Leo's Blog For Journalism

Digital communication has made it easier to get mad at each other than ever before. We can say things we would never say to people in person and can tune off if they give a response. We avoid the consequences of in-person confrontation. For no subject matter is this as true for partisan politics. While the tension between political parties has existed, digital technology seems to have accelerated in recent times, spreading it to other areas of life. Political parties are semi-public organizations . For most of us, they function as a form of categorization. If we like certain policies, having a political organization that officially endorses them makes it easier to make sure they’re implemented. If we like one particular politician and need to vote for another one, political parties can be a useful way of tracking down that person. The issue with this categorization: it creates a shortcut for determining what to believe is right. Finding the truth is complicated. It takes work and effor...

According to this graph, the newspaper industry is not as lucrative as it once was, and it is not clear if the chart takes into account inflation, which could mean the industry is doing worse. While there are other forms of journalistic media, newspaper journalism is one of the most respected and often one of the most cited by other journalism paradigms. The article, " Why journalists should explore the business side of news, " focuses on the dichotomy between the content and revenue producing departments of modern journalist companies. This dichotomy is reminiscent of the film industry. Many famous directors such as Ridley Scott, Orson Welles, John Huston, etc. were known for their clashes with studio executives who altered films to make them more marketable. There are  infamous cases  of this "studio interference." In each of these stories there is the "artistic side" and the "commercial side" clashing with each other. With film the implication...

I was homeschooled. For the majority of my life, I had few friends and most of them lived 45+ minutes drive away. The internet aided these relationships without a doubt. I talk to my best friend over the pandemic more often than I did before. I was able to communicate and coordinate with people from the local high school despite never attending there. These are examples of online and in-person contact working hand-in-hand to present the best possible outcome, but let's look examine my in-person and online interactions that don't have as much overlap. Something I dislike about the critiques of technology is how much they aggrandize in-person conversations as if they all were inherently valuable. I have conversations with people all the time, and I’ve discovered that it's very easy to find people boring. Extracting value from social interactions requires skill. You have to know what questions to ask, you have to probe, to get to the heart of their interests. At my current ski...

Technological overload is an issue I’ve become increasingly aware of in recent months, but how easy is it to resist? I tested this when my class gave me a week to complete the challenge of going without technology for 4 consecutive waking hours. I did not beat this challenge, but I did get some interesting information about how technology mediates my life. I’ve always known that technology has become deeply ingrained in our school system, but I never learned how much until this week. My assignments are online, my textbooks are online, my notes are online (more on this one later), and even some of my classes are online. There was only one assignment that could have been completed without a laptop, and even then it required note-taking, something which I am not accustomed to doing on paper. It's not that I never learned handwriting, but once I was introduced to the simplicity of the keyboard, it took a back-burner and got sloppier and sloppier. This is apparently becoming a problem ...

  As a skill, attention has always been important. It's what helped our ancestors catch prey and spot predators. Getting attention is just as important to societies, since all societies are built on a form of communication. You can’t collaborate with someone if they don’t hear what you say. And they won’t hear what you say if they’re doing something else. The attention economy has always been with us in some form, but the interconnectedness of the world-wide web has increased its importance dramatically. The internet is able to stimulate us faster than ever before. Since we spend so much time on it, we’re used to being stimulated fast and expect to be stimulated fast. Take this essay for example, I looked at my phone’s notifications or clicked on another tab every 30 seconds while writing it. And this is an assignment I’m having fun with! It's becoming harder and harder to hold people’s attention, so products and marketing become more stimulating more quickly, which makes us ev...

Hello, I’m Leo. I'm taking this course for my computer science major. My first programming experience was with Scratch, a software for making video games and animations. It was a very simple form of programming, but it's visual structure was very similar to Python, which was easier to learn as a result. When I first learned Python, I knew that I would love the computer science major. Since then, I’ve learned Java, HTML, Javascript, and Dart. Of these languages, my strongest is Python. I’ve written several personal projects with Python, such as a text-based game simulating Dungeons and Dragons.  I value my computer. I can use it for many productive activities: fiction writing, computer programming, playing well-crafted video games. My phone is useful for communication, alarms, and listening to music. It’s also home to addictive social media and purposeless video games. I have a toxic relationship with it. Roughly 75% of my computer usage is productive. Approximately 60% of my ph...