Terms and Conditions EOTO Reflection

From watching everyone's presentations, I've learned a lot about awareness, the media sphere, theories, and policy. 

One presentation that stood out to me was on the echo chamber.

In this presentation, I learned that an echo chamber is an environment where a person only receives information or opinions that reflect their own. 

Sometimes you’re in an echo chamber without even realizing you are in an echo chamber. This is because people are constantly using their phones and phones are constantly analyzing their user's activity to market things to that user that it believes they're interested in. 

Your phone is only rooting stories toward you that it thinks you want to see, and not necessarily the latest news that pertains to other important issues. Some people say this is convenient because it gives you the information you want, but you can be missing other important news. Therefore, it’s important to diversify our news.

Some of the pros of echo chambers are that you get some information on a topic and it boosts people’s confidence. However, some of the cons are that it can cause misinformation, limit people’s problem-solving, and people can stop thinking for themselves.

People start to depend on echo chambers and they don’t seek out other information, causing them to limit themselves in terms of news. People also stop thinking outside the box in terms of other people’s opinions and become very closed-minded. 

Something else that stood out to me in this presentation is that it seemed very closely related to my presentation on confirmation bias. Confirmation bias, similar to echo chambers, causes people to be limited by their own views and opinions and keeps them from branching out and seeking new information that opposes their preconceived views. This was an interesting connection to me and it made me realize how interconnected all of these concepts are.

Another presentation that stood out to me was chord cutting. 

Chord-cutting refers to the practice of canceling cable or satellite TV subscriptions in favor of streaming services or other forms of content delivery. These programs are canceled in order to save money on streamlined services

Some of the pros of chord cutting are that people no longer have long-term contracts, there's more flexibility, people save on costs, and there's access to a wider range of content.

However, some of the cons of chord cutting are that people become dependent on internet access, there's content fragmentation, limited access to live programming, and a lack of local programming. I find these last two points to be the most important. 

As a result of chord cutting, people are no longer getting news because all of these streaming services offer shows on entertainment and not mainstream news. As a result, people are entertaining themselves to death, and aren't informing themselves at all. 

In addition to this, chord cutting has caused cable companies to lose millions of people and their business, it makes me think that maybe these cable companies won’t be around much longer and we’ll be completely overrun by streaming services. 

This was an interesting presentation to see because I feel like this generation is being completely taken over by streaming services. In my everyday life, I use streaming services all the time, but I don’t think I’ve accessed typical cable news in months since I’ve been in college. This is incredibly weird to think about because when I was little, everything was cable news. Now, kids are growing up in this generation with streaming services being the new normal, in enough time, kids won’t even know what cable TV is.