Fakes vs. Facts

After the lecture a few days ago, I got around to thinking about just how much different the world would be if the movable printing press had never been invented. Or, if no mass communication device had been invented. Sure, the world would be very different, but even just our day to day life would almost have no correlation with daily life as we now know it. Since I severely messed up my one question quiz on this same topic, I thought I'd write a response on it to show that I actually somewhat know what I'm talking about. Here is what my daily schedule would be if the movable printing press was never invented. Location: Holy Roman Empire (present day Germany) Year : 2018 Sunrise : Wake up to the sound of my infant son crying. My husband has already left the house to tend the fields for the day. I tidy the bed and make breakfast for my son and I. Mid-Morning: My son takes up a lot of my time, but I have to go collect the eggs from the chickens in the barn and milk th...

Bi Sheng of ancient China was the first to create the movable type press. A lot of people attribute this feat to Johannes Gutenburg, although he created a later model of the press. Here's a brief explanation of the differences between the models. Bi Sheng Press:   - Made of clay - 1040 CE - Used Chinese characters - Thousands of individual characters - Broken characters had to be replaced individually Gutenburg Press: - Made of metal - 1450 CE - Used colloquial German alphabet - not many characters - Easy to replace broken characters - Required much manual labor

It's nothing new that Disney owns a lot . They're a huge company that made $9.4 billion dollars last year alone. Most people know that Disney is everywhere - what kid hasn't watched Disney Channel or begged their parents to take them to Disneyworld? But most people also think of Disney as a strictly entertainment company (including myself, until last week). They will probably be shocked to find out that Disney owns much, much more than just a few TV channels and some amusement parks, and it's much, much more than an entertainment company. Among the many smaller companies Disney has purchased throughout the years are Marvel Entertainment (Avengers and X-Men), Lucasfilm (Star Wars and Indiana Jones), ESPN (one of the largest sports networks), and ABC (news network as well as entertainment). When Disney bought ABC, they became not only an entertainment company, but information company as well, since ABC is predominantly a news network. The entertainment/infor...

It's always interesting when fascism comes up in class. Whether it's a vocab word in English or used to describe time periods, the word is thrown around a lot , and a lot of times, misused. And today it was used to describe Trump's presidency. This, in turn, led to a long and in-depth discussion on the presidency and fascism. One of the more shocking comments made was, "some people think Trump is going to be the last president". We started breaking that down in class, starting with the fact that a lot of people bring up fascism or pull the fascist card when something isn't, in fact, fascist. We also talked about how this could lead to a "boy who cried wolf" situation, which could potentially be harmful.  But what we didn't talk about in much depth was that some people actually think Trump is going to be America's last president. Let's dissect that. In order for Trump to be the last American president, total chaos and/...

While reviewing my notes from the lecture over the past few days, I was thinking the same things Ellie was writing in her blog: How could a news organization leave behind their morals when offered more money? And why would they? Ellie made a good point in her blogpost. Fox News, at it's core, is a populist organization. This seems crazy, since it is a news organization and should focus on informing it's audience, which seems more like an elitist group. But as I was thinking about this more and more, I staring asking myself, why couldn't it be both? Yes, Fox News is trying to spread news, and subsequently, spread the truth. They want you to hear what they think is important. However, they also take into account your opinion, and your money. I do believe that if Fox News were to make more money being a predominantly liberal news media that they would switch to being predominantly liberal. However, money isn't the only thing they have in mind. They genuinely care...

Although we went heavily in depth on the steps of mass communication in class, it helped me out a lot to read Mya's blogpost on it. She carefully explained each of the five steps and gave examples of each. It isn't hard to tell that she fully grasped the subject, since she was able to explain it well in her blog. I would highly recommend the post to anyone looking for an explanation of mass communication, as well as to other students to use for test preparation. By Lily Wobbe To read the full blogpost:  http://updateswithmya.blogspot.com/2018/09/steps-to-mass-communication.html