Media Stuff

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Media Reflection #2

My relationship with media has without a doubt changed after participating in this Media Industries course. Before I took this class I did not ever really considered who owned which form of media outlet or platform or what agenda they may have been pushing leveraging their ownership. I used to just take a lot of what I read at face value and never really thought to dig a bit deeper into who is writing the story, what their past looks like, and who owns the platform the story is being published on. This was a problem because it really made me realize that I am taking a lot of what these media outlets say as fact when in reality everything these media outlets say should be taken with a grain of salt. Thanks to this class, I am now able to recognize this and I am overall, a more educated and well-rounded media consumer.

Considering all of this, my relationship with media has definitely changed in the sense that I am extremely skeptical in what the media, in general, is saying. I now know that what they are often saying is not what is really happening or what is going to happen and it is instead, what these people want to happen. Just take this election cycle for example. For almost an entire year every single media source out there was saying that there was no way Donald Trump would win the primaries, let alone the general election. This is what the media wanted to be the case, but it turns out, what they wanted to happen, was completely wrong by a long shot. Not only did Donald Trump win the election, but he won by a landslide with the electoral college. Just goes to show that we really can not trust what the media says because in most cases, all these people are doing is telling us what they want to hear.

With that being said, again the biggest thing I will take away from this class as a media consumer is you really need to do your own research into why these people are saying what they are saying. When we research the mainstream media to see which campaigns they funded the most, it was obvious that all of them donated up to 10x more money to Hillary’s campaign than they did to Donald’s. This again shows that all of their reporting was really just pushing the message they wanted people to hear because that message was in line with the election result they wanted to see and the result they had financially backed. When you start to dive deeper into why these media outlets are reporting what they are, it is very obvious that there is an extreme bias with all of these outlets. Knowing that most of these media outlets do have a bias and that bias can often be easily confirmed by doing a little research into their history and ownership is one of the lasting impressions this class will have on me.

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Media Industries (MCST 2010) Critical Thinking #3: Tumblr

For this post, I chose to discuss the future of the very thing I am currently writing on, Tumblr. More specifically, I am going to be talking about where I think Tumblr will be in 5 years and why. I personally think the future of Tumblr is very bleak and I predict the company being out of business within 5 years. Before I explain why I think Tumblr is heading in this direction, I would first like to look at where Tumblr has been, and where it is now.

Tumblr was fully launched in 2007 by a man named David Karp. It initially had a pretty good launch due to all the media buzz around the new website and by the end of Tumblr’s first year, they had around 450,000 active users.

Then from 2008 to 2011 Tumblr started to see exponential growth and by the end of the year 2011, they had an astonishing 38,000,000 million users. Tumblr’s growth did not stop there either. Then in 2013 Tumblr was said to have an astonishing 300,000,000 unique monthly visitors and 120,000 signups every day.

Now whether or not these numbers are true has been a subject of debate and according to some, unique monthly visitors, it is not a valid metric due to the structure of the platform. Tumblr is a social media platform meaning, it really can only advertise to people who are logged in through their dashboard. The number of logged in users is much different than the number of monthly unique visitors and instead, metrics detailing monthly active users, are much more relevant. Some have estimated the actual number of monthly active users to be 30-50 million. This number is a lot smaller than the originally announced 300,000,000 unique visitors.

This is also not the first time numbers regarding Tumblr have been smudged a bit in order to paint the company in a better light. A Forbes article in 2013 claimed that Tumblr had made $13,000,000 in 2012 while another source actually verified that they had only made $5,000,000. These two examples show that Tumblr’s numbers should be taken with a grain of salt because in both cases they were skewed or used nonrelevant data to make the company’s performance appear to be better than it is.

This leads me into where Tumblr is now. Yahoo purchased Tumblr for an astonishing $1.1 billion in 2013 and they are the ones who came out with the 300,000,000 unique monthly visitors number. Since then they have been in control of Tumblr and this is the biggest concern for me going forward.

