K-Talk

Media Critique: CNN News "A 3-day-old and 2 other infants were stabbed at a New York day care center, police say"      An article was posted Friday, September 21, 2018 by Ray Sanchez on CNN about a crime committed in a house daycare for infants. To clarify, this story explains how an older, female employee stabbed three infants and two adults in a home daycare. She then proceeded to go to the basement and makes an attempt to end her life via slicing her wrist with a knife. All parties involved were rushed to the hospital and are in critical condition. While intriguing and interesting, this story does not meet the criteria to be considered newsworthy journalism. Newsworthiness is a very important factor that determines the difference between good and bad journalism. Because of multiple factors, this story does not make the cut.         While this story may be relevant to the friends and family of the victims in New York, it is definite...

Hot and Cool Media A Response to Laila Hill While Laila's entry regarding hot and cool media was informative, it seemed like more of a summary than a response to class. She did, though, make some very good points. She explained the difference of hot and cool media, and gave clear examples for each side of the binary, which gave me a clear understanding of exactly what she was talking about throughout the blog. She explained how she came to the conclusion that movies would be considered cool media, which I do not fully agree with. Her argument was that you could leave for a restroom break and come back without being too lost, but that is not the best circumstance to use for hot and cool media. The difference between hot and cool media is that with hot media, you have to give your full attention to understand while in cool media, you can be doing other things and not fully focus on the media and still almost fully understand the media. When you take a restroom break during a ...

A Communication Clarification   Responding to Desiree Leveir      In Desiree's blog, she explains the vast yet misunderstood difference between group communication and mass communication. I completely agree with her comment which stated that " When first learning of these distinctions between group / mass communication, it's not uncommon for an individual to misinterpret the message as mass communication equaling more viewers and group communication being equated to less viewers." This is what I thought when I first heard the two terms. Her example used to explain how that misinterpretation is not always true was very well thought out and understandable. The example she used was how you can send a group email to a thousand people and it is still group  communication, but a public Instagram post seen by one hundred people is considered mass communication. This was a very clever and well thought out way to explain mass communication/group communication to an...

Why Demassify?      After learning about the process of mass media, we discussed the idea of demassification and niches. This conversation made me wonder, does demassification happen for bigger, more complicated reasons than we may think? It seemed almost taken too lightly during our discussion. Newspapers and other forms of mass media are being demassified and being sold to niche audiences for more reasons than just lack of popularity and relatability. What if important mass media is only going to niche audiences because of people not taking the time to learn about other types of people or listen to different opinions? For example, a magazine published for the niche audience of teenagers. In this magazine, there were articles explaining the reasons teenagers in our day and age are so stressed and have more mental disorders than any other generation. If parents and teachers were to read this magazine, it would be a lot easier for them to understand the h...

The Truth      Today in class we had a discussion about the history of newspapers and the effect of the metal moveable-type printing press. I learned about someone named Andrew Hamilton and although he is not Alexander, he said something that really opened my eyes. "How can the truth be wrong? If what you say is true, is it wrong to punish you for saying it?" This is something that is still a problem in our society. People listen to everything the media says as long as it is what they like or believe. If someone says something that is true, especially when it is against many people's beliefs, it is immediately shunned by everyone. In some countries, you can still be killed for saying something offensive or humiliating about its ruler, even though it may be true. It is absolutely insane to think that somebody can tell citizens the truth about a leader, yet still be murdered for saying it. I wonder if these false accusations of libel will ever end, and if they do, ...

Reaching Interalizaton         The Process of Mass Communication is a very tedious process that requires a great amount of effort and time. It seems that it would be very rare for a piece of mass media to reach the last step of the process, internalization. Not only because there are many more steps involved that could go wrong, but because our society does not seem to take the time to process most mass media thrown our way. With how many articles, advertisements, and other types of media there are today, it is very hard to be able to internalize all of it. Is decoding enough for us to understand the media that we read? I have been thinking about this ever since it was brought up in class. Decoding seems to be enough for us to read and understand what we are reading, but how much of media we read do we really internalize? Not much. That may be why so much false news goes around, because we read what people say or actions they do without really thinking abou...

Conglomerates Effect on the Binary Models Our discussion on the binary models and conglomerates went a little bit over my head. I was not sure at first exactly what Mr. Miller was talking about. Once he related them together and asked how conglomerates affected the binary models of mass media I understood the direction he was going immediately. Conglomerates really change the world of mass media more than most people would think. They make companies much bigger, which completely changes the models. For example, the content-distribution model. A company like Disney used to only make content and rely on other distributors to sell their products, but after becoming so huge from buying out other companies, Disney has now become a content and distribution company. Or the other way around, Netflix. Netflix used to only distribute other companies mass media, but in the fast few years, they have started to make their own shows and movies. If this cycle continues, the content-distributio...