye. People who want to see these sources need to go out of their way to discover them, as opposed to the larger ones who are right there for us all to see. 

The Age of AI

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence, known as AI, has had a huge impact on society, with everyday life being changed because of it. Things such as school and work have been permanently changed because of this very powerful technology. Naturally, there are pros and cons to AI, which is what I am going to talk about today.

This documentary discusses how AI has changed the world around us, with the positives and negatives being described from multiple perspectives. One of the most profound changes AI has had is on the workforce due to it's ability to do certain jobs. As a result, many people have been put out of work to be replaced by AI machines, which puts a huge disadvantage on our way of living. While AI may be good from production standpoint, it has resulted in our quality of living decreasing due to the number of jobs that are now being taken from us. 

Our quality of living is also impacted by AI due to its influence on our privacy. AI is able to find out so much about our personal and private information, putting people in a position where their privacy is in jeopardy. In terms of protecting national security, this can be used for good so that people who intend to commit harmful acts are stopped. However there are many instances where people's private information are used harmfully. Large cooperations also use AI to have access to consumers' information at a far greater than any of us realized until recently. As said in the documentary, "you would be horrified is you knew how much we knew about you." In 2021, Facebook came under fire when it was revealed that they were stealing users' information, such as birthdays, email addresses, and phone numbers, which was used by hackers to sell. This was a huge deal, which got Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg fined $5 million. It is situations like these that shows how harmful AI can be when it comes to the protection of our privacy and information

Overall after watching this documentary, I would say that my outlook on AI has shifted towards a more negative viewpoint. While AI can do amazing things that will help build the future, it also has huge implications on our personal wellbeing. Its impact on our jobs and personal privacy are vast, and will only continue growing in the future. We don't even know the full extent yet as to how far AI can go, and it is definitely not going to slow down any time soon. 

Privacy, On & Offline

Watching these four videos shows how concerned we all should be for our privacy, both on and offline. The videos revealed how things as simple as phone calls, text messages, and even places you drive to are accessed by the government. The constant surveillance from the government and the usage of people's online information by large cooperations is something that negatively impacts everyone's privacy, which should not be allowed. 

This is an issue that causes harm to myself, and everyone else. We all have digital footprints online, which we now know are all being watched by the government. As a person who grew up using different kinds of social media, this heavily impacts me and all of my friends and family who use it as well. This was discussed in the TED Talk done by Juan Enriquez, where he talks about how we all have "electronic tattoos" online. He uses the term as an expression to say how your presence online is the same as having a tattoo on your body, or in other words, that your online presence is permanent. It's important for us to remember this, because the more personal information we put on the internet, the less privacy we will have. Anything we post about ourselves will be out there forever, whether we delete it from our profiles or not. Though the government doesn't just track our online presence, but also our texts and phone calls. In the TED Talk done by Christopher Soghoian, he discusses the way the government taps into our phones through wiretapping to look at our phones. This means that everyone, including myself and my loved ones, are having out private conversations watched everyday by the government, which they have no business in listening to. I find it really shocking that this kind of invasive surveillance is allowed to take place, when the line between safety and invasion of privacy has been crossed. 

In my opinion, I think the government should put heavier regulations on the amount of information they are given access to. As of right now, there are clearly not enough laws in place to protect our privacy, since we are being watched to such an extent that even our personal conversations are being listened to. It's at a point where our information and online presence are also being used to harm people, which was discussed in Darieth Chisolm's TED Talk about how revenge porn is done as a way of hurting others online. Laws against revenge porn have only came about in recent years, which shows how further changes need to be made to stop the numerous ways our information can be used against us. 

People are aware of the dangers this kind of surveillance has on our privacy, which is why there are now multiple ways for people to protect themselves from these invasions of privacy. Many people install VPNs to their electronic devices, which is an encryption service that blocks their internet activity from being seen by outside parties. This helps us feel more secure in our internet history being private, without the government being able to watch whenever they please. We also now know that we have to be careful with what we decide to put online so that information which is more personal does not fall into the wrong hands.

EOTO #2: The Five Eyes Alliance

The Five Eyes Alliance (or FVEY) is an intelligence alliance between five countries; the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Through this alliance, each country shares their resources and intelligence through their security agencies in order to keep their countries safe from potential threats. The purpose of Five Eyes is to prevent national security threats by aiding each other with intelligence and, in more recent times, cyber security. 