Yahoo has acquired many companies in the past and they have produced a horrendous track record regarding how these companies have performed. In fact, 25 of the last 53 companies Yahoo acquired from 2012 to now have shut down and failed. This is undeniable proof that Yahoo really doesn’t know what they are doing when it comes to acquiring companies considering 47% of the companies they acquire fail within 5 years which is only slightly better than a coin toss.

Tumblr was acquired in 2013 and based on Yahoo’s past performance the chances of Tumblr being around by the year 2018 is only 53%. Again this is hardly better than a coin toss and is what most would consider an unsafe bet. Not only is Yahoo’s past performance an issue, but just being owned by such a large holdings company like Yahoo is also an issue. According to Gary Vaynerchuk, it is one of the biggest problems Tumblr faces. In fact, Gary believes this problem is so big that he predicts Tumblr could be extinct by 2020 (Vaynerchuk, 2016).

So after looking at where Tumblr began and tracking its progress to where it is now, I firmly believe that Tumblr is on its way out and there is an extremely good chance they will be out of business in 5 years. Based on their owner’s performance alone, there is a 47% chance the business will be shut down by 2018. On top of this, one of the leading experts in social media, Gary Vaynerchuk, is also predicting that Tumblr will be gone in 2020 and this is coming from a man who successfully predicted and invested in the success of Facebook, Twitter, and Uber and he actually was also one of the original Tumblr investors. So not only does Yahoo’s own performance point to Tumblr having a very high chance of being shut down by 2018 but also one of Tumblr’s original investors believes the company could be extinct by 2020.  These two facts, combined with everything mentioned previously, is why I believe Tumblr will be extinct in the next 5 years.

Sources:

Vaynerchuk, G. (2016). Ask Gary Vee: One entrepreneur’s take on leadership, social media, and self-awareness. United States: HarperBusiness.

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Critical Thinking #2: Gender & the Media

The text I have chosen to study for this post is female Hip Hop music album covers. The reason I chose this text is because I think it portrays the female gender in the negative roles outlined in Miss Representation to not only women but, men as well. One study found that most women start to feel like their body images began to be affected by media between the ages of 12 and 14(McCabe, M. a. P., Butler, K. e., & Watt, C. h. 2007). This is also the same age when most women are likely to be listening to 2.5 hours of music a day. This shows that hip-hop music and the album covers used are an extremely popular text that is heavily consumed and seen in today’s world which allows it to reach and influence a massive audience of all ages and genders.

The gender portrayal in these texts represent the negative extremes of the female gender outlined in Miss Representation. It portrays women as objects to be sexualized over, abused and who can be controlled by money and power.

The two hip-hop album covers I want to analyze are by some of the most famous female artists in the industry. These women are Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. Let’s first start by looking at who owns the companies both of these women are signed too.

Rihanna is currently signed to Def Jam Records, which belongs to Universal Music Group, which is owned by Vivendi, a French multinational mass media conglomerate headquartered in Paris, France. Nicki Minaj is signed to Young Money, which is also owned by Universal Music Group and therefore Vivendi. So when you trace it back, it is the same company producing both of these women’s music. And as I break down the gender portrayals outlined in their album cover, we can see that they are using each of the artists to appeal to the different genders. 

We will start with Nicki Minaj. Below is her album covers for her Anaconda album.

I think the imagery says it all. Nicki Minaj’s album portrays her as what looks to be a stripper and it is very obvious that the goal of this album cover is to sexualize her body and use it to sell more records. I personally think the main demographic for this album cover was mostly men as they are the largest consumers of hip-hop and this album cover is up front with the sexual image it is sending, instead of trying to artistically frame the image like in Rihanna’s album cover. The impact this has on women’s gender roles is it paints the picture for men, that women are sex objects that can be influenced by money.

Next let’s take a look at Rihanna's R-Rated album cover, which in my opinion, is much more damaging to how women are to be portrayed in society.

