Blog Post #8

The Rise and Fall of Vine

The Rise and Fall of Vine

    Vine came out in 2013 and was a weird smash hit in the eyes of corporate America. No one would have guessed that an app that only allowed people to records six-second videos with their back camera would be popular in any way other than a rip-off of Instagram. Just allow for a quick snapshot of a person's life. But it was found that the constricted time of the videos allowed for a lot more creativity from the users.

    Vine took off soon after, as more users began to join the app. The fast-paced filming process allowed for quick humor and one-liners that could cement themselves in pop culture. By 2015 the app had almost 200 million active users. It appealed to young people and young people appeal to advertisers. The app was great for corporations to advertise as they were able to reach young people through the popular users on the app.

    But then it became stagnant, a lot of the users that were on it had started to go to other platforms, like Instagram. With the amount of change that other apps were experiencing, there was no way for Vine to keep up. Instagram added videos and Snapchat added a group tab that allowed people to share with everyone. Vine just couldn't keep up, and they weren't able to bring in more people to the app. 

    Now the people that had helped make the app so popular were starting to leave to greener pastures. Newer features to well-known platforms meant that they could be doing the same thing as Vine with a little more leeway. There was no longer a pull to have them join Vine.

    For the most part, the app was positive on the social mediascape.  The people that they had on the app used the short time frame of filming to make quick, witty comedy that was easy to have seep into the pop culture. Now it did do some bad as well, it made some awful people famous to children. I can't help but wonder if the world would be a better place if people like David Dobrik and Logan Paul weren't famous. But its hard to look back on something that I grew up loving, with anything other than the rose colored glasses.

    Vine will live on in youtube compilations, but the app itself has been gone for a couple years now. Even though it is gone, it has had an effect on all of the other social media platforms that it came in contact with. 

https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/what-happened-vine/ 

https://www.businesschief.com/technology-and-ai/rise-and-fall-vine-brief-timeline-1

https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-twitter-shutdown

Blog Post #6 EOTO

Fax Machine

History

    The Fax Machine was originally invented in 1843 by Alexander Bain. As to be expected with the technology of the time it was nothing like the fax machines of today. Bain used a series of "pendulums" and a "clock" to scan the document line by line. It was then transferred over, and the image was reproduced. It took a long time and the quality of the reproduction wasn't great, but it was a feat by the standards of the time.

   Then Frederick Bakewell took that design and modified it to use “rotating cylinders” and a “stylus” to create the faxes. His design appeared at the World's Fair in London in 1851. While it was not a huge hit, it did gain some curious eyes and it would go on to serve as the blueprint for the fax machines to come

   In the late 1860s, Giovanni Caselli had created the Pantelegraph. It was a huge hit and would become the basis for the modern-day fax machine. But the modern fax machine would not even begin to take off until almost a century later.

   One of the next big steps that would occur was in 1964 when the company Xerox would create the Long Distance Xerograph (LDX), which had the capabilities of faxing a single sheet of paper to any fax machine in the world. It took about six minutes for the document to send, but it was a huge step forward and would remain at the forefront of faxing until a Japanese telecommunications corporation created the “ITU G3 Facsimile Standard” in 1980.

   In the '80s and '90s, there was a huge rise in the usage of analog fax machines. With the analog fax machines, you only had to plug into a phone line and the fax machines worked. This was great in the time before the internet had taken off. This allowed companies to send anything they needed without the internet, which was still pretty new at the time. But the costs to keep them up and running were getting higher and higher, so companies struggled to keep up with them.

  Mixing and adding other functions to the fax machine was supposed to help with the costs, but in a lot of cases, it didn't help at all. The prices got larger and were not sustainable for most companies. 

Disappearance

    As the internet began to grow in popularity, it became a lot more readily available. It was a much cheaper experience to use the internet services instead of all of the machinery. Fax machines are still around and are in use, but there are new ways to send faxes. Anytime you use your phone to send a picture and send it with the signature, you are sending a fax in a new way. The need to send documents is one that has existed since documents have, and it will continue forever with businesses especially. But technology is constantly expanding and adding the functions of one thing into something else. So, as fax machines begin to disappear, it isn't that we don't need fax machines but it is that we have added them to other technologies.

