Presentation Reactions - Blog #6

From Vinyl to Visual: Three Technologies That Rewired How We Experience Media

Long before streaming and smartphones, a handful of inventions quietly reshaped how people listen, watch, and connect. Compact discs, radio, and motion pictures each solved a different problem — and as someone who collects physical media, I've come to appreciate just how much groundwork they laid.

The Compact Disc: A Quiet Revolution

The CD was developed by Philips and Sony, building directly on the technology of records and cassettes that came before it. It offered more data, more durability, and the ability to skip instantly between tracks — features vinyl and tape never allowed.

As someone who owns a sizable collection of both CDs and vinyl records, I find the contrast fascinating. Vinyl has a warmth and ritual to it, but there's no denying the CD's practicality made it the format that carried music into the digital era.

That practicality also made singles commercially viable, since CDs were cheaper to produce than vinyl or cassettes. And because CDs could store any kind of digital data, their real legacy extends well past music into software and gaming.

Radio: A Contested Birth

Radio's origin story is genuinely messy. Even court trials have struggled to settle who truly invented it, given how many people experimented with radio waves throughout the 1890s. Heinrich Hertz reportedly saw no practical use for the technology, while Guglielmo Marconi is the name history remembers as its inventor.

What strikes me most is how radio never really left — it just changed form. I rarely tune into an FM station in my car, but every time I connect Apple CarPlay, I'm relying on the same radio-wave technology Marconi pioneered over a century ago.

Motion Pictures: Nobody's Sole Invention

Film had no single inventor either. It emerged from contributors like Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, and the Lumière brothers, culminating in the first public film exhibition in 1895.

As a film lover, that collaborative origin resonates with me — movies have always felt like a communal art form, and it seems fitting that its invention was communal too. That 1895 screening didn't just entertain; it created an entirely new visual language still shaping how we understand the world.

AI Disclosure: AI was not used in the research and information for this blog post. All information came from notes that I took while watching the EOTO presentations on the History of Communication Technology. I then prompted Claude AI Chatbot to help me shape my notes into a blog post of between 300-400 words, written in a smooth and professional style. Finally, I added appropriate images and captions to help break up the type and give the blog post a professional look. 

EOTO - Blog #5

The Nineteen-Second Video That Changed How We Watch the World

The current YouTube logo, which was released in 2019. 

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It started with a garage, three former coworkers, and a nineteen-second video of an elephant.

Today, that same idea — anyone, anywhere, sharing video with anyone else — reaches nearly 2.7 billion people every month. Understanding how that happened tells us a lot about how communication technology actually spreads: not always through grand design, but often through a scrappy fix for a small, annoying problem.

The History: From Dating Site to Global Platform

YouTube's story begins in February 2005, with three former PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. Hurley brought design experience; Chen and Karim, both computer science graduates from the University of Illinois, brought the technical chops.

They weren't trying to build the future of media. The founders' original idea was closer to a video dating site — the tagline was reportedly "Tune In, Hook Up." Other accounts trace the spark to something more mundane: the difficulty of emailing a video file to friends.

Whatever the exact motivation, the underlying problem was the same. In 2005, sharing video online was clunky, technical, and out of reach for ordinary people. Broadband internet was just becoming common in American homes — for the first time, video over the web was even technically feasible.

The founders set two rules for their new site: it had to be dead simple to use, and it couldn't require anyone to download special software. That simplicity became YouTube's defining feature.

"It wasn't clear that the internet could even support video, say nothing of the massive scale we take for granted today." — Sequoia Capital, on backing YouTube in its earliest days (Sequoia Capital)

The domain was registered on February 14, 2005. By April, Karim had uploaded the platform's first video, "Me at the Zoo," filmed at the San Diego Zoo. It's still on the platform today — a nineteen-second time capsule from before anyone knew what YouTube would become.

Growth was almost immediate, and expensive. Within a year, the young company was straining under its own bandwidth and legal costs. In November 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock — at the time, the largest acquisition in Google's history.

The Impact: Rewriting Who Gets to Speak

If YouTube's origin was modest, its effect on global communication was not.

It erased the barrier to entry for media-making. Before YouTube, producing and distributing video required studios, broadcast licenses, and real capital. YouTube needed only a camera and an internet connection. That shift didn't just create a new website — it created an entirely new profession, the content creator, and with it, a creator economy that has now paid out more than $100 billion to video makers worldwide.

It changed where people go for information. YouTube functions today as the second-largest search engine on earth, behind only Google itself. People turn to it not just for entertainment, but for news, tutorials, and education — a role once reserved almost entirely for television and print.

It reshaped the economics of attention. With roughly 84% of U.S. adults now using the platform, advertising dollars have followed the audience — YouTube pulled in an estimated $60 billion in revenue in a recent year alone.

But the transformation hasn't been uniformly positive. YouTube has also faced sustained criticism over misinformation, copyright disputes, user privacy, and the psychological effects of algorithm-driven recommendation systems — particularly on younger viewers. Scaling "anyone can post" to billions of users scaled the platform's problems right along with its reach.

The Bigger Picture

YouTube is a reminder that communication technologies rarely arrive with their eventual impact fully formed. A video dating site idea, built in a Menlo Park garage to solve a small, personal annoyance, ended up restructuring who has a media voice, how information spreads, and how an entire generation makes a living.

Two decades and one 19-second elephant video later, it's still writing that story.

