Amelia: Media Law and Literacy

    On November 5th, Facebook unveiled their new "From Facebook" logo in hopes of giving a face lift to their branding.  The new logo bears a lot of resemblance to the Instagram logo in terms of color hues, which has a lot to do with the fact that Facebook owns Instagram. If you didn't know that, don't worry, 71% of social media users are right there with you. What you also may not know is Facebook owns 72 other companies such as WhatsApp and Oculus VR.     This new logo was created in hopes of establishing a clear distinction between Facebook, the company, and Facebook, the app. With all of the media turmoil behind Facebook's privacy or lack thereof in recent news, the company wanted to create a concept that would increase transparency with users. With that being said, the logo is used to show just how much of a reach Facebook has among media platforms.  Facebook's chief marketing officer, Antonio Lucio, states"People should know which c...

      Have you ever typed your name into Google and wondered what would pop up about you? You may be extremely surprised.      This past week I performed a self-audit on my Internet presence and was intrigued to find I had done a pretty decent job in keeping a low-profile online. It certainly helped that other Amelia Herbert's on the internet had done a lot of impressive things such as receiving a Fulbright scholarship at their respective university.     I truly thought a few of my social media profiles would pop up in my Google search but I scrolled through the Facebook pages under my name and found my profile was not even in the top 10 of people with the same name as me. Another platform I include my full name on is Instagram and that page was nowhere to be found(at least easily accessible after looking through 12 plus pages on Google). The finding that shocked me the most was that the only trace I could find about me was linked to my...

             Picture from Forbes website             Snapchat is one of the most popular social media platforms used today. Users primarily fall in the range of 13 to 24 years old, so clearly a younger demographic. Forbes magazine featured an article  on Snapchat’s success in 2018. Using the Diffusion of Innovations Theory as a lens to look into the history of the app, it’s success is clearly evident.             The pioneer and innovator stage of Snapchat is an interesting beginning. The idea actually occurred through a conversation between two students Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel, who attended Stanford University, about the concept of disappearing pictures. Therefore, Snapchat was born. However, what a lot of people do not know is that the app actually started as a mobile website under the name Picaboo. It was not until July 2011 t...

          "Hate Speech" taken from Who What Why Blog In learning about the eight values of freedom of expression the one that stood out the most to me was promoting tolerance. The foundation of this value essentially says that it’s important to protect hate speech in order to promote a more tolerant society. When you first read that statement it can be a hard pill to swallow. Why would anyone want to protect hate speech? I continued my research on this and was able to find some interesting information.             Erwin Chermerinsky the dean of Berkeley Law  discusses in an interview    with the New York Times the importance of hate speech being protected by the First Amendment. Chermerinsky says that hate speech, although hurtful, stresses an idea. By taking away a person’s right to express an idea we move closer to a society of censorship.  The core problem that arises ...

The creation of the Internet has been one of the most groundbreaking technologies our world has seen today. Without the internet you could not even be reading this blog right now! Here is a quick timeline of how the internet came to be leading up to before the World Wide Web was created.            1962 JCR Licklider proposes idea of having a networks of computers communicate 1969 The first message from one computer was sent to another using ARPANET(Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) which was the government’s internet network. One computer at UCLA sent a message to another computer at Stanford saying "Login". Only the first two letters were sent but this was the first time any type of messaging between two computers had been successful.  1969-1970: Other computer networks added all across the world in Hawaii an London to name a few major ones. But there needed to be a way for all computers to communicate even if the...