In the Age of A.I.

 In the Age of A.I.

This entire film scared me a bit. As opposed to just focusing upon the many things they talked about, privacy was the scariest thing to me when watching this. In class, we spoke upon the impact that our phones' privacy has on us, or that the “Alexa” has on each person that has it. I found my mind wandering to all of the terrifying things the internet has a hold of whether it’s my own personal information or my friends or the people around me. Apps such as snapchat where all you do is take photos of your face all day, it is all saved. Even the feature on new iPhones with the face ID to get into the phone. People have their faces scanned 100’s even 1,000’s of times a day and where does that go? People that have their emails and passwords saved by a fingerprint on their apple devices to make it “easier” to get back are just throwing their personal information around like it’s candy. 

I want to focus mostly on the “Alexa”’s in this post, though. I personally have never bought an Alexa because I thought that the concept was scary. “Would you let a stranger eavesdrop in your home and keep the recordings?” Washington Post  asks. Most people would react to this as if it were a dumb question. Of course people would not want someone they don’t know listening to their every word. What is the difference between a stranger and Alexa though? Where do people think Alexa goes when she’s so called “off”? How does she turn off then magically come back on just to her name? The answer is she isn’t off. Many home owners say she "goes rogue", meaning she activates quite often without her trigger name being announced by the owner. This is a terrifying concept that anyone can hear anything you talk about just through a little machine that is supposed to “make your life easier just by plugging it in”. Alexa is always listening and the “In the Age of A.I.” movie, it is very clear we are all being watched and listened to at all times. 

EOTO #1: Motion Picture

 Motion Pictures

Learning about motion pictures is more than just looking at the impact individual movies have on a person. If that were the case, we’d be here forever. Movies, tv shows, etc. do have an impact on people in many different ways. Different genres hit different parts of your heart, but how does the creation of motion pictures truly affect people to this day? As a society, do we benefit from this creation? Have we self-destructed more than built ourselves up since this invention? It is hard to say the overall impact considering everyone has taken it differently, but to really dive into this we have to take a look back at where this all began. 

Thomas Edison was the creator of motion picture in 1888, that is, the first successful creator. The creation in 1888 was the first motion picture camera, to be more precise. Edison had the help of a man named William Dickson, who he leaned on quite a bit when it came to his crazy ideas. Though Edison is the name one thinks of with this creation, he was not the first or only one to try to invent this technology. Many European inventors took a swing at it first, even getting confident enough to have patents made on their designs. With that confidence though, came disappointment as each of their ideas were rejected. When Edison was successful he continued to create new technologies with Dickson, but never got a patent on them. This led to many copies being made of each of these inventions. None were entirely the same, but close enough that other inventors found themselves just building off of his original ideas. 

One of Edison and Dicksons’ very first inventions was called the Kinetograph, created in 1890. This was their first attempt at a motion picture camera. Two years later is when they invented the kinetoscope. This was a device that acted as a projector of moving images on a screen. The way that this technology worked was that there were images flashing across the screen from a roll of tape across the machine. The images were not entirely clear when it first came out, but it was remarkable what they were able to do. 

With these inventions being the start of it all, look where we are now. A world where TV’s are old news. People use their laptops and smartphones to watch anything in the world in seconds without taking any amount of time to consider how this is possible and how incredible it truly is. There are so many upsides to the new technology of motion pictures. Whether it is the easy access to anything you want to watch at any time, the wide variety of genres to choose from, the different emotions people can take away from different cinematic experiences, and so much more. Having said this though, some of these upsides are also downsides of technologies today. Having these platforms at such an easy access point creates the illusion that it is okay to be disconnected from the world as long as you want to be. This easy access to any and all content has also made monitoring what people find out there very difficult. Additionally, there is a stereotype of people in these cinematic films or television shows that portray people in a light that is not always realistic. It has caused many people in this generation to try to grow up faster than they should be, almost missing out on their youth a bit. People see the technological improvements as improvements, and scientifically they are. Looking more closely at the psychological impacts though, it is hard to say if where we are today as a society is better off with these crazy inventions or if we would be a closer-knit, happier society if we were back to using kinetoscopes. 