The alliance began in 1946 following World War II, when the UKUSA agreement was formed with the promise of sharing intelligence on post war threats. Canada later joined the alliance in 1948, followed by Australia and New Zealand in 1956. By the time all five countries were in the alliance, they used the majority of their resources to focus on the Cold War by combining their intelligence to aid the United States. However as time went on, their attention shifted towards combating terrorism and technological threats in order to keep their countries safe. Events that the alliance maintained surveillance on included the War on Terror, and their conflict with China in 2018. 

Initially the Five Eyes alliance was top secret, with the nature of the agreement being heavily classified for many years. That is until the details of the original UKUSA agreement were finally disclosed to the public in 2010, which showed how the two countries would share a global network of "listening posts" through their security agencies. Naturally, this later extended to the other three countries who would later join the alliance. 

While Five Eyes does keep us safe from threats, it also has it's downsides in terms of our personal privacy. When the full extent of the data being used was revealed to the public in 2013, it was discovered that the surveillance used is far more invasive of people's privacy than we initially thought. Simple online interactions such as phone calls, emails, internet history, and other kinds of online usage are all heavily tracked by these security agencies, which gives us nearly no privacy online. This also extends to any personal information a person has online, meaning that all online information is tracked, and can potentially be used in a harmful manner. 

The government having constant surveillance on people's everyday lives causes an ethical issue to rise, as the line between maintaining national security and respecting people's privacy becomes blurred by the practices used to gather information. 

The Eight Values of Free Expression

There are eight values of free expression that help us understand why freedom of speech, and the first amendment, are so important in America. These values show how vital it is for a country to allow its citizens to have the freedom to state their own opinions without fear of government interference or punishment. Every one of these theories applies to our society today, with each one explaining different aspects of life and how they contribute to free expression. However, there are two in particular that I feel are the most important. 

Individual Self Fulfillment

If I had to choose one of the eight theories that I feel is the most important to me, I would choose individual self fulfillment, also known as self-actualization. This theory, created by C. Edwin Baker, states that free speech allows people to truly express themselves and form their own identity, which to me is truly beautiful. In my opinion, one of the most incredible feelings is when you are truly able to be yourself without being afraid of consequence. It helps people feel more secure in themselves, and gives them a voice that they know won't be silenced. When we have the freedom to express ourselves, we also feel more confident in ourselves and our abilities, giving us more motivation to be successful in life. Even in the Supreme Court, the following was said about this theory during Stanley vs. Georgia, the "right to think is the beginning of freedom," and "speech is the beginning of thought."

Marketplace of Ideas

Another on the eight theories that I feel are most important is the marketplace of ideas, first mentioned by historian John Milton. The theory states that when the truth and false information are able to conflict, truth will eventually win over the falsehood. This is definitely important when it comes to free expression, as the freedom to tell the truth without fear will ultimately have positive outcomes on the world around us. I have had multiple experiences in my life where this theory applied, with the truth always coming out in the end, even when the falsehood originally had consequences against others. 

EOTO1: The History of the Telephone

The history of the telephone dates back to the 1800s, where many inventors were trying to successfully create an invention that allows for wired communication. However it was inventor Alexander Graham Bell who created the first telephone in 1876. The telephone transmitted sound through electrical wires, with the first words spoken over the telephone being “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” This was revolutionary for the time, though it wasn’t able to have exchanges from other areas. This didn’t happen until 1878, when the first telephone line was created in order to call people in local areas. Within just three years, there were around 49,000 telephones being used across the United States. In 1880, the first telephone company was created by Bell, named the American Telegraph and Telephone Company (otherwise known as AT&T). This was the company that would dominate telephone communications for the next century. They made further advancements to the telephone, creating dial telephones in 1891 which allows callers to directly dial a phone number instead of having to go through an operator. 

