EOTO #2: Terms & Concepts

  “The 2020 Election Was Stolen”

 

 

 

An echo chamber refers to situations in which beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside a closed system that does not allow external ideas to penetrate. An echo chamber that was started with COVID was when Donald Trump kept denying that the virus was dangerous and claimed that, “it would be gone in no time, it's like the flu.” The majority of Trump supporters didn’t wear their mask after that, and they believed everything that came out of his mouth. The virus was a big challenge for Trump because it had taken more lives than in all of the World Wars and 9/11 combined, and he still said it was fake. Many workers lost their jobs and everyone had to be put on a stay-at-home order to remain safe from the virus.  Since the beginning of the pandemic on March 11, 2020 to now, there have been over 141 million cases and 3.01 million deaths, and while Trump called it a hoax, he ended up getting COVID-19 himself as a result of not wearing a mask or following social distancing rules. Many people who were Trump supporters started becoming divided on the idea of wearing a mask as an everyday need, and they felt that it was a “political issue.” What happened was that Trump’s words were an encouragement to his supporters to not take the coronavirus too seriously. This idea was taken forward and put as an essential belief for Trump supporters.

Millions of Americans became even more divided when the 2020 United States Presidential Election came around. President Joe Biden won by 7,052,770 more votes than former-president Donald Trump. It was a very close race, and it was nothing like anyone had ever seen before, especially since the entire nation was still feeling the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump and his supporters thought the election was a hoax, solely due to the fact that he didn’t win. Also, they were accusing the voting sites of throwing away the voting ballots that were going towards Trump. Ideas about voter fraud were circulated in this group and magnified by the echo-chamber effect.

Trump also had to deal with the racial injustice that would rock the world to its core when George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officers, including Officer Derek Chauvin who kneeled on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. After that, millions of people around the world started contributing to the Black Lives Matter movement, and they were demanding justice for not just George Floyd but also for Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the countless other precious black lives lost to police brutality. The echo chamber with George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter Movement was when President Trump accused the protestors of being affiliated with a group called Antifa, a left-wing anti-fascist and anti-racist political movement. While Trump was busy taking pictures in front of a church and holding a bible upside down and as a prop, the George Floyd video caused an uproar of grief, and everyone around the world wanted to share their anger about the video and other African Americans killed by police. He also said that white people are more likely to die in the hands of police than black people. People of color were tired of seeing their own getting brutally murdered for senseless reasons and wanted justice. The black community felt like that would come into fruition just based on the response to George Floyd and after years of murder after murder. As a result of all of the major events of 2020, it's what caused Trump to lose the election and his position as President. People were tired of seeing the President not taking the virus seriously. But remember, Trump continued to be politically applicable until close to the end of his presidency. 

Privacy, On and Off

 Privacy, On and Off

 

 

    Since technology has evolved from the telephone in 1876, the start of radio in 1894, the TV in 1927, the first iPhone in 2007 to today’s technology that is known as Alexa, it has become disturbingly easier to find out where your friends are. We feel as if we need to know more about people and what they are doing because we feel insecure. The expanding acclaim of social media has fascinated a tremendous number of people that all seek to compete with one another on a daily basis to show that their life is better than someone else’s. Social media can be a really toxic space at times. This info provides opportunities for analysts and access providers to investigate and better perceive customers’ attitudes. However, publishing user-generated data risks exposing individuals' privacy. Users’ privacy in social media is an emerging issue and has attracted increasing attention in recent years.