Top 5 News Sources

Where Do I Get My Information?

My top 5 news sources may not be the typical magazine or daily news show. To be entirely honest, the majority of my major news comes from social media. Instagram is the main place where I learn about everything going on in the world but I also see a lot of my news on facebook and from family members who are keeping themselves well educated on the news around the world. Having said this, I do sometimes use CNN and New York Times to read more in-depth articles about the news stories so those would be main sources as well, but Instagram is certainly my main source. 

On Instagram, there are so many different ways to get your news. Personally, other people posting informative posts on their stories is how I get my news. The way that this works is when I see that a friend of mine found something interesting enough to put it on their account, it causes me to want to know more about it and be more educated. This social media platform is where most students my age get their information because on average, I would assume I open instagram over 40 times a day (I know, I have a problem…). As that is an absurd amount though, I learn so much every time I click on the app now. Whether it’s social issues, politics, or local news, Instagram covers it all. It is no longer an app just to look at photos of friends having fun. It still includes that element that we all love, but this app is turning into a platform to raise awareness for so many things people were not educated on before. 

As for Facebook, this app is a bit more biased when it comes to the news being spread. Though it allows news articles to be shared as a link on the platform, there is a more of an open space to allow people to caption it with their opinions. In addition, Facebook is more of an adult platform which does lead to more political and sophisticated issues to be posted and discussed. I would say this is my second source for information still for the purpose that there are typically bigger arguments in the comment section on Facebook which can make it hard to tell if the post is reliable or not, whereas Instagram has a shorter box for comments and is better about reporting comments that may be true or may be 

false. It is second, above the others though, because it is a platform I spend a lot of time on and it is somewhere I use as my initial source for information before I do additional research. 

When it comes to my family, they are extremely up to date on current events. They are passionate about staying as educated as possible and enjoy having debates about the news. My grandmother uses different sources as say my mother and father, so getting all of our different perspectives is a really cool way for me to get my information!

Lastly, it is important to get current news from magazines, journals, newspapers, etc. Also, considering my dream profession is to work writing for magazines, it is important I read a lot of styles of magazine writing and see how they report on different events. Almost every morning, I try to read through a new story from The New York Times, and depending on how much time I have I read at least one story from CNN. CNN is a bit biased at times and has a very clear standpoint on each story, but I find it a good source to get a general idea of what is going on in the world. The New York Times is one where I find more information than any of the other sources that I use to get my information. It feels like a more sophisticated platform and has stories that go into much greater depth than say Instagram or Facebook. 

In all, I find it extremely important to get my news on current events from many different sources, not just many different magazines. Getting news on social media is so beneficial these days, but that works hand in hand with reading magazine articles as well in my opinion.

Why I chose journalism (extra post)

Why Journalism?

Many misinterpret why I want to be a journalist (and chose a journalism major). Some ask me if it is solely for the fun of writing about gossip or being the first to know the latest information on all world news, but this is not the case for me. Journalism feels like an outlet for me. I chose this path because for as long as I can remember my greatest passion was writing. It did not matter what I was writing about, I just loved it. With that being said though, my favorite prompts in school were always the subjects about real life events. I thought it was so interesting being able to inform the world (or my classmates) of a certain topic in- depth and be able to write about it the way that I felt was the most effective for an audience. I knew from then on I wanted to be the person who wrote stories that truly impacted people. I’ve never been one to dwell on gossip of any kind, and though this is part of being a journalist depending on the stories I must report, my goal is to have a greater impact than this. 

Not only do I love the writing aspect of journalism, I also love the editing aspect. I grew up reading a full book every two days and then moving to the next. In elementary school all the way through high school and even first-year of college I was all of my friends’ personal editors on each and every paper, sometimes prioritizing their edits over my own because of how much fun I had editing. So with this journalism major, I hope to make it into the journalism field where I can work my way up from writer, editor, to publisher and maybe even do them all simultaneously (though I know this is a harder task than I am leading it to be). But overall, every day all my life I have been told to do a job that I love when I get older and not to base it off of how much money I would make, and I know how strongly committed I am to this subject as a whole.