Social Media

The two social media accounts that I have are Facebook and reddit. For me, I use Facebook for staying connected with friends and family, and for more local information. Community happenings pages exist for almost any place you can think of, and they can be a great source for finding out why you heard sirens last night, why certain roads are closed, what public events are happening, and local news articles. There can be drawbacks to these groups, as people tend to be awfully brave and opinionated when hiding behind their keyboard. Although I will admit, sometimes it can be fun to make some popcorn and spend an evening reading all of the drama from the day. Now when it comes to reddit I consider it a more national or even global news source. Some of the subreddits I follow are r/politics, r/worldnews, and for sports r/nfl and r/mma. The thing that I like about reddit is the organization of the information. I think it makes it really easy to check facts and have discussions with other people in a well informed manor.

The last post that I upvoted on reddit was from r/entertainment and it was an article about Chris Brown being arrested for felony battery. One thing that I appreciate when it comes to the recent media trends is holding celebrities more responsible for their actions. I think that the media is definitely starting to be less forgiving when it comes to assault/sexual assault in the entertainment industry. It's great to have that as an example for the rest of society to follow.

The truth of the matter is, media helps shape society, whether we like it or not. I think that social media in particular has amazing potential to encourage thoughtful discussion and debate, and to keep everyone informed. On the other hand, I think that there is equal potential for social media to do the opposite for people. So often I talk to people and they only follow people that they agree with on social media. I think it's important to broaden your horizons and learn about issues from other points of view, so that you can make fully informed decisions and judgement on your own.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 5

Image
Topic One The first amendment is always referred to as "freedom of speech". In my mind the only thing I've ever really associated the first amendment is the right to say what you want and to protest what you want. I think it's incredibly important to have the first amendment, especially in entertainment. It's on the news all the time when people exercise their first amendment in a way that garners attention, whether that's from a speech, a protest, or a release of information. Sometimes, people can get offended by someone else's use of their first amendment right, but isn't that the whole point of the amendment? That it doesn't matter if you offend someone because you're allowed to say whatever you want? This is 'Murica after all, no one can tell people what to do. Or can they? Every example that immediately came to my mind of people overstepping their bounds regarding the first amendment was political. So it got me thinking, were they re
Read more

Media Product Review: "Sober", by Demi Lovato

Image
Every once in awhile I'll come across a song that stops me in my tracks. "Sober" is definitely one of those songs. I first came across this song in my suggested videos on Youtube a couple of weeks ago, but after the recent tragic news of Demi Lovato relapsing and ending up in the hospital, I've seen the song all over the place. The song itself is very new, and it was released unexpectedly, so that coupled with the fact that Demi Lovato has been in the hospital means that there's only a couple performances of the song, but here's my favorite one: It's clear to see in the video above the amount of emotion that went into the writing of this song, and it's obvious that Demi struggles to sing it without getting overly emotional. The reason that this is my favorite performance of the song has very little to do with the performance itself. Even though the song was brand new at the time of this show (it had been released only three days before this show ),
Read more

Week 6

Topic One: Newspapers have never been a really big part of my life and I think that it's partially because of my location. Events in my immediately local areas aren't generally covered by any of the major newspapers. Because of this I've always used Facebook for community updates and things like that. I think it's a very effective platform especially when you're looking to find information about something that just happened, and you don't want to wait to read about it in the Sunday paper. Recently there was a civil emergency warning that Oregonians got on their cellphones. No details were given and a lot of people were really panicking, because no one knew what the emergency was. After trying to find something on local news websites and coming up empty handed, I went on Facebook and found the answers I was looking for within minutes. When it comes to local politics I'll admit that I could  be much more well informed. Unless there's something reall
Read more