Vagnones Blog

  Tech Topic: Emoticons The technology I selected, is emoticons presented by Aaron Jackson.  Emoticons are visual symbols or "glyphs"  used in technology-mediated written communication used to d epict a certain emotion and clarify tone.  The first emoticon,  created in 1982 by Scott E. Fahlman, are keyboard symbols, ":-)", arranged to represent a smiling face. Emoticons have evolved from keyboard symbols using punctuation to small graphics of animated faces   ( 😂🙄😩) , commonly referred to and hyphenated as "emojis".  These emojis help the message composer and  receivers avoid miscommunication, each face clarifying tone and meaning. If you are unsure of how your message may be interpreted, emojis allow for the sender to quickly add feeling, without having to change or rewrite their message to do so.  For example:  "what do you want  😒 "  "what do you want 😁 " "what do ...

 Age Of AI The film introduced AlphaGo, an AI program created by Google that plays the North Korean board game Go which was said to be effective as, if not more than, a human player (pictured below). After the computer beat the worlds best Go player the industry’s interest in utilizing AI shot through the roof. The film also explained the field of AI in itself, and our country’s competition in its advancements with China. It is terrifying to think of a country like China, a state which already violates their citizens' freedoms and rights to privacy, is surpassing our AI technology. Although there is an existing lack of accountability within our country’s tech industries, the big tech companies still can be held accountable by the people of the country and the government to a certain extent. By our markets boycotting these wrongdoings and using our freedom of speech, and our constitutional rights with lawsuits we can slightly protect ourselves more than other countries can like...

Silencing Anti-War Voices  The United States’ foreign policy and military decision making is influenced heavily and held accountable to the opinions of the governed. However, as the United States wages military operations around the globe, there are expressions of objection in the media. Mainstream media has widely disregarded the opposition to our foreign affairs, leaving alternative media sources, like ANTIWAR.COM, to report on the ethical, economic, and political issues involved in the United States’ war efforts.  As many large corporations benefit from a specific state of affairs or war in itself, these companies push propaganda and biased information that specifically align with their objectives. Vulnerably, the majority of Americans now receive their news and information about current events from social media platforms, which are controlled by these companies. Evil Facebook, for example, is notorious for making biased media available to influence popular opinion among th...

Whistle  blower    What is a whistleblower? A whistleblower is someone, usually an employee, who leaks private or compromising information about a company's wrongdoing to the public. W histleblowers play an extremely important role in the continuation and integrity of our government and governments across the globe.  Keeping big business like the evil Google and Facebook in line when trying to steal more of our personal information through some logistical loophole is key in this day and age. Whistleblowers help the public hold companies with influential amounts of power accountable as they usually have the resources to effectively conceal their wrongdoings. Why are whistleblowers important? W histleblowers are a critical tool in exposing fraud and other wrongdoing not only around the country but around the globe! Whistle blowers helped expose Watergate, the health dangers of nicotine and tobacco  products, and so much more. Because of their importance, whistlebl...

 Alternate Media  I found the way Caroline tied street art into a form of alternate media and explained how it was a way of expressing different ways of gathering opinions ons and topics in current society fascinating. Anyone can write a blog post, write into a newspaper, send into a magazine but it take a true poet to express feelings through art and have the message be understood also. So what exactly is alternate media? Alternative media is any form of media that is NOT related to mainstream media. Alternate media is opinion based and not extremely credible but offer unique insight into the minds of minorities when it comes to a certain topic. All opinions ons need to be heard and deserve to be heard and i think street art is a insanely cool way of going about hearing the opinions of people and all diffrent types of voices and using the art to translate what you think it means into a new way of thinking all from basically just graffiti.   Some times I think the more va...