Final Project

Mass Media and the Internet
By: Amber Drake

(A) The internet is anything you could ever want or need to know all at your fingertips. Its media focus isn’t really a focus, the internet is one huge compilation of every kind, version, and “side” of media you could ever want, and you can search up any of it at any given time. There are Ads, blogs, news sites, archives, videos, and almost every other kind of version of media you can think of, and it’s everywhere, again, at any time you want. You don’t have to wait until “after the break” to hear the latest news story, you don’t have to wait until tomorrow morning for the paper to appear on your front step, and you don’t have to wait for…really, anything. Unless of course, your internet is slow.
I chose the topic of Media and the Internet because depending on what your favorite style of media is and how biased, or not, you feel like being for the day, you can search the whole internet for whatever version of whichever topic you want to read about. I love the idea of searching a topic and finding multiple blogs filled with average people’s points of view on the matter as well as the formalized news station-type versions. This is also one of the reasons why I love YouTube and the video bloggers. When they have something to say, they just make up a video about it and suddenly anyone can see it and it’s such a great way to get multiple points of view out there.
The internet has its ways of getting certain news out fast no matter how important most people think it isn’t. It’s definitely a great source of media.

(B) Over time I have learned that the internet is one huge, sometimes overwhelming source of information. While you can just about anything you want to learn more about, you have to be careful and check your sources. Anyone on the internet can say anything they want making things sound like facts when really they aren’t. Thankfully it’s really simple to search things you find by, let’s say, putting it into Google and seeing how many results you get that say the same thing. Then you can most likely conclude it’s a true statement.

(Learning Outcome 5) Obviously the internet can be viewed as a problem in that it’s too much information all at once and, like the article “Is Google Making us Stupid,” are we losing our ability to focus on one thing all the way through or do our minds jump ten different ways at once because of how things on the net are constructed. That being said, I don’t believe there has to be a solution to this beyond the fact that individuals just have to control their minds the best they can and focus on the things they want to focus on, but remember how important it is to focus on things they have to focus on.
In my experience of the internet, certain types of news, information, or group related jokes can spread extremely fast so that pretty soon, even the most uninterested in the internet type of people still know what’s going on. For example, I wonder how many of you have heard of the popular subtitled cat pictures called “lolcats.”
http://icanhascheezburger.com/
These pictures of cats are often subtitled with the “internet” way of typing as you can see quite a few words appear to be misspelled but this is just the internets own grammar and spelling! They even publish actual picture books of these cats, I own one!

(Learning Outcome 6) When using the internet to find any source of media, it’s very important to try and find valid unbiased sites, however, even if you come across extremely biased websites, you might only recognize that because you think the opposite. So, be careful that unbiased sites aren’t just unbiased because you agree, and remember to think about things from all sides!
The blog I did that most exemplifies my final project topic is the one I did entitled "Assess the Functions" where I went into more detail about the internet and why I like it.
http://jrn131amberdrake.blogspot.com/2009/11/assess-functions.html

Links related to my project:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media#Internet
-Jump down to number 8 - The Internet. Remember to take Wikipedia facts lightly as anyone can edit these pages at any time!
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol1/issue4/morris.html
-While this article is rather dry, it seems to have quite a detailed assessment of the internet.

Here's a helpful hint when searching for something on a webpage! Hit ctrl+f and it will let you search a certain key phrase or word and it will search the article for you highlighting the areas where the phrase you searched for shows up!

Thanks everyone =)
-Amber Drake