The Youngest Self Made Billionaire in the World

SEVEN BILLION POUNDS for a website, is not that something?!!!!!! You might say some get lucky but you could also say some know what people want and need when it comes to communication. Mark Zuckerberg was just trying to create something to keep contact with friends. Well, his good intentions surely paid off! He is now the younest billionaire in the world since Facebook is valued at seven billion pounds. He does not want to sell. Probably because he is so proud of his creation. This is understandable, I mean, who would sell his son or daughter? I just do hope that he will not regret because technology today is moving fast. Somebody might just come up with something better and Facebook will not be worth a penny anymore. I remember that Cello was really something in 2000-2001. It was the ultimate chatsite. Todat nobody even remembers what Cello is. It was an internetprovider in the Netherlands who provided also a chatsite. When MSN was launched nobody looked back at Cello anymore.

Facebook, Youtube, Blogs and Censorship

Just like the book business, the social contact business is also changing. I remember that people used to place ads in newspapers to find friends, family or just a relationship. Now things changed. Today we have sites like Facebook to make and maintain or retrieve old contacts. This has its advantages and its disadvantages. It is good to maintain social contacts with people that are dear to you, to find old friends or to look for new ones. But how about the invasion of privacy? Many people are in possession of offensive pictures of other people and they can post those pictures on sites like Facebook for thousands, if not millions, of people to watch. Not to mention how opinion leaders (popular people) are used by marketeers to persuade friends to buy certain products and services. Youtube is another story. People post their videos, which could also contain offensive stuff. I think that youtube is more for people who have nothing to do and then watch some videos that they are interested in. I do not think that the purpose of Youtube is very informative or social. Blogs are again something different. This is simething I am very fund off. People get to exchange information. That is something positivie up to a certain extent. People with bad intentions could influence others in a bad way. I do not have to remind anyone about how Hitler influenced millions of people to commit one of the greatest crimes of human history. This brings us back to censorship. Stopping people with bad intentions is a good thing sometimes, but that does not mean that you should stop people who have things to say about improvement of societies for example.

Reporters Without Borders

Who says that the French are nationalistic? Well they are. But that does not mean that they do not have a Paris-based non governmental organization that writes about all crimes committed to society. They are the ultimate uncensored journalists. They write about incidents in the whole world, mostly shocking. This is something we need in Morocco. An organization that would remain within Moroccan borders to report about the crimes committed against society. I think that we still have some censorship that would not allow this. I do hope that one day we will be able to say that there are people in Morocco that report about such topics.

Assignment 3

Was is a greater mass medium: newspapers or television? Good question. Both have a great reach, but for lazy people television is better and I think that television is a greater form of media to disseminate messages. But, Sarkozy is clearly trying to exert some influence through his friends through newspapers here. This means that one should not undermine the power of the newspaper as a form of media. I think that most people still believe that newspapers provide more reliable information than television, but this is not always the case (tabloids for example). I think that newspapers are still popular because journalists are being perceived as the watchdogs of public interests. This might explain why the newspaper is not being read very much in countries like Morocco. It might be because of illiteracy rates, transportation, and suburbanization, but censorship could also be playing a huge role here. People just lose faith in newspapers after finding out that they are subject to censorship.

Assignment 2

We live in a digital culture, this means that businesses and society cannot escape from it. The E-book is today not very popular. E-book sales still are not even 1% of total book sales, but that is because the generations that read books today are used to books made out of a nice cover and many pages. The upcoming generations will be more used to using advanced technology, so they are more likely to buy and read from E-books. We perceice the bad quality of the screen of the E-book as something negative, because we are used to reading from printed paper that is clear in sunlight or electric light. The screens are already being improved, so that they are ready for the upcoming generation to read from then comfortably. Everything is moving faster and faster, so it is likely that people will prefer to download their favorite book with a high speed internet connection on their E-book rather than going to the bookstore and look for the book.

Assignment 1 mass comm

It is known that the Internet brought many advantages and many disadvantages with it. One of the disadvantages is that people are losing the ability to acquire new social contacts or they lose established ones. People also read less physical books and newspapers. Google is now trying to make reading newspapers online more attractive by offering more information from newspapers online. People looking for information from the past could previously not find it on the Internet; now they will be able to do so. This event is a good example of machine assisted communication. It may also lead to an enhancement of mass communication through digital newspapers. People might even have the possibility to comment online on newspaper articles; which could broaden the horizon of many other people.