Global Media in a Digital Age

 Rules are fun, right? Not really. Are they necessary? I guess.  That's my view on the Federal Communications Commission. We talked about how there's censorship on the television and the radio and how the FCC regulates media. It's really "censorship" but people don't like to use that big bad word because for many "censorship" is automatically a bad thing.  In the US, we actually have some pretty strict laws with regards to what we can say on the radio or broadcast on the TV. In the UK for example, swearing on the radio isn't a big deal . When I lived there in 2012-2014 I also discovered, to my pubescent amazement, that there were advertisements and TV stations which had very attractive women with bare chests showing past a certain time (I think it was 11pm? Though I wouldn't bet money on that.) I also found it quite fun to watch South Park without annoying bleeps. In America, bad language can only be found on certain specific channels or in s...

 As it stands, the music industry is perhaps one of the longest-running industries in the history of our species. For millennia, music has influenced our culture, and for millennia our music has either been controlled by the state or works to subvert the state.  Today, music is shared in ways never before possible. With the introduction of radio the ability to cheaply access music was possible. The ability to cheaply (and freely) access music has only gotten easier. The Internet's promulgation of digital sound created a renaissance of digital artists. Those of us who remember the early Noughties and late Nineties (I unfortunately only remember the Noughties) know of a time where independent and subversive artists were spreading their music. I think some of my earliest memories outside of the sanitized websites my parents put me on were pirating music with my friends. My introduction to dubstep was not the highly-popular Skrillex, but obscure London-based groups who were releas...

 I would assume that many people will be writing their first blog posts about fake news. In the past few years, we've been flooded with cries of "fake news!" From our televisions to our phones to the radio, we've been blasted with these two words. Really, what is fake news? Well, fake news itself is exactly as it sounds; fake.  I think what is interesting about fake news is how even just the two words carry so much power. Former president Donald Trump used the word "fake" just about every day . To rally his base against a media which constantly disparaged him, he referred to them as the "Fake News". Fake news was no longer just a title for incorrect information, but a term for the entire institution of news media. It was a return of the  Lügenpresse, a term coined by another populist who ruled a certain western European country throughout the 1930's and 1940s's. The idea of a lying press was continued after the fall of the Nazi regime, used...