Media Law and Literacy

  In The Age of AI Over the past years, AI technology or artificial intelligence has become a more integral part of society and our everyday lives. Nowadays, AI is still up and coming but soon, in the future, it will revolutionize the world. Bringing with it opportunities and social and economic development.  So, how does it work? AI programs learn from the inputs they are given. From here, the program develops and improves its own algorithm. In other words, it mimics humans in a sense that it is trained to learn the rules of a given task as it goes. With the use of computer science programming, AI is able to imitate human action and thought by looking over data. This data also allows AI technology to learn numerous tasks and solve or anticipate problems.  World champion Lee Sedol playing against AlphaGo I was rather surprised to hear about how artificial intelligence was able to beat a world champion at a board game. This happened with the world's most complex board game, Go where

The Julian Assange Battle You've probably heard of the name Julian Assange by now and how he was recently arrested by the U.K. authorities in the Ecuadorian Embassy where he spent his prior 2,488 days of asylum. So, why is this so important and why should we be paying attention to this? Well that's because the government's indictment of Assange poses a clear and present danger to journalism, the freedom of the press, and the freedom of speech. Julian Assange is 47 years old and the founder of WikiLeaks. Since 2010, the U.S. government has been determined to indict him after he published hundreds of thousands of war logs and diplomatic cables revealing numerous war crimes and other acts of corruption by the U.S., U.K., and other governments worldwide. Most significantly, he helped whistleblower Chelsea Manning get a video out to the public. The video, called the collateral murder video , showed an airstrike in Baghdad on July 2007 on unarmed civilians. Obviously this was ve

 Sherman Anti-Trust Act In 1890, Senator John Sherman of Ohio successfully proposed and passed a law that prohibited trusts, monopolies, and cartels from assuming control over the general market, this became known as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act . The main objective of this law was to safe guard the process of competition for the benefit of consumers. It made sure there were strong motives for businesses to operate efficiently, it kept prices down, and it kept quality up. This is obviously a monumentally important law because it banned businesses from merging to form a monopoly that could dictate, control, and manipulate prices uninterrupted with customers at the will of the businesses.  “Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.” - Sherman Anti-Trust Act The need for such an act came from the growing public uproar over large corporations suc

 Vertical Integration As one can imagine, businesses and companies are consistently always looking for new methods and strategies to reduce costs and manage the quality of the products and services they offer. It really comes down to doing whatever is necessary to gain a competitive advantage against the competition in the hopes of being able to benefit in one way or more. One way that a company can generate a competitive advantage is by incorporating different stages of its production process and supply chain into their business, this is called vertical integration.   What is it? Vertical integration is the strategy that allows a company to streamline its operations by taking direct ownership of numerous stages of its production process rather than depending on outside contractors or suppliers. In other words, a company or business takes control of two or more of the steps involved in the making and selling of their product or service. They do this because it makes their organization

 Diffusion of Innovations  How we seek to explain how, why, and at what rate new technology and ideas are spread can be defined by Everett Rogers' theory of diffusion of innovations . The diffusion theory describes why certain technologies are adopted, not adopted, why some people are early adopters, why some people are late adopters, and why some people simply opt-out of a certain technology. So let's try and apply this theory to Instagram... Instagram Instagram  is an app that allows its audience to share images or videos with others. Instagram caught on and spread mainly because it was something new that hadn't been done before. The app used simple features like photo sharing, liking, and commenting to draw their audience in and become hooked. So many people became early adopters of this platform due to a few factors. First, the app was free. I'm pretty sure I can speak for everyone when I say that users are always if not more willing to test out an app if it is free

Netflix  Netflix  was founded on August 29, 1997 in Scotts Valley, California by two entrepreneurs, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. Netflix is a subscription- based streaming service that allows its members to watch movies and TV shows without commercials on any internet connected device. This revolutionary entertainment service took the world by storm. It is now the go to place for TV and movie streaming, providing its services to millions of people. Coming in as the largest streaming video subscription service in the world, Netflix is available for streaming in over 190 countries. To add to that, they have roughly 209 million global paid memberships. So, how did it all begin? Early Beginnings  The idea for this company was inspired in the 1990's when co-founder Reed Hastings was charged a $40 late fee from Blockbuster for an "Apollo 13" movie. During this time, Blockbuster dominated the home entertainment market. You would simply have to go to the store pick out any m