Shattered Glass

        So in class we just got finished watching a movie called shattered glass. The movie is about a new young employee at the New Republic named Stephen Glass. Stephen woo's his co-workers with his fantastic stories that somehow, only he can come across. As the movie goes on, another journal becomes suspicious of an article.
      Later, we discover that Stephen made up most of his articles. It was something like 47/61 articles were fake. Stephen tries and tries to keep his job, getting caught in lie after lie. In the end he loses his job.
     This movie gives you a lot to think about. It really shows how easy someone can fake an article or a story. It really makes you think about what stories are true and what isn't. How corrupt is our media? More importantly can you spot out the truth from fiction?

Well here is your chance. Is this story about Frane Selak real, or did I just make it up?

Frano Selak: 'world's luckiest man' gives away his lottery fortune

The 81 year-old won £600,000 five years ago in the lottery in Croatia, to celebrate his fifth marriage, after earlier surviving plane and train crashes.  He also survived other disasters including landing on a haystack after falling out of a plane door that had blown open.

Now the pensioner has decided that "money cannot buy happiness" and has decided to live a frugal life.  He has sold his luxury home on a private island, given away his fortune to family and friends and moved back to his modest home in Petrinja, which is south of Zagreb, in the center of the country.  He kept the last bit of his winnings for a hip replacement operation so he could enjoy life with his wife and also so he could build a shrine to the Virgin Mary to give thanks for his luck. Mr Selak said he has never been happier.

"All I need at my age is my Katarina. Money would not change anything," he said. "When she arrived I knew then that I really did have a charmed, blessed life.  "I never thought I was lucky to survive all my brushes with death. I thought I was unlucky to be in them in the first place." He added that people were always telling him he was lucky to have survived so many disasters but he added: "I always think I was unlucky to have been in them in the first place but you can't tell people what they don't want to believe."

He had his first escape in 1962 when a train he was travelling on from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik jumped the rails and plunged into an icy river.  Seventeen people drowned and he barely made it to the riverbank after suffering from hypothermia, shock, bruises and a broken arm.

A year later, he was thrown out of a plane on his first and only flight when a door flew open.  This time 19 people died but he was thrown clear of the crash and landed in a haystack.

Then in 1966, a bus he was on skidded into a river, drowning four. He swam to safety with just cuts and bruises.

Accident number four came in 1970 when his car caught fire as he drove along a motorway and he fled with seconds to spare before the fuel tank exploded.

Three years later, he lost most of his hair when a faulty fuel pump spewed petrol over the hot engine of his car and blew flames through the air vents.

Then in 1995 came his sixth accident when he was knocked down by a bus in Zagreb but walked away with minor injuries.

The following year, he was driving in the mountains when he turned a corner to see a UN truck coming straight for him.  His Skoda careered through a crash barrier and over the 300ft precipice.  But he leapt clear at the last minute and sat in a tree as he watched his car hit the bottom and explode.

He then won £600,000 with his first ever lottery ticket and celebrated his fifth marriage saying: "I guess all the earlier marriages were disasters too."

Find the answer here

No More DVD's?!

Just the other day I visted our school's iMac lab. I have a personall project I need to edit and I would prefer to use iMovie. It's fantastic for making long movies, easy to use, and very efficent. I went to check it out and was pretty excited. I was excited until I realized there is no iDVD. This is a program that converts your iMovie project on to a DVD and allowes you to add menues, chapters, and other DVD features. I looked around to see if there is another similar program. I found nothing. I looked it up online and it said that the new computers do not come with iDVD.

So what is the point of having iMovie if you can't put them on DVD's. Well I found my answer. I clicked the share button and it gives me choices to save as a file, or send to itunes. I could also upload my video to facebook, youtube, and a few other websites. Finally I could send it to my tablet, phone, computer, iPod, or iTV. All of these are great but it poses one problem, I have to keep my movie in digital form.

This might work for some people, but for a lot of people it doesnt. It's impractical for everyone to have enough space for a 3 hour movie. I just want to make several DVD's and hand them out to my friends. I want them to have that DVD in their possesion.

In other words, apple is making a huge push to make everything go digital. This might not be a bad thing but were moving a little to fast. It's shocking to me that they don't even give you the option to burn a DVD. If were not careful, our entire world, moreso then it is now, will be sucked into the internet and go completly digital.

This might be good, it might not.

"Ignorence is Bliss."