The number of telephones continued to rapidly increase over the next few decades, reaching 10 million telephones by 1920. The technology involved in the telephones were also increasing, with the first transatlantic call being made from New York to London in 1927. However, the true groundbreaking moment for the telephone during this time was in 1947, when the first mobile phone was invented by Martin Cooper. While it wasn’t yet commercially available to people, it was still a huge breakthrough in wireless communication technology. It wasn’t until 1973 when mobile phones were made commercially available by the company Motorola. The phones only had a battery life of 20 minutes and weighed about two pounds, but this was still revolutionary in the way we communicate with others. With the quickly growing technological advancements over the next few years resulted in the first smartphone in 1992, which had touch screens, email, and fax capabilities. This is what laid the foundation for the smartphones we now use today.

The Supreme Court

From watching this video, I learned that the Supreme Court is the most powerful judicial body in the world, as they have the authority over congress, the states, and even the president. Because there are so few members, the likelihood of someone becoming a Supreme Court Justice is very low. Through this video, I learned that the US public actually took a long time to accept the Supreme Court. Before 1801, the court had barely any political influence. But after John Marshall was named Chief Justice, the court was given much more power and influence, making it a co-equal branch of government. As a result, the people finally began to respect the Supreme Court and what they represent in our country. I find in fascinating that a court that originally was seek as weak with little power was able to turn into something so important in modern day America. 

What I found most surprising is that out of the hundreds of thousands of cases sent to the Supreme Court every year, they don't actually review very many. In fact, they only review around one hundred cases a year, which was definitely a surprise to me considering how prominent the Supreme Court is in our government. They receive each case a week prior, and lawyers will had thirty minutes to make their argument in front of the justices before they vote and make a ruling. There are also many times where not all nine justices will be present at the ruling, with a lot of arguments only being heard by four or five of them. 

A key take away I got from this video is that over the two hundred years of the Supreme Court's history, there have only been a hundred justices. This is very interesting to me because you don't truly think about how few justices there have been until you actually look back at the court's history. It also shows just how difficult it is to become a justice, since most people in politics will likely never be in that position. All in all this key point has changed the way I view the Supreme Court. I didn't know much about the court before watching, apart from the basics. But the way the video explained how the court is run and what these exclusive members do on a daily basis shows me first hand how important the Supreme Court is to our country. 

My Top 5 News Sources

1. Instagram

Instagram has become one of the primary ways to gain news information throughout the past decade. The rise of social media and it's influence on society has allowed these platforms to cater to a variety of audiences, which makes it easier for people to find news in a wide range of topics. What I like about getting news from Instagram is that just about every news corporation posts on Instagram, so you can see all of their reports on current events on one platform. It is also interesting to see people's opinions on these events through comments and likes, as it adds an interactive element to news coverage that you wouldn't normally get from news channels or newspapers. 

2. Apple News

Apple News is a quick an easy way for those with apple products, like myself, to get news information. The app on iPhones will send notifications on the latest news stories, which keeps users up to date on current events. As a college student, I don't always have the time to go on usual news cites to actively look up news stories, so having this app on my phone helps keep me informed on global events regardless of what my schedule looks like. I also like how Apple News doesn't have a political bias, which makes me feel more confident in the information I am receiving. 

3. BBC News

BBC News is a news channel within the British Broadcasting Corporation (often referred to as the BBC). It covers news from across the United Kingdom, while occasionally discussing global news as well. BBC News was founded back in 1922, and is funded by the British monarchy through a license fee. I grew up in London, so BBC News was what my and my friends' families used to get their news, especially before social media began to take off in the realm of delivering news stories. What I like about BBC News is that they a neutral stance in many issues, with the exception of news relating to the British royal family and monarchy. Particularly when discussing politics, they don't tend to lean in one particular direction, which makes their reports far less biased than other leading news channels. 

4. Spotify

While Spotify is primarily used as a music streaming platform, it also contains very informative podcasts of a wide range of topics. I love listening to podcasts on Spotify because there are endless ways to gain information about the world around me. When it comes to getting my news, I like listening to podcasts that aren't from typical news cites, but from every day people who have their own opinions on current events. This allows me to gain a new perspective on news stories that I may not have had before. 

5. TikTok

TikTok is another social media platform that has become very prominent over the last few years. There are so many people who use TikTok everyday, whether it be to learn new dances, make funny videos, or keep up to date with current news. I find myself constantly going on TikTok to look at the latest news, and what everyone's opinions are. I also find it interesting that so many news cites now have TikTok accounts because of how popular it is, despite the fact that the app isn't what would be considered a typical news source.