Growing up Online

Internet today is the most powerful thing in the world. If were technology were to shutdown or get into the wrong hands people get into a panic. Especially now a days with all of our youth becoming more computer and technology literate people are finding ways around things on the Internet. A lot of this is due to social networking such as myspace and facebook. In the documentary "Growing up online" shows how much this technology is effecting out youth. It is creating a whole new culture among our youth. Also with this new technology and our youth becoming more literate it is harder for parents to check what they are doing. With this lack of authority online these kids use it as a way to escape and make their own decisions. What they fail to realize is that they are not safe on these social websites. One of these websites that you cannot restrict your children from seeing is how to commit suicide. That is only one of the many disturbing websites that aren't restricted. The only thing we know for sure is that the Internet will keep on growing and will keep influencing our youth. We need to start letting the parents have restrictions on their children's Internet and computer time. I know the new Windows Vista has come up with new ways to restrict their children's. Hopefully this will be the first stepping stone on children restrictions on the Internet.

Merchants of Cool

Media professionals in most cases don't really try to get to know their audience and what they like. Intern they try to manipulate them buy telling them what they should like and what they should do. They figure this out through many different ways whether it be ratings, sales, groups, and e-mail responses. Media professionals can determine these things are workings through putting their advertisements in different places and seeing if they boost or drop sales. For example, kids shows they would show toy commercials. These media professionals are not really targeting kids though. Teens are the largest market segment. So the media professionals have meetings and groups of kids come in a study them on a day-to-day basis. As the movie showed these media professionals are now entering teens houses and looking to see what they like and what they have in their rooms. They look at what clothes they have and what movies and games they play. I feel like this is going a little to far. To invade someones privacy and pay them a couple dollars for it is just stupid. You can not base your conclusion about all teenagers on one teenagers room.

Short Film

This short film was very interesting and did a great job an grabbing my intention. I didn't really know much about the banking system and how it was established. It was very surprising to hear that banks made up 95% of the United States money. This 95% is just made up through lending out loans that have no real money backing it. They can do this with the promise from people to pay them back. The film did a great job of telling you the back story of where banks came from. The fact that Goldsmiths started banking is incredible. Our paper money today is a spin off of their paper claim checks that they lent out back then. They would hand out these claim checks to their customers saying that they had enough money to back it in their bank. When the people found out that they didn't have enough gold to back up these claim checks people started to ask for their gold back. This intern led to a run on the bank where the bank did not have enough gold to support as much as they lent out. This cause the government to step in and regulate the process so this wouldn't happen again.
Everything now a days is just digital money that says there is enough money to back what is lent out. When really there should be as much "gold and silver" to back it up like it used to be in the old days. Where in order to create more money you would have to go find more gold and silver. Debt today is up to 45 trillion dollars which is an astronomical amount.
I agree with what the movie is saying and that we need to act on this now before the debt doubles to 100 trillion. The movie gave us a solution that the government should look into trying to put into effect. It would be hard to achieve this goal with the economy so terrible right now but you have to at least try.

Bitmap vs. Vector Quiz

Conglomeration Animation

With the alliances being made with media owners increasing the amount of this mainstream media is sitting in the hands of fewer companies to control. For my Media Conglomeration Animation I chose America Online Instant message. In my animation I have the AIM logo running off the cliff of the mountain and killing itself. After it kills itself the soul rises up to heaven as the word MEDIA. I used this because our society relies so much on America Online and other Media Conglomerations that they need to stop buying up small individual media companies.

Media Globilization

With the emergence of transnational media conglomerates the dominance of these global media industries cause an uneven flow of information. The use of these new technologies from the conglomerate companies cause a deregulation in society. This raises concern for the new changes in technology. One change will be how the old and new media merge together to form one consistent form of information. Another concern is how and where media will be taken in. With all this new technology the consumption of media is very easy to come by. "Media globalization has been made possible by the ongoing changes and developments in information and communications technology." Examples of this are Cable, DSL, and Broadband each of these new communication technologies are speeding up the way we can access media. One concern is for poor societies who don't have these advances in mass media. How will they get these advancements and keep up with more information rich societies. The "digital divide" between these societies needs to be taken into account. Some other worries the book explains about media globalization is media imperialism, cultural homogenization, and general fears about the rise of global capitalism. These criticisms are valid and need to be addressed immediately. We need to restructure media ownership so these media conglomerates don't cause these concerns and worries we have.