Post #9: Alternative Media

    For this EOTO project, I researched Alternative Media. Alternative Media, sometimes referred to as Underground Media, is media that isn’t under the control of a higher power such as a business operation or government agency. It involves more traditional media such as newspapers as well as newer media like websites and podcasts. Alternative Media gets its name by being an alternative to Mainstream Media due to the bias often found in Mainstream Media as well as Mainstream Media outlets often being unable or unwilling to offer the alternate opinions that are found in Alternative Media.

    Alternative Media has existed for centuries but hadn’t become a specific form of media until the 20th century due to social unrest starting to become much more common. The media first started as printed publications before growing to include radio, television broadcasts, and even low-budget movies around the 1960s. With the growing popularity of the internet, Alternative Media would start to appear online through websites. The internet led to a massive increase in Alternative Media outlets due to how easy it was for people to create their own websites and blogs, allowing more independent writers to get their opinions out into the world.

    Most of the time, Alternative Media publications and outlets start out fairly small which forces them to use more affordable methods of distribution such as blogs and newspapers. This often affects the quality of the work they're able to put out. As these publications grow their viewer base, the quality of their work improves. It also allows them to use more expensive distribution methods letting them put out more work faster, plus they can afford to use the more expensive forms of the media like short films.

    Despite the various kinds of Alternative Media, it remains much more hidden and hard to find compared to Mainstream Media. There's a reason it's called Mainstream, as often all you need to do is turn on a television or head to a news aggregator to see news from Mainstream news outlets and publications. Why is it that Alternative Media is so hard to find? Often, Alternative Media companies are much smaller in comparison to Mainstream Media, which leads to Alternative Media companies having way fewer resources to not only expand but also advertise themselves. However, one of the main reasons Alternative Media isn't mainstream is because of how specific they are. Mainstream Media is mainstream because it covers news of all kinds. Alternative Media on the other hand tends to produce content that is made for very specific groups of people. For example, some produce mostly conservative content, while others produce mostly liberal content. This forces Alternative Media outlets to remain small because they only cover a specific niche thus leading to their audience being niche. Alternative Media also doesn't really have any television presence at all. This is why there was an explosion of Alternative Media when the internet came around thanks to how easy and affordable websites were.

Post #8: Invasion of Privacy

     After watching the TED Talks, I've been further informed on how technology is used to invade people's privacy, but also how some technology protects people's privacy. Every action we make online is permanent, even if we delete it, the information is still out there, and that is a big issue.

    As I talked about in my last post about the internet, it's become a major part of our everyday lives. We use technology to not only access the internet but also to communicate with others from any distance. Most Americans carry their phones with them everywhere they go; thus, they're almost always being tracked. Anything they do or anywhere they go is turned into data which is collected by the government.

    The main problem I have with this is that we have little to no control over this data collection. I don't even think we can access this data, and even if we can, it's most likely a very difficult process to acquire. At the very least, one of the TED Talks showed me that some of my data is encrypted such as my phone calls and text messages so I can feel better about communicating with others that way. Still, so much data is collected every day, and not knowing what is or isn't being collected is horrible. The last thing I want is to someday see information about me that I thought was private to appear in a place for the public to easily see.

Post #7: The Innovation of Internet

     For this post, I want to view the internet through the lens of diffusion theory. The internet has been around for a while yet it took some time before it became a core part of most people's lives.

 
  The first early adopters of the internet would be those who purchased home computers starting in the 1970s. These early home computers couldn't do a whole lot, but the consumers who bought them wanted them so they could be part of the "Information Revolution" or the future of technology.

    What caused the internet's first spike in popularity was a combination of new discoveries. The growing popularity of email and the invention of DNS (converts hard-to-remember IP addresses into simple names) were some of the main causes of the internet's first spike in growth. This all caused the network to grow from 2,000 hosts to 30,000 from 1986 to 87.

    The main reason the internet hadn't exploded in popularity yet was because of the barrier to entry. Advanced knowledge of computing was necessary to dial into the internet at the time, so access to the internet needed to become easier to allow those with very little computing knowledge to use it. This was solved with the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1989. It was invented by a man named Tim Berners-Lee who had proposed the idea to his employer to structure and link all the information on it's computer network to make it much easier to access.

    In 1993, the Mosaic browser launched allowing those outside of academics to use the internet. This led to people discovering how to easily create HTML web pages, leading to the number of websites on the internet to grow from 130 to over 100,000 over the course of just 3 years. By 1995, the internet had now reached millions of users, with the most popular browser at the time Netscape Navigator having over 10 million users alone.

    The internet would continue to grow from this point onward, yet there were still many who weren't using it. This would all change with the introduction of the iPhone and other smartphones in the late 2000s allowing people to access the internet from just about anywhere.

    Nowadays, almost everyone uses the internet to some extent, and many of us use it on a daily basis. It's become basically essential to our daily lives and it's difficult to see what things would be like without it. However, there are still parts of the world that don't have easy access to the internet like we do. Many developing countries live without the internet opting for other forms of communication instead. The internet continues to grow to this day and there are no signs of it slowing down. Will the internet eventually reach all parts of the world, or will there always be somewhere that simply refuses to use it?

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