Blog Post 11: Learning Something New

I learned about several subjects that influence society. The presentations include confirmation bias, influencer culture, whistleblowers, propaganda, deepfakes from artificial intelligence, gatekeeping and agenda setting, and social credit scores. The technology being used in social media platforms causes confirmation bias by creating a pattern of content presented to users that supports what already exists in their minds. 

These topics were interesting because they showed how technology influences our lives and choices. With this, it starts to create perceptions and hinder our critical thinking in many areas. Social media, including Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, has the technology in its ability to change public opinion and control buying behavior, its capacity to drive trends and strengthen a brand is remarkable. The presentation also underlined its negative consequences, including the dissemination of unrealistic expectations and rising mental illness among its supporters, highlighting the modernization of technology in our society.

History.com claims that whistleblowers provide material about a company or government to media outlets, distributing it to the general public. Whistleblowing helps people to be protected and guarantees that major issues are exposed. The presentation did, however, also draw attention to the inherent dangers whistleblowers run and the need for robust controls and efficient protective actions inside security protocols. Mass and electronic media help people to be mobilized toward a shared belief or goal. The presentation was important since it explained how propaganda changes public opinion as well as, hence, society's attitudes and behavior. It underlined the need for media literacy skills and the fact that unrestrained technological power can be dangerous, which increases our awareness of the ability of the media to shape our mindsets. 

Deepfakes using artificial intelligence and social credit scores ultimately represent developing technologies of great relevance. Although artificial intelligence deepfakes use programs to create realistic but synthetic images, audio, and video, ethical and security questions surface. The talk was interesting since it covered many cases of fraud as well as the use of deepfakes. Social credit scores similarly track and evaluate behavior to build trust and control social activity. These numbers have a great influence on socioeconomic activities, so they affect individual liberties and societal standards, even if they raise questions of privacy, monitoring, and use. These technologies show the developing technological problems as well as the optimism for the future.