Gabriel Rodgers - Digital Media

 Good evening, and I hope you had a lovely week. I had a delicious weekend, full of relaxation and enjoying the company of others. But all good things must change, and that is actually this week's topic. This week we're going to cover the Digital Divide, sometimes in my field called the Homework Gap.  The Digital Divide references the socioeconomic difference in access between the higher-earning households and the lower-earning households. This is unsurprisingly complicated by other marginalizing factors such as race and ethnicity. ( source ) The truth is that poorer households just can't afford to be as connected as wealthier ones - the child of a single mother working 3 jobs to keep a roof over her family's head is not going to be able to afford a high-speed internet bill, 3 cell phones, 2 tablets, a smart TV, and 2 computers. According to the PEW Research Study, 27% of adults in households earning 30k a year or less use their smartphone for all of their internet acce...

 Well, it's a rainy Thursday in February. Peering out the windows, the world is white noise made of water while the tree branches beat a merry tune on the building. And here we are, looking at net neutrality, a particular hot button issue over the last few years.  Let's do this in layman's terms. The internet, at least since Net 2.0, has been a constant. You pay for access to whatever provider worked best for you, but after that you could go anywhere and do anything. Welcome to the Internet, as Bo Burnham would say. But there is a significant threat to this way of doing things.  Net Neutrality is "the principle that the companies who provide access to the internet (so-called “internet service providers”, or ISPs) cannot block or throttle internet traffic, or prioritize their business partners or other favorite web sites or services." ( source ) Comcast or AT&T, for instance, can't partner with Hulu so that it has the highest speeds and then throw Netflix b...

Good Tuesday Morning, if there is such a thing, and welcome back! So I just got back from New Orleans and I have to say, the weather up here is not my favorite comparatively. Speaking of things that are not in my wheelhouse, let's talk about ads. More appropriately, we're talking about online advertising and marketing strategies. Now, I am good at many things. I'm an author, a minister, a crafter, an artist. I can make beautiful things with my hands and my mind. I can sing, play the piano, operate a Class B vehicle, somewhat fly a plane, rewire a house, change the oil in your car, and format a manuscript to look like it was published in New York. I can write poetry, dance, cut your hair, and reassemble machinery. I can even help you do your taxes or pass the ACT. What I cannot do is marketing.  I do not understand it. I am terrible at it. Anyone who's read my novels, whether they knew me or not, have begged me for more. Anyone who's picked up one of my handmade boxe...

 Good evening, and welcome back! So this week, we're supposed to look into social movements and how digital media has played into them of late, and this one is going to be somewhat hard, so buckle in.  When I was in middle school, my TAG teacher delved deeply into the Holocaust and World War II. The ethics of showing real video and media from that era and subject matter to a classroom of 11-year-olds aside, she made an incredibly valuable point. She asked, "Why was this war different? What made it bigger, scarier, and hit harder than any other war before it?" The answer was simple - people could see it. The advent of television being a common household encounter meant that more than picture or video, the average Joe could see the horrors of war. People watched other people suffering and dying in their living room. This technology changed the face of how people interacted with war, because even though wars have always been visceral, terrible events, now it wasn't somet...