MATAPRE REFLECTION FINAL

Stocks
Golden Ratio
Voting System
Encryption/Decryption
Djkstra’s Algorithm

These are the few lessons that have a big impact on me leaving MATAPRE. The others, I did learn, but I have a feeling that these would honestly leave more of an impact for me in the real world. First things first.

Stocks:
– This would affect me as a consumer and as a prospective buyer in the stock market. Why? At least right now, I have an understanding
on how the stock markets work, affecting the prices of various commodities, when to buy them and to know which ones surge in value.
– As a prospective buyer, I know which stocks and companies to buy and invest in. The bonds, Blue Chips and big name companies are all a breeze now since I understand it, but honestly, I wouldn’t see myself investing in the stock market jsut yet.

 

Golden Ratio:

Ah, this is one of the more important lessons to me. As a student in communication arts, and with photography being one of my skills, it is important that one should know a thing or two about proper composition, what attracts a person’s eye to the subject, and many more. The rule of thirds, many composition grids and similar skills all come down from this. It’s also nice to appreciate nature as it was, since there are countless patterns we don’t notice all the time. (Some pictures attached below of me using the golden ratio in editing)

Voting System:

Here, at least this thing has application for everyone, because everyone has a choice on whether to vote or not, and politics directly and indirectly affect what happens to all of us. Understanding what goes behind voting, the methods of counting and voting is quite essential to understanding the political systems in a way. What this means for us, is that we won’t be clueless voters anymore and understand how the ballots are to be counted.

Encryption/Decryption

The internet is huge right now. Lots of files that are of various sizes are being sent back and forth to different people. It’s important the we know on how to encrypt these files since privacy is a big issue right now, and the best way to keep conversations safe between people. Knowing how to decipher/decrypt is also one of those biggest benefits, as to not be bamboozled by what exactly this all means.

Algorithms

AS someone who relies on navigational apps, and is currently amazed with how Grab (not Uber) calculates the quickest routes in order where to go, it was one amazing lesson once the algorithms have been explained to us. Not only is it found in maps, but you can see it too in our daily lives, where we subconciously implement it, picking out the most efficient way to go through our day to the computers we use, with files finding the shortest way to reach you, and other related items.

MATAPRE might have had a lot of lessons and quizzes, but at least, these, I will remember a lot.

 

INTPRIN Reflection Paper 2

1. What did Noam Chomsky mean by manufacturing consent?

   Usually, governments have more information available to them that the public simply cannot access for obvious reasons. But because of this, governments can “manufacture consent” from the public by releasing statements on a certain issue that is of current status right now. An example would be the word war within North Korea and United States, where North Korea would constantly throw out threats, and the United States government would express displeasure or retaliation threats, which the public would then approve of the following actions that they may possibly take without having second thoughts.

2. Who are the ones responsible for manufacturing consent? Whose consent are being won over?

   Simply put, during times where the government of a certain state would need to take somewhat concerning issues, they would happen to manufacture issues that the public would agree on via official statements or “leaked intel”, so they would not have to worry about public backlash. (Let’s Make America Great Again)

3. What are “necessary illusions”? How does this relate to the manufacturing of consent?

   Necessary illusions are the news/leaked information that the public would happen to come across in news (or in today’s age, the internet, where leaked information is much more prevalent nowadays) that people would take with a grain of salt, and depending on the reaction of the public, the government may then adjust the manufactured news in an official statement in order to gain the public’s consent.

4. What are examples of necessary illusions as cited in the film? How does these illusions lead to “irrational attitudes of submission to authority?”

   One of the more striking necessary issues cited in the film would be the Vietnam War. Sure, it was one of the more relevant wars that the United States participated in during the Cold War era, but there was another on-going war that was happening at the same, which was the Cambodian War, which was a war that was just as gruesome as the Vietnam War. But people have forgotten about the other war due to the media covering the Vietnam War just as much, so you can infer from that alone was with how the Vietnam War got more support. The soldiers in Cambodia were just silently forgotten about, which is a terrible thing to happen to you if you were deployed there, only with support from the military, but then, were also allocating more resources towards Vietnam.

5. What is the model of journalism being assumed by mainstream news media as argued by Chomsky? What are the ways in which this model of journalism is being carried out by the mainstream news media? Enumerate examples stated in the film.

   The model of journalism being assumed would have to be that mainstream press is owned by corporations, and with corporations come with business in their minds, so a corporate mindset to the news is not uncommon among most major corporations, such as Time Warner and the New York Times. So with this mindset, the governments would often bribe the corporations who control the news publications in order to publish the news that they want to, often with news reports being doctored (oftentimes the news article being rewritten to an entirely different story, hence that surgery scene of the news article in the documentary) One example would also happen to be the issue of the Vietnam War also being the main focus of the media publications at the time compared to the Cambodian war.