New research has shown the vulnerability of user-generated data against the two general styles of cyber attack: identity disclosure and attribute disclosure. These privacy issues mandate that social media data publishers safeguard users' privacy by sanitizing user-generated data before publishing it. Consequently, various protection techniques have been proposed to anonymize user-generated social media data. There's an enormous amount of literature on issues relating to the privacy of users in social media from many perspectives. In the article, “Privacy in Social Media: Identification, Mitigation and Applications,” the authors survey the key achievements of user privacy in social media. They discuss open problems and future research directions for user privacy issues in social media. An extensive compilation of human conduct data by associations severely boosts privacy concerns. Tracking behavior is a crucial part of the big-data economy, which enables corporations and industries to sector, portray, and grasp their users in progressively greater detail. It has been confirmed that representing the background and interests of users has various commercial advantages. People who randomly follow you could potentially be just a fake account that wants to try and get as much information out of you as possible by sending you links to a website through Instagram Direct Message that can hack into your phone. Large organizations as well as different users want to accumulate data on individuals for various reasons and can do so effectively due to the absence of protection on social media. People want to take advantage of others when they don’t give them the respect that they want. An example I can give is in the video, “Darieth Chisolm: How Revenge Porn Turns Lives Upside Down.” Darieth Chisholms' manipulative, jealous, stalker ex-boyfriend posted a website with her name on it and included nude photos of her while she was living with him in Jamaica. A few months prior to that, he had threatened to kill her and stab her in the heart. This is what’s called ‘Digital Domestic Violence.’ It typically starts when someone that can’t take rejection and can’t physically touch the person they want to harm uses electronic weapons (IPhones, laptops, cameras, etc.). They are able to find information about others that leaks online, and they can edit and post it whenever they feel like. That’s why many people say, “you have to be careful what you post on social media,” because anything that causes controversy spreads like wildfire, and it can do damage to someone’s reputation based on the severity of the situation.

Diffusion of Innovations

The Evolution of the iPhone

                   

When the iPhone was released on June 29, 2007, it was the product that would place Apple on its ongoing track as a leading technology corporation. The iPhone is the merchandise line that both sells the most and is the most beneficial to the company’s essence and financial health. The first generation iPhone was very different from the phones we see today. For one thing, it was small by comparison with the newest iPhone (iPhone 12) launched in 2020. The device was the start of the touchscreen. The smartphones before the iPhone had physical keyboards attached to them and a very small screen. The launch of the iPhone was met with mixed reception at first. For example, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in an interview at the time that the iPhone, wouldn’t be able to take over the smartphone market. Many technology companies were skeptical, but the iconic phone was able to find a way to make a difference in most people’s lives. The iPhone made it easier to gain access to the apps people enjoyed. People also loved the way Apple designed their phones to be touchscreens. For people who had previously used a Blackberry or the Nokia E61, it was good for them because they could finally text people without constantly getting the words in their text wrong.

 The phone was first adopted by younger generations consisting mostly of millennials because they really liked how the phone was sleek and innovative. That's what Steve Jobs, the creator of the iPhone, envisioned it to be like. Over time, the iPhone would go through stages of it either being thinner or even bigger than the previously released iPhone. The iPhone 3G included a camera. When the iPhone 4S was released in October 2011, it introduced the voice-assistant “Siri” for the first time. Apple's goal was to revolutionize the smartphone industry by making the phones look like pieces of art and appear trendy. This is one of the reasons why the technology spread to such a wide audience. It looked a lot more attractive than the Samsung and Android phones, and it was more innovative as well. By being user-friendly, it was able to circulate more widely to different age groups that could all use a variety of apps. Additionally, other Apple devices could be connected, and people could transfer data from their phone to their computer. 

Some people were late adopters because they were not interested in the increased communication aspect of the technology. The iPhone had late adopters that switched for pragmatic concerns (Ogg, 2013). The other group that never bothered to get the iPhone might have avoided it because they prefer other technologies. Some of the late adopters didn’t want to be tracked on their phones or feel constantly insecure about their privacy. They also didn’t like how the iPhone, and text messaging in general, didn’t provide real, face-to-face conversation. The negative consequences of the iPhone are how they disrupt people’s sleep when they use them in bed. They can cause anxiety and depression, and they’re also really dirty and carry more bacteria than a toilet seat. This just goes to show how people don’t take their hygiene into consideration and they let the phone distract them. Apple started adding a Fitness app, AppleTV, for people to watch movies that were exclusively made for streaming services. Once people bought an iPhone or a MacBook, they couldn’t get out of the ecosystem. Apple made the smartphone market highly competitive because the iPhone was more innovative, better-looking than most smartphones, and it supported all of the apps that most people wanted. 

https://gigaom.com/2013/06/03/here-come-the-late-adopters-iphone-popularity-grows-among-first-time-smartphone-owners