Well, it is. This seemingly simple quote says a lot about the way we feel and think when informed of something new. Many times, we would rather not hear news that is complicated to understand. We would rather remain ignorant then to understand what is going on. I have not really understood this phrase until our media literacy class. We watch so many documentries, about topics I have never dug into, and it really opens your eyes. Most the time, I wish I had never seen it in the first place.

The first example was the documentary we watched on vaccines called "The Greater Good." It's a movie questioning all the vaccines we give our children and if they are really necessary. It talks about the horror stories of people effected. It was kind of scary and really made me think.

Another example was "Food inc." Its a look at where our food actually comes from. What are we actually consuming. Now I had heard of this movie before class and I purposely did not watch it because I didn't want to know. I would rather just happily eat my food, assuming its natural, then actually know what it's made of. I watched it anyways. While I still eat food, it was eye opening and really interesting. However, it made me rethink what I ate.

Finally, we just recently watched a cartoon about the "American Dream" and our economy being in debt. It was very informative but made me feel scared, helpless, and small.

While part of me wishes I had never watched these videos, the other part of me is thankful. I'm now informed and no longer ignorant. While I would remain in bliss had I not seen these, I would have still just been a sheep, controlled by all these things without even knowing it. So while being ignorant is nice, being educated gives you power... power that you can't use.

The importance of advertising.

We haven't really went over this in class, but while I was researching for my 50 points of Media presentation and watching my favorite show Survivor, I started thinking about advertising. Yes advertising is super annoying but it is extremely important for the world of television.

Advertising started when some English man put a poster up on the door to a store advertising for some type of product. It was probably an ingenious idea at the time. It spread the idea of his product. It presented something to the unaware. Not a whole lot more is known about this but I'm sure his product sales went through the roof.

Now lets fast forward to the advent of the television. Programs need to get money to run their show somehow, so they use advertisements. People pay to have their products endorsed on breaks of television shows or promoted through product placement. Variety shows used to have people sing jingles of a product and game shows would have questions or the timer sponsored by a company.

 

Fast forward to about the year 2008. Television companies started coming out with the DVR, or digital video recorder. This made it possible for viewers to record their favorite t.v shows and save it for a later time. This also enabled them to skip commercials. By 2011 42% of households had a DVR. Compare that to the 1.2% in 2006 and you can see the drastic jump. Of the people who have these devices, only 36% still watch live television. This could be very bad.

 

If the percentage of people who own these dvr's continue to grow, and advertising continues to be skipped, will we still have commercials? Why should advertising companies continue to pay if their product is just going to be skipped over? If this is the case, what happens when programs lose their funding?

 

This idea of television going permanently off the air probably won't happen anytime soon however, advertising companies are going to get smarter. We will probably see more product placement in our actual shows, we will probably see still frames (almost like comics), and maybe even the chance of commercials not being allowed to skip. If you try to watch an episode online, you already have to watch four commercials before your show. These are impossible to skip. What if we start seeing that on our t.v? The big bucks we pay for our dvr's will eventually become worthless.

 

This is a scary thought but there is still hope. Advertising agency's are forced to become more creative. For now, advertisers are working hard to get you to press play during the fast forwarding and watch their commercial. Think about all the weird promotions you see when your watching the magic box. Everyone is guilty of stopping to watch the latest Geico or Etrade Baby commercial. Advertisements might actually become more entertaining.

 

For now we have nothing to worry about, but we will see the way we know advertising change. It has already started. So while advertising is annoying, its necessary for entertainment.

History Narrative

A Narrative on the History of the Media

            Media has been around for the entire history of the world. It’s our means of communicating information, portraying ideas, and persuading and audience. The media are the single most important aspect to our world. Can you imagine a world without it? It’s impossible. It embodies such a wide range of forms that it is a part of every aspect in our life. It’s really almost impossible to define a starting moment of the media in our history. It’s been around for, well, all of time.

            With that being said, there is only one place we can start our journey through the media. That word is time. It’s the past, the present, and the future. It keeps the world ticking, explains when events occur, and much more. Without time we would literally have no social structure. The media works to influence people. Time does that better than anything else on this planet. It persuades us when to get up, when to eat, when to exercise, when to work and more. Many times we do these things because the clock tells us to, not because we feel like we need to. It does what the media only wishes to do.

            Moving past the very beginning, we start to get into things that are more in our vision of the media today. The first stop is religion. Religion started only one week after time, that is if you listen to the creation theory. Religion begins with the day God created man. It is arguably the most influential part of our world today and has been forever. It gets people to believe in morals, laws, and miracles. Countries and societies have been built all on the basis of religions. At the same time, wars have been fought and countries have fallen due to religion. It is super influential and has a huge impact on the way people live their life.

