Personal Reflection

Nice movies.

Critical Reflection 2

Media bring the world into our homes. From them, we learn about war and peace, the environment, new scientific discoveries, and so on. We are dependent upon mass communication for knowing what is going on in our physical, social, economic, and political environments. In other words, almost everything we know about people, places, and events that we cannot visit first-hand comes from the media. We also rely on media for entertainment and pleasure. Television and film have become the storytellers of our generation; these stories tell us about who we are, what we believe, and what we want to be.

The cumulative impact of mass media is to unconsciously shape our visions of ourselves. In some ways, this is fine: we can learn from the media that our nation is strong and decent, that our political process is reliable, and that our technological acheivements are often remarkable. But in other ways, allowing the mass media to shape our images of ourselves is dangerous because the media must follow conventions that are often out-of-sync with real life.

Critical Reflection 1

Media literacy is the ability to understand how mass media work, how they produce meanings, how they are organized, and how to use them wisely. The media literate person can describe the role media play in his or her life. The media literate person understands the basic conventions of various media, and enjoys their use in a deliberately conscious way. The media literate person understands the impact of music and special effects in heightening the drama of a television program or film...this recognition does not lessen the enjoyment of the action, but prevents the viewer from being unduly credulous or becoming unnecessarily frightened. The media literate person is in control of his or her media experiences.

The following definition of media literacy came out of the Trent Think Tank, a 1989 symposium for media educators from around the world sponsored by the Canadian Association for Media Literacy:

"The goal of the media literacy curriculum must be to develop a literate person who is able to read, analyze, evaluate, and produce communications in a variety of media ( print, TV, computers, the arts, etc.)."

Media are actually many forms of communication...including newspapers, magazines, and billboards, radio, television, videocassettes, video games, and computer games. Since the students are too young to read newspapers and magazines, their activities focus on video and TV.

Personal Reflection

The 3rd day I bring my food into class. Atleast, it keeps me awake for it :D

Critical Reflection 2

Few examples of sterotypes,

African Americans play sports. Latinos are gang members. Native Americans are alcoholics. Wheelchair-bound individuals are helpless. Gays are effeminate. Lesbians wear their hair short. Older adults need constant care. Anglos are either racist or are rednecks. Homeless people are drug addicts.

These and other stereotypes are perpetuated by visual messages presented in print, television, motion pictures, or computers-the media. Because visual messages are products of our sense of sight, pictures are highly emotional objects that have long-lasting staying power within the grayest regions of our brain. Consequently, media messages that stereotype individuals by their concentrations, frequencies, and omissions become a part of our long-term memory. The media typically portray members of diverse cultural groups within specific content categories-usually crime, entertainment, and sports-and almost never within general interest, business, education, health, and religious content categories.

I am not quite sure how to combat the usage of stereotypes in media. I think, however, it is very important that people are able to recognize the stereotypes. One of the best prevention for stereotyping is to use your common sense and to be reasonable.

Critical Reflection 1

Mass media became on of the main sources of popular culture in modern capitalist society. Media, however, not only entertains and offers news to people, but also transfers the stereotypes, beliefs and values of the society to reproduce the existing order of social life.

One of the example is stereotype that presented in all of the movies was the dependency of women upon men. Male characters always participated in helping a female-character to reach the success. What makes all these examples even more interesting is that one can develop a counter-argument, saying that the fact that in these movies men were helping women to achieve the success was instead a break of stereotype, which represents men as those who achieve high goals, and women as those who help to achieve these goals. If we compare the different ways, in which media depicts helping male and helping female characters, we will see that if men help with a wise advice and with their knowledge, then female helps by cooking and taking care of children. This is yet another stereotype, common to all kinds of mass media.

Personal Reflection

I still don't see any changes of me for the class.

Critical Reflection 2

There's a lot of buying and selling occur on the internet such as eBay etc. Usually they provide fake information about the product and lead people that wish to buy it. Most of it is just scams and fraud that cheat people's money, credit card number, personal info etc.

There are some tips I found on the internet on how to avoid false information on the internet:-

- Use "common" sense. This simple tool will allow you to filter information that is not correct from the correct.

- Cross-check. Reading from more one source allows for the correction of mistakes, errors and malicious intent.

- Go to the source. Using a real library, real people and your legs can be positive steps in gathering information that is free from errors.

Critical Reflection 1

As one of the most important features, the Internet enables individuals to make their personal thoughts and opinions easily accessible to the global community of Internet users. Studies have shown that the Internet's anonymity can result in a high rate of false information, which may lead to suboptimal decisions by deceived users. Little is known what drives users to post false information. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to identify the drivers of false information in communities where users neither have incentives to make false statements nor spread information at all.

Personal Reflection

There's some topic in MLC class that attracted me, but not all. IMHO, MLC class is quite boring for me. No offense. Peace.

Critical Reflection 2

Social media includes many different forms, Internet forums, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies include blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP etc.

Some examples of social media applications: -
- Google Groups
- Wikipedia
- MySpace
- Facebook
- YouTube
- Flickr
- Twitter