Last fall, John Oliver ran a piece on Last Week Tonight on HBO about Facebook. The piece covered how Myanmar uses Facebook to get the majority of their information, even citing that they use the word internet and Facebook interchangeably. While it is good that the people of Myanmar have access to the internet and Read More…
A Deeper Dive into the Revolution in Sudan
Last week I looked at a viral photo that came out of the Sudan protests. It depicted a young woman on top of a car speaking to a crowd. At the end of the article I talked about the mass presence of cell phones in the picture and that is something I am going to Read More…
How One Image Is Defining a Revolution
A couple days ago the above image went viral on Twitter and made major news headlines. Some have even called it the “Image of the Revolution.” An article by The New York Times compares the image with other images that have become synonymous with revolutions, like “woman in a red dress” or the picture of Read More…
How Modern Revolutions have Utilized Social Media
Revolutions have been a well documented event all throughout history. Each one is unique yet many recent revolutions have shared characteristics. One of these is how the people have used social media. To examine this we will compare the revolution in Egypt to that of Euromaidan. To start, what was Euromaidan? After a highly controversial Read More…
Congress has Officially Entered the Memescape
On Tuesday, the Senate voted on the Green New Deal. Big events like this are primed for internet mockery, which happened when The Green New Deal failed to pass by a vote of 0 “yes” and 57 “no” (Democrats voted present). The final vote on ending debate re: the Green New Deal – 0 Yes, Read More…
How will AI affect our Lives?
It’s a fair assessment to say that artificial intelligence, or AI, is the wave of the future. This can already be seen on a small scale in the world of chess, where computers are being taught by humans to play by absorbing mass amounts of data. But in chess, they took this one step further Read More…
Covington Teen Sues “The Washington Post”: Does He have a Case?
On January 18th, 2019 Nicholas Sandmann appeared to have gotten himself into hot water. A picture and video began to circulate Twitter of Sandmann staring down and smiling at Nathan Phillips, a Native American activist, as he sang a song. With the help of Twitter, the story took off. People accused Sandmann of being a Read More…
#Hijacking
The power of the hashtag is undeniable. It quickly allows people to see related content through the hashtag, which is constantly updated to the minute. One way this can be seen was in 2007 with the San Diego wildfires. People were able to be updated on the events worldwide through #sandiegofire (Gregorio). It can Read More…
How blog and the internet increase polarization
In a summary of his book, #Republic, Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, author Cass Sunstein wrote this article where he imagines “a conversation… between Google and John Stuart Mill” (Sunstein). In it, he talks about how when like-minded people get together, their views get more polarized. He then talks about how this Read More…
Is Howard Schultz out of touch with the American people? MSNBC thinks so
Hot off the idea of running for President in 2020 as an independent, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and one of the big topics that came up was… Cheerios. This kind of question has been used repeatedly in politics, whether it be Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, or George H.W. Bush. It’s Read More…