Megan Sayther: Digital Past

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HERE!

As with most young folk my age I spend an obscene amount of time on the internet and a majority of that time is spent specifically on social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook. On these I do as we all do and post miscellaneous parts of my life that most likely matter to very few except for myself. When I am not sharing my thoughts on those sites I can be found perusing the internet for items that I probably do not need on Amazon. After the current readings I am feeling a bit uneasy about how much I rely on my computer and would be devastated if it was wiped or hacked in the way that happened to Matt Honan. The first accounts I looked into to see just how protected my so public life really is, were the ICloud and Amazon (since I was instilled with fear). The ICloud is lacking in important information since I have not begun to rely on my Apple products just yet. The credit card it is attached to is not even valid anymore, because I have not bought music from Itunes in quite a while. This provided relief. Next there was the Amazon account. I searched around the site looking for a way to view my privacy settings with no luck, and realizing that I just needed to rely on Amazon to keep me safe. A naturally uneasy thought due to the horrors of hacking.

The next move was looking into the social media sites that i so oftentimes frequented. Starting with Twitter; all of my settings are set to as private as possible (which is hardly on this site). My name is protected and other than that I have little personal information. Assuring me that I am doing what I can within my abilities. This then led me to Facebook. I have every small box checked for only letting those who are my friends search for me, or message me.

I do try to keep my information as private as possible.  Each of the sites I use have different passwords and modified as much as possible to protect what I can. Of course, the internet is a very open domain and I could never be fulling safe against a hacker if they desired taking my down with technology.

The Television News Archive is a site dedicated to maintaining and preserving the news broadcasts in America from 2009 until today. It copies the broadcasts and has them available for search. I was perturbed initially by the idea of this site taking these videos from the news source and was determined to discover the legitimacy of doing such things. Then I began looking through what there was to offer; any topic mentioned on any news source since the archive begins is there and decently organized.

To go with something I was comfortable with I searched “The Daily Show”. I was aware of that the Daily Show’s official site contained full episodes and I believed that it was unnecessary for the TV News Archive to even contain episodes since they were already openly available and I am assuming they could be archived through that site. So, when the search loaded I was pleasantly surprised with how it not only offered clips from a multitude of episodes it also contained clips from all other news shows that had mentioned The Daily Show. For this the ethics of it are blurred since the show is already freely there for viewers to enjoy and this is just another place to watch. However it is questioning how the site can get away with obtaining these shows.

Determined to further understand how this constant coping and publishing was occurring I turned to the old faithful, Google. One of the first links was to a recent New York Times article explaining the new website. I was once again shocked when it was discovered that the project was mainly funded by outside grants by the Library of Congress and the National Archives. The founder, Brewster Kahle, said that he set the annual budget at $12 million. The article also went on to say that the broadcasts were protected from direct coping “under a federal copyright agreement signed in 1976”. This added more to the legality of the site.

The ethics of whether or not it is okay to take these broadcasts is still skeptical but the New York Times article does give peace of mind by stating:

The archive has no intention of replacing or competing with the Web outlets owned by the news organizations. Mr. Kahle said new material would not be added until 24 hours after it was first broadcast. “We don’t expect this to replace CNN.com,” he said.

This site does take care to keep the actual news broadcasts still desirable to watch, and this makes it so that the effect of the site does not impact the market. While, of course, there is still the chance that people will limit their live television watching and go for the online viewing at a time of their pleasing (naturally with the 24 hour gap). The premise of the site is stated as for research purposes and this increases its legality by the site being educational.

I decided to search the South African Soweto uprising as the historical topic to look up on Wikipedia. This was a student protest turned horribly violent in 1976. After skimming over the article I reached the sources and began clicking on links in a random fashion.

Most of the sites I came across were articles based on the event, and others were short historical overviews. None of what I came across were very in depth, and lacked details of the uprising. One source that I was taken back by was the 20th one, which was this, and what shocked me was that it is a blog and it has not been updated since 2010. Usually blogs are not considered to be anything scholarly and lacked in the credibility of most other sites. I looked through the blog and found that it was more extensive on the topic than most of the more reliable sources. After spending a bit of time perusing around I found that the site had won the new media award from Highway Africa. This gave me a bit more hope in Wikipedia. While some sources seemed to not have substantial amount of facts they were all mostly able to check out as solid sources.

“Seeing is believing” is not always relevant especially when dealing with photos presented in the media. The article Photography as a Weapon is an interviewing going in depth about why people will believe just about any photo they see. The way the brain will tell you that something is true when its known that it is not is mind blowing.

 Roughly 30 to 50 percent of our brain is doing visual processing. It’s just processing the visual imagery that comes in, and if you think about it in terms of bandwidth, there is a remarkable amount of information entering into our eyes and being processed by the brain….Vision is a pretty unique sense for the brain. It’s incredibly powerful and is very valuable from an evolutionary point of view. So it’s not surprising that it has an emotional effect on us.

The human brain is so powerful but still so much about it is not understood. Using photographs to entice people to think one way or another is strategic in all the worst ways. It plays on human emotion so much more than simple words do. Dictators of the past such as Mussolini and Stalin both were great public speakers but also took advantage of doctoring photographs to have even more power over their  people.

The article does give a glimmer of hope against falling prey to these photo-shopped images.

Kids now are growing up in digital age where they routinely see doctored images in their mailboxes, in the media, on television, and so on and so forth.

Since the youth today is so bombarded with the fixed up images then they will be less likely to be so quick to believe everything they see. These pictures are more dangerous than most people would like to believe.

Initially there were some blocks in finding anything about any labor disputes, but I went onto ProQuest and began my hunt there. I started by typing in all the information possible into any space available. Of course only one article came up from this and it had nothing to do with what I was looking for. I modified my search to be more broad while trying to keep it specific. I searched “public school teachers” and “dispute” and I narrowed the search down to everything before 1970. I came across one article that I am hoping meets my needed requirements; search number one.

Immediately when I began navigating through ProQuest I noticed some disadvantages. It was difficult to find a topic if it was not specific. If you were to go onto the site knowing very clearly what it was you wanted to find then it would be quite easy to locate it. However I went on with no clear intentions so finding something to begin writing about was a challenge. So I used some advanced searching and looked up my birthday (March 26th) in the year 1954. I was bombarded by so many different articles of so many varying topics. There were weather reports and stories of local schools, but the article that I found most intriguing was this one about The Soviet Union and East Germany. The article talks about the Soviet’s attempts to strengthen relationships between East and West Germany to one day work towards reunification but the differing governments of the two areas creates a great deal adversity. I have always been very interested in the Cold War and this was completely relevant to that. 

The way ProQuest is organized makes it clear how to use it and find documents from any time when there could be a document to view. I think it is wonderful for when it comes to research for any topic and is great to discover good primary sources.