        

Link to Presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1C6Vjk-jcChtdjMCxQ5v3W2KyfzH4IXxh2-f-Tqi0m54/edit?usp=sharing

References

https://www.efax.com/blog/brief-history-of-the-fax-machine#1

https://www.explainthatstuff.com/faxmachines.html#:~:text=A%20fax%20machine%20is%20designed,only%20in%20black%20and%20white.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/faxing-is-old-tech-so-why-is-it-also-growing-in-popularity/2019/03/08/d01c638a-2f0b-11e9-86ab-5d02109aeb01_story.html

Blog Post #7

EOTO Blog Post
Homing Pigeons

    Back in the time of Ancient Greece, the homing pigeons were used to announce the winners of the Olympic Games. The homing pigeons have been used forever, there are even stories that date back to the time of Noah's ark. But where they held the most important was in war correspondences. With coded messages that were being sent, being vulnerable to interception they had a better way of getting the letter where they needed to go by using the homing pigeons.

  The group told the story about a homing pigeon that was shot and still managed to get the letter that they were entrusted with to the people they were supposed to. That isn't something that happens with technology now. There is a certain reliance we have now that the technology will work when we ask it to. And now if it doesn't, we are high and dry sometimes. With things like homing pigeons, they are alive and can work outside of what they are expected to do.

  I had never thought of that aspect of the expansion of technology. But this presentation brings up interesting questions about technology and what changing it and moving forward means. Technology is ever moving forward and that change can mean a loss of somethings that are important to us.

Blog Post #5

                         

    We, as people who are protected by the First Amendment, are given rights that are protected. One of those rights is the freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is not just something that the individual needs to be able to express themselves and learn who they are and what they believe, it is also an important way to check on the government and see what they are doing. 

   There are eight values of free expression as a result of our freedom of speech. They are the Marketplace of Ideas, Participation in Self-Government, Stable Change, Individual Self-Fulfillment, Check on Governmental Power, Promote Tolerance, Promote Innovation and Protect Dissent.

   All of these values are important to the individual, and to take one of these away would hurt people and would change how our democracy works. One of the important ones is the value of Checking on Governmental Power, otherwise known as the Watchdog role.

  The Watchdog role is used with the freedom of the press to keep an eye on the government. Take a look at Watergate, one of the best examples of watchdog journalism. When the Washington Post was able to see a connection between the break-ins of the Watergate office and Nixon's re-election team, they broke the story. The publicity that this story gained was enough to make other areas of government, like the Justice Department and the FBI. 

    Without this freedom, we would not be allowed to do that, or we would have to worry about the government censoring things that they don't want to be known. This is one of the best ways we have to keep the government honest and doing what it is supposed to. Knowing that they are being watched and with the assumption that everything will come to light eventually can help with that. 

  One of the most important things that we have in the value of governmental checks is local news. They are the ones that are on the ground looking at what affects the people around them. They have the most skin in the game to care about what people need. They are the ones holding government officials accountable on local levels, making sure they are doing what they can to help people. 

   But local news is in danger, it is disappearing slowly but surely. They are being closed or taken over by bigger news sources and losing their ability to focus on the local problems like they used to before. In this article https://apnews.com/article/816b31f8571d4b759227e58c6252e99d, they talk about how the local papers and news can help bring a lot of transparency within the government. As all of these establishments are being closed or taken away this has a huge effect on the people in these towns who are becoming less and less aware of everything that is happening around them.

  They don't know what their government is doing, and with no one watching over the government's shoulder to make sure they are doing the right thing. The government now has a lot more free range to do as it pleases. The role of Watchdog Journalism and the Check on Governmental Power is so important to keep the government honest and making sure there is transparency in what happens to the people who aren't directly in government.

Blog Post #4

   

    I think one of the main reasons that a lot of these sites don't seem to have the same pull as the mainstream news does is the fact that the government like all other bodies in the world cares about their image. In the same way, a person wouldn't post a picture or let someone else post a picture of them, that painted them in a bad light, the government wants to avoid that too. Luckily for us, as individuals, we have the right to the freedom of the press and are allowed to search out other sources. That doesn't mean that they will be easy to find, but they are out there and the government can't do much to take them down, even if they don't like what is being said.

  We live in a time where the amount of information we have at our fingertips is unprecedented. With just a few clicks, we can have access to all the information we want. And yet in a lot of ways we have become compliant in what news we consume. We need to be better at not taking news at face value. Looking at other sources is the first step, there have been lesser-known sources that have been focusing on pointing out the "similar thinking" of major news sources. It can be seen in a lot of articles where they are written either similarly or in some cases the same, as in word for word. It is easy to take the word of only the mainstream media, but then you are only getting one side of any story. We as people need to look past that and find more than just those sources.

https://www.antiwar.com/