Response to Mattie Townson: Movies

I read Mattie's post here about movies, and she made some good points in her reaction to the lecture.. I was also confused when Mr. Miller said movies are just many pictures played together at a very fast speed, but after thinking about it for a while, it made sense to me. Knowing this information makes the technology involved in making movies a lot more transparent, and I feel like I know a lot more about movies now. It's interesting to think about how there's a certain speed when your eye can't detect many pictures being played together, that is a concept that I've never considered. Mattie's reaction to movies is very relatable, and I agree with all the points she's made.

Response to Wave 3 News 10/11

On October 11, Wave 3 News ran a story about how shots might have been fired at a festival in New Albany, but it might have just been a firework. This story is highly unnecessary, especially because nothing was confirmed. They don't even know if shots really were fired. Something that might have happened is not newsworthy, and it's not a good story. Even if shots really were fired, it still wouldn't be a very important story, because it doesn't have a long lasting impact on people. Wave 3 wasted an opportunity to share important news, so that they could share a story on something that might have not even happened. That is not good journalism, and it doesn't adhere to the yardstick of newsworthiness.

Response to Wave 3 10/13

On October 13, Wave 3 news ran a story on their show about a hiker who feel ill on the trail and was later rescued. The story discussed How the woman felt stomach pains and was unable to continue hiking. A search party was sent out, and after a while they found her. While this story may be interesting to some people, it's not really important. People don't need to know that a woman was rescued from a hiking trail, only to be found later. The slot that Wave 3 used to run this story could have been used to run a story that would educate the public about an important issue, instead of just trying to fill the show. This story is not newsworthy because it hardly affects anyone, and it affects no one for an extended period of time.

Television

Television has really risen to popularity in the past century. It's become a popular form of mass media, but it seems like television is following the same pattern that other mass medias such as radio have followed, and it's fading out of popularity. The concept of the way things fade away and out of popularity is interesting to me. I know about it in theory, because I've heard about how radio lost its popularity, and how "video killed the radio star", but I've never experienced it happen to something that I've used in my life. Now, with television, I'm starting to notice how subtle it is when something becomes less popular. You slowly stop watching things on the TV, and little by little you start using the internet to watch shows more. Soon enough, people will stop watching things on the TV and just switch to the internet. I can see this happening with the TV right now, but if things follow the same pattern, then that means that the internet is next for fading out of popularity. That is something that's really weird to think about, because I can't imagine not using the internet anymore.

Movies

Movies have been very big for a very long time. What's amazing to me is how much movies have advanced in the time they've been around. Movies have gone from being silent moving pictures in black and white to colorful pictures with stereo, and even the ability to be in 3D. Movies have advanced a lot technologically in the last century, and movies today are very, very different from movies back when movies were first starting out, which is interesting to me because they changed so much in such a short period of time. What interested me the most, however was how movie theaters went about adopting the new technologies. It seemed to me that if there was new technology available, then all the movie theaters would be jumping to get it and improve the way they showed movies. I was surprised to learn that that's not the case, and when new technology such as sound or color was invented, it took a while to catch on. I never knew that just because a technology existed to make something better, that didn't mean it was going to be used.

Recording Technology

Music is a really big part of life everybody's lives today, wether they realize it or not. Going through your regular routine, you probably hear music multiple times throughout the day. It's hard for me to imagine a life where music wasn't as widespread as it is now, but before recording technology such as the phonograph, music wasn't a very big part of many people's lives. I never knew how much being able to record music changed things. The ability to record music is always something I've taken for granted, and I've never really appreciated how much it changed music and the way people communicate through music. Before you were able to record songs, music was just a form of group communication. Now it's mass communication. It's not often that you see something make that jump, and that makes recording technology all the more interesting to me. It's been very important in making music more commonplace, changing music into a form of mass communication, and allowing artists to have deeper meaning in their songs. I never realized how much that one piece of technology changed music.

Radio

While we were learning about radios, we learned that they were used as point to point communication for a while, and that was something that stood out to me. Radios were used, but they weren't being used to their full potential. As we talked about later in the lecture, radios became immensely popular, reaching huge audiences. It's strange to think that something can go from being used to talk to one person to talking to millions. This makes me wonder, how different would our world be if radios had never been treated as mass communication? If people had just continued using radios as walkie talkies, and nobody had realized that you could reach mass audiences with this technology, what would our world look like today? It's also interesting to me that people were using radio that way for years. If it was possible for people to look past the full potential of the radio, then maybe there's technology today that is being misused, or it isn't being used to its full potential.