Rihanna's R-Rated album cover is a bit darker in my opinion. It portrays her to be a woman who is not only sexualized, but also abused being tied up in barbed wire. On top of that, she is wearing a mask, which in my opinion dehumanizes her even more by sort of covering the fact that this is an actual woman and instead makes her appear to be more of a prop to be used for sex. What makes this worse, is this is a woman who is considered to be the 21st centuries ultimate pop star, which means young women all over the world are looking up to her. In fact, she is actually the most consumed artist by the female population, which means this imagery of her being a faceless sex object is reaching millions and millions of women. Something to note is that Nicki Minaj is number 38 in the top artist consumed by females, which is also why I believe the album cover of hers that I previously discussed, is mainly being used to advertise to men.

The people who produce both of these album covers know that Rihanna’s fan base is mostly women and Nicki Minaj’s fan base is still women, but also includes a significant amount of men being as her label is Young Money. This is why they try and make Rihanna’s appear to be more artistic being black and white while they make the Nicki Minaj album cover much more in your face with the fact that they are using her body as a sex object to sell albums.

Overall, the gender portrayal in both of these album covers is the same. They are both portraying women as objects to be sexualized over, abused and who can be controlled with power and money. What is interesting, is each album cover portrays this gender role to a different gender. Rihanna’s album cover is targeting women, and are therefore is more artistic in nature, whereas Nicki Minaj’s album, which is targeting men, is much more blatant and upfront with the fact that they are sexualizing her body. Both of which have a very negative impact on how women see themselves and their bodies and it also has a negative impact on how men see women and their bodies.

Works Cited:

McCabe, M. a. P., Butler, K. e., & Watt, C. h. (2007). Media Influences on Attitudes and Perceptions Toward the Body Among Adult Men and Women. Journal Of Applied Biobehavioral Research, 12(2), 101-118.

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MCST 2010 Critical Thinking #1

Google, it started as a name of a company and eventually was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb in 2006. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were studying to obtain their Ph. Ds at Stanford University on September 4th, 1998. It started as a private company but was later IPO’d on August 19, 2004. Although the company is public and Jeff and Sergey only control 14% of the shares, they still maintain 56% of the stockholder voting power. Then on August 10th, 2015, Google created a Holding Company called Alphabet, which is now the official owner of Google. So Alphabet owns Google along with many other businesses, and Google owns the Google Search Engine, the AdWords & AdSense platforms, Google Maps, YouTube, Android, and the Google Play store.

The structure of Alphabet’s holding is without a doubt horizontal integration. They own a variety of different businesses in a lot of different industries and sectors which allow them to extend their reach as a company. The horizontal integration does not stop there. Google, which is one piece of Alphabets horizontal integration, is also integrated horizontally with all of its holdings. Instead of vertically integrating like Disney where they would control every aspect of their product from end to end, Google’s holdings are all in different types of businesses where they only control one thing in each of these sectors, their product. They don’t control the platforms their product is used on in most cases, where people are using their products, how they are getting the products and things like this.

By integrating horizontally Google is able to create a variety of products and platforms that are all in different industries allowing them to really spread their reach as a company. In addition, Google makes really great products that often become the industry leader for each sector they are in. Their map service is by far the best map service available, same with their search engine, their ad platforms and their video platform. Not only is their reach greatly expanded because they are horizontally integrated but it is really blown up because they are often the best product available in every sector they are in. And in the case of video platforms,  YouTube by far completely dominates this industry.

YouTube was originally created in 2005 by 3 former PayPal employees. Only a year after it was created, Google saw the potential of the platform and purchased it for the sum of $1.65 billion dollars(3). The reason Google purchased YouTube is because it compliments their main product, their search engine, extremely well. Many people think of YouTube as a place to be entertained but that’s not why Google bought it at all. Sure, YouTube is full of entertaining content, but why Google snatched it up is because they saw the potential it had as a search engine. And as of now YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Is this a coincidence? No. Google saw this coming and they were ahead of the curve like they are with nearly every product they release.