            Starting around 3,200 B.C we see the emergence of writing. Writing is hugely important in the world of the media. Without words, information would only be able to travel through word of mouth. In our society, we rely so heavily on social-networking, the internet, our phones, and other media devices. Information travels at light-speed because of it. While it is due to technology, the main reason it’s so helpful is because of words. Without words all we would see is pictures. While a picture is worth a thousand words, it does not clearly depict the information to each person. If in some freak event all forms of writing was eliminated from society, not only would the media fall, but the infrastructure of society would crumble. It is hugely influential and a big part of the media.

            So at this point in time, we have time, religion, and writing as our major points of media. But there was still a need for information to travel faster. Humans have this burning desire to get information as fast as they possibly can. Many different systems were developed around 2,000 B.C to get information traveling. Carrier pigeons were trained to deliver messages. The Persians developed a system of foot couriers who would run several miles to relay messages. In a sense, these were the first forms of mailing systems. Information started to move, and more people became informed. This was a huge step for the human race.

            The next step for the media was the transition from rolls to codex. This switch from scrolls to book form isn’t a huge leap but extremely influential. Imagine having to buy a psychology text scroll for class. They were impractical and just a pain to use. Books conveyed information so much easier. It was also easier for mass printing, which begins much later in life. While it was a smaller step, and we would probably be able to get on with life still in roll form, it’s still an important stop in the history of the media.

            Many people, when they hear the word media, think about advertising. I think it’s safe to say the media and advertising go hand in hand. The first forms of advertising were the Tipao in the year 615. These were government initiated, public announcements. While they started off as communications between different governments, some were made into public announcements. This could be considered a form of propaganda. A couple hundred years later, people began to put posters on store’s doors advertising different events or products. This was the start of advertising as we know it today.

            This finally brings us to the printing press. While civilizations had found ways to print, using blocks and clay, several years ago, Gutenberg was the first person to do it efficiently. He created his printing press in 1450. So while he can’t be credited with printing, he can be credited with the printing press. This made information more conveyable than ever before. It was quick, efficient, and readable. This was a huge step for the media. It marks the end of old media, and the beginning of a new era.

For more information check out my Prezi on the 50 Points of Media
To start your own research and for an even a more indepth look check out this Timeline.

The Start of Media?

For our media literacy "exam" we have to make a list of fifty points of media from the beginning to the printing press. It's a lot of work but it has proved to be very interesting. Going through, I started to think of all the little things that had to come together from all points in time and all over the world to get the media where it is today. Each little part had to be included, without each part contributing it would completely alter our idea of media! Here are some examples.

Autographs: Imagine life without autographs. No one signing off on documents, there own written work, and no claim to ideas. It would be impossible to know who came up with what. Autographs first appeared almost 11,000 years ago on tablets.

Written Gossip: Imagine a world with no gossip?! How would we even have media! That's what the media, as we know it, thrives on. Written gossip dates way back to 1,500 B.C when it was used in poems as a form of entertainment.

The Roll-Codex transition: Can you imagine reading the Hunger Games or Harry Potter on a scroll? I don't think anyone can. It would be highly impractical. Without the transition to our book form, we would still be buying super long rolls of literature. This happened just a couple hundred years into the 1st century. It would drastically change the course of our media.

The Printing Press: By far the biggest advancement in media. It made information accessible to vast populations at a quick and convienent rate. Without this writing for the masses would be impractical.

So what does that say for our future. Every little piece of media we add, from the typewriter to the Iphone, is going to have a huge impact on the media hundreds, if not thousands, of years from us. Everyday we are going to drastically change change the future. We need to ask ourselves, is this going to impact the future positively or negatively?

Presenting to the unaware.

    "Present the information so that it is useful to the unaware." I feel like this quote kind of embodies the media. If you think about it, that is there goal. To inform people of ideas and information while making them care about it. It's hard to be a popular source of media if people don't care or listen to what you have to say.

This is where the media can become a problem. Sometimes people don't want the boring true story. It becomes uninteresting. Sometimes the media beefs it up to make it more intersting. Would you rather read something about a simple car accident or a huge life threatning collision that endangered the lives of millions? I think it's safe to say we would all rather read about the latter of the two.

While we want intersting, that becomes a huge problem with the media and is a leading factor as to why it can not always be trusted. They are constantly turning mole hills into mountains in order to obtain viewers and keep them interested. Then again it's not their job to come up here and tell us the truth. More so we need to find the truth in it.

The best thing we can do is to look at the big picture to get the idea of what the true story is.