6. Do you agree with the arguments being put forth by Noam Chomsky?

   After watching the film, it dawned on me with how a lot of things line up and connect, such as the misleading leaks happening to align with how the audiences would react, seemingly “fabricated” news articles that seem to be hiding something (as if they were lacking in content or it feels off when you read the article), it can be possible (and it most likely is) that the governments are exploiting the media to gain consent of the public on controversial decisions, as such where the power of the public can take a government down, so they oftentimes have to play tricks in order to carry out what they desire. There are a lot of things that we (the public) do not know at all.

INTPRIN Reflection #1

My findings – It has been interesting, how I’ve seen the evolution of media come and go involving newspapers. Modern newspapers have slowly adapted to how television and the internet both affect our perspectives and more importantly, the new target audience that differs per generation

– Length in newspapers has greatly changed, especially with the articles and pictures. I’ve been reading newspapers since the 60’s, and that was still when photography was in its infancy. Articles used to be full of words, not much pictures, since they were mostly reserved for the headlines or more important news. Could explain with how digital cameras didn’t exist back then, where reporters could just keep on taking pictures on and on. Newspapers seem a whole lot more colorful right now. Guess it has to do with the attention span of the younger generations

– Back then, the showbiz section was less of a stupid section. It actually had some pretty interesting articles regarding celebrities (in this case, movies, TV and radio personalities being interviewed), nothing like the stupid “Jadine spotted holding hands”

– Culture has remained more or less the same. They’d feature places to eat, vacation spots. Nowadays, the only new additions are photography or even places locally to just relax with friends

– The headlines, on the other hand, have both some changes but mostly stayed the same on the surface. You’d have the eye-grabbing headline, a related photograph, and the most important details on the first page, with the rest of the details in the following page. This was somewhat referred to the “pyramid style” of writing?

– For the local newspapers, there would be international news, but only very few but compared to today’s newspapers with an entire section dedicated to international news. Almost everyone can easily get news headlines instantly with the internet.

– During the martial law era, the news was heavily filtered. There’s not much else to say, but that’s the easiest way to put it. We had this saying at the time not to trust what they put out in the newspaper, since this was simply a way to reassure the public that nothing fishy was going on at the time. Of course, you know what happened to that after.

– If I’d compare it to the Chinese newspapers I’d be reading whenever I’d visit Mainland China, Hong Kong and the local Chinese newspapers, the type of government really affects what you’d see in the newspapers. It’s very interesting seeing the different views of the people (the editors and reporters).

– Editing styles have changed greatly. Back then most of the news articles written would be written in formal English, Filipino or even Chinese. The languages used now are more laid back, still are formal but today’s lingo has bled in, albeit very subtly.

According to my grandpa, when the radio was first developed, people immediately thought that newspapers were going to be a thing of the past. Well, they were wrong, as they both grew to complement each other, with some instances, it being the only way of exchanging news at the time (think World War 2, Vietnam War and Martial Law).

Interestingly enough, people are starting to have suspicions of the news that they see online. We’re going full circle, where people tend to only trust more traditional news sources such as newspapers and magazines since that they have to go through multiple editors and checks in order to be verified as true. Which is true, compared to having to find news online where that they could have been manipulated. Partially due to the abundance of anonymity, people have no idea as well if the news sources are to be trusted.

This also aligns with how people who are known to be trusted editors are more likely to be trusted. Information gathering nowadays often comes from computer generated search results coming from algorithms and artificial intelligence. Google is one of the biggest examples of that, just like in the reading where it can go through your data to see what you are interested in (which is an issue of privacy as well) to deliver personalized results. This was previously a big deal back then when people expected the future of print media to be with fax machines that deliver personalized news.

But there’s still the human factor, so people obviously trust fellow humans as well. This is why social media and forums such as Twitter, Reddit and other related sites are what make up majority of the internet we visit since they’re (well, mostly) people who give recommendations, advice and whatsoever. You simply couldn’t get that with modern media compared to print media.

As for the news, there’s still always that argument on whether the news we see online is indeed accurate, but as for my opinion, seeing how it develops in real time is the biggest draw for me. I love revisiting some of my favorite tech articles only to find out they’ve been updated due to recent developments. Same can’t be said about print media, where they’d have to reprint the same article or an erratum.

Gathering the data for this essay was pretty interesting. Hearing the perspectives of the elders and how they’ve experienced attaining information from newspapers during a different era is interesting, I would see myself getting quite invested in this, since there’s always this essence that you simply cannot find in digital news.

Kind of like photography, but that experience of knowing the news firsthand at a newspaper stand (that was a thing before, apparently) and informing your other friends via word of mouth made you feel as if you were updated. Nowadays, we just keep swiping and waiting for live updates. Sure, the advantages of seeing news as it develops is one of the best things to happen to news since sliced bread.