So why does Google care so much about search engines that they were willing to buy YouTube for such a high price? Is it some unethical reason to dominate the internet and steal all of our information? No. Two words. Ad Revenue. Google makes 90% of their revenues from their advertising platform and there is no better place to have an ad appear than as a search result from someone typing in a very specific query. You literally can not have a more targeted ad. And with YouTube being the number one place people go to see product reviews and tutorials, it makes perfect sense that they would want to be in control of this platform that is perfect for advertisers as this is where Google makes all of their money.

In terms of media concentration, this does give Google nearly complete control over the search engine market. By owning the two largest search engines in the world, they are able to capture well over 70% of all the searches that occur on planet earth. This gives them the ability to have massive control over what people are going to see when looking for things on the internet. And unfortunately, Google has been found to skew the search results in favor of their products in order to boost their revenue. From a consumer’s perspective, I can see how this looks bad or unethical. But from a business perspective, I don’t think it is. Google is not a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing people the most relevant information in the world. They are a business and as a business, it is their duty to maximize their revenues on behalf of their shareholders. In fact, Google could actually get in legal trouble if they weren’t doing this.

Overall, this media concentration does provide the public more good than bad. Information is more accessible than ever before in the history of the universe and this gives people tremendous power. Now people can literally learn about anything they can think of thanks to Google and their search engines. You can find products you would have never known existed, and find people you would have never been able to connect with before by simply typing in a few keywords. You can literally find anything that a college, university, or book would teach you via a Google search for free. Google’s search engines give people more access to information they would have otherwise never been able to reach and this makes mankind as a whole so much better. To argue that this is a bad thing would be like arguing the introduction of books or writing was a bad thing because it gave people information they previously could not access.

So in conclusion, Google purchasing YouTube does provide Google with immense control over the search engine marketplace but at the end of the day, this has without a doubt benefited the public interest at large. People who argue against this would likely be the same kind of people who were saying books and writing would be the downfall of human civilization. Knowledge is power, and thanks to Google people all over the world have more access to power than any other time in human history.

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MCST 2010: Media Reflection #1

Where do you get the majority of your news? Why do you choose the source and medium you do? How do you use it and how often? Do you share this news with others? If so, with whom and how? If not, why not?

I personally get most of my news from a few different websites on the internet. The reason I prefer this medium is it’s accessibility and how frequently it is updated. You can access your favorite news sources anytime from any device that just makes it so much more convenient to stay up to date. I usually access it on my smartphone or laptop and I probably look at my favorite news outlets at least once a day. I personally am not a big sharer of news and honestly, I can’t remember the last time I shared an article on social media or something like that. I think the reason I usually don’t do this is because it has most likely already been shared and I really don’t ever feel the need to share an article.

What is your favorite source of media entertainment (television show, radio program, podcast, films (theater? streaming online? Netflix?), etc.)? Why do you choose this program/source? How do you use it and how often? Do you use it alone or with others? If so, with whom and how? If not, why not?

My favorite sources of media entertainment without a doubt is online streaming(Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc). I really enjoy the streaming services because they are able to produce really high-quality TV shows that do not have to be as censored as they normally would if they were to be made by a traditional cable network. I usually watch it on my TV at home or on my laptop if I am traveling and I use it every night as I prefer to fall asleep with the tv on. I almost always use it with my wife because we both enjoy the same kind of tv shows and movies.

Tell me about the most significant media event you have experienced (via the media, not in person). Where did you see/hear/otherwise experience it? What was the experience like? Were you alone or with others? Why is it the significant to you? What is its lasting impression on you?

The most significant media event I have experienced was watching the all of the news coverage on 9/11. I remember we were called out of school when it happened and when I went home the footage of the planes hitting the towers and the towers collapsing was playing over and over on the news and I will never forget seeing footage of people jumping from the building. I think this event was so significant because it was the first time not only was I watching people be killed but I also saw people take their own lives which was a really crazy thing for me to see at the time.