AI Disclosure: AI was not used in the research and information for this blog post. All information came from the information posted in the prompt from our class blogger and my own research.  I then prompted Claude AI Chatbot to help me shape my notes into a blog post of between 500-700 words, written in a smooth and professional style with short paragraphs. Finally, I added appropriate images and captions to help break up the type and give the blog post a professional look. 

Privacy - Blog #4

The Surveillance We Don't See

Between Catherine Crump's talk on government surveillance, Juan Enriquez's idea of the "electronic tattoo," and Christopher Soghoian's look at wiretapping and encryption, one thing became clear: privacy isn't disappearing because of one big event — it's eroding through hundreds of small, mostly invisible systems working at once.

How this affects me, my friends, and my family

Every time I drive past an automatic license plate reader, take a photo near a facial-recognition system like face.com, or send a text on a network that was, as Soghoian points out, "wired for surveillance" from the start, a small piece of my life gets logged somewhere. Crump's point in her Ted Talk stuck with me the most: police departments keep this data indefinitely, even when the person tracked has done nothing wrong. That means my friends and family aren't just risking exposure if they break a law — they're building a permanent record simply by existing in public. And per Enriquez, that record doesn't fade the way memory does. It's an electronic tattoo, and unlike us, it doesn't die.

What the government should do

The government shouldn't get a free pass just because storing data has become cheap. Crump's research shows federal agencies have quietly built databases with billions of entries — license plates, cell tower dumps, Stingray-collected phone locations — without clear justification. If there's no ongoing investigation, there's no good reason to keep the data. Retention limits, transparency requirements, and real oversight of tools like Stingrays would go a long way. At the same time, Soghoian's Ted Talk shows the opposite pressure: government agencies pushing tech companies to weaken encryption so they can maintain access. I don't think the answer is giving the government more access — it's giving citizens more accountability from the systems already watching them.

What we can do

On an individual level, we're not powerless. Soghoian highlights how companies like Apple have"democratized encryption," building strong security into everyday products. Using those tools — encrypted messaging, secure devices, being mindful about what we hand over through apps and contracts of adhesion we never actually read — is a real form of self-defense. Privacy in 2026 isn't about hiding. It's about making the invisible collection a little harder to do.

AI Disclosure: AI was not used in the research and information for this blog post. All information came from notes that I took while watching the top 3 Ted Talk videos linked on the class Blogger Page. I then prompted Claude AI Chatbot to help me shape my notes into a blog post of between 300-400 words, written in a smooth and professional style. Finally, I added appropriate images and captions to help break up the type and give the blog post a professional look. 

Free Expression - Blog #3

Eight Values of Free Expression 

The entrance of the Federal Communication Commission Headquarters, located in D.C. 

At first glance, the First Amendment can seem straight forward, that is a list of freedoms. But with a closer look at these values, we see that the free expressions directly guide what speech the government can and cannot restrict. The First Amendment is essential to democracy, but when the Federal Communications Commission tries to change the framing of the public media landscape and defund media outlets with political wins, we see the First Amendment at work. Out of the Eight Values of Free Expression that we have covered, the two that felt the most relevant and important to me were, "Checks on Governmental Power" and "Protect Dissent." 

1. The first value that feels most important to me to begin with is the fifth value, "Checks on Governmental Power," or the "Watch Dog Rule." According to Vincent Blasi, a first amendment scholar and theorist, this value rests on the claim that a free news entity can check the abuse of power by public officials. A free entity is meant to serve as a channel of information to the electorate (electors), while giving the public a chance to perceive and digest this information. This theory was published in the wake of the Watergate Scandal and the Vietnam War, proposing that free expression works as a "watchdog" over the government. At first glance, the First Amendment can seem straight forward, that is a list of freedoms. But with a closer look at these values, we see that the free expressions directly guide what speech the government can and cannot restrict.  

I chose this value because it feels relevant, especially with today's political administration. An example of a check on governmental power by the press occurred from 2016-2017 when the NY Times published private details of Donald Trump's tax returns, as well as revealing that Trump had been evading taxes for 11 years. After Trump became president, he only payed $750 in taxes. The Times report sent shock waves through his second campaign, challenging his public persona. This is a prime example of the free press directly checking the power of public officials, in this case, the President. 

2. Additionally, the eighth value, "Protect Dissent," feels extremely relevant today. This value is based on the idea that the First Amendment does not exist to protect mass popular speech, but to protect the minority view. Big or small, it is evident today that not every individual will agree on world issues. Steve Shiffrin, a legal scholar and advocate, argues that if we took a dissent based approach to free speech that we, as a society, would not longer accept the fact that public debates are controlled by the powerful and wealthy. 

In order for us to be heard, Shiffrin argues that the country should be able to take certain steps in order to make defamation laws more welcoming and open to criticism. In doing so towards the wealthy, this can reduce control businesses have over media and ensure that young teens, including myself, are taught the importance of why we should challenge the injustice in our government.

I chose this value because it is evident that today, a small number of mass media conglomerates and millionaires own the majority of our mainstream news networks. With that being said, many people believe the first headline they see, without ensuring it is correct. This behavior reduces the amount of minority views, which are few and far between. According to Shiffrin, dissent has a crucial role in promoting justice and equality in society. Being able to have a voice no matter where you are placed in society can create an equal amount of opinions and voices throughout the world. In order for us to have that, I believe that change needs to start now while we are in hard times with our government and take advantages of the technology that can benefit those who feel unheard.