Now that we have reached the end of this course, I have taken the time to reflect on all of the different things that I have learned. I thought that this course was very interesting, and also very helpful. This is the second class that I have taken through the Mass Communications department, and I thoroughly enjoyed this course more than the other. When the class first began, I did not fully understand the definition of media literacy, and if we are being honest, it can still be a little confusing to me. I have since learned that there are many different definitions of media literacy, and that the definition tends to change among different sources. I also learned a lot about the impact of social media on us as humans living in today’s society. The impacts are both good and bad, and they seemingly tend to outweigh each other. I was surprised to see in numbers how much both myself, and my classmates spend consuming various media outlets on  daily basis. With how high those numbers were, I would be curious to see just how high the numbers are on a weekly, and even monthly basis. Overall, I really enjoyed this class. It was filled with important information that is applicable to real life situations, and not just in the classroom. I also really liked the online aspect of the course, and how all of our assignments were due at the same time, at the end of the week each week. We could do our assignments at our own pace, which was awesome for someone that is busy during the summer like me. I do not really think that I would change anything for this course. I liked the recorded lectured, because we could kind of get a feel for Dr. Magolis’s teaching style instead of just reading a textbook.

Protecting our privacy is a crucial part of using the internet. There are many ways that our privacy can be taken advantage of on the internet, and many ways that we can find ourselves in deep water when our privacy is taken. There are many types of software that we can ensure that we can keep our privacy. For starters, we should be very cautious when creating a social media profile. Things like personal addresses, social security numbers, and anything that has to do with bank information should never be shared over the internet or over any conversations that take place online, or on social media networks. There is also a software out now that is basically like a password generator. You can visit these websites and they generate a password for  your social media logins, or phone and computer logins that are highly unlikely for an information hacker to easily guess. The biggest issue that I can think of today is the privacy settings on social media such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. All of the social media profiles should be kept private. It is also important to not use the location features when they are not on private. The same goes for Facebook check in’s and snap map on Snapchat. These things seem to be a cool feature, and they can be, but it can open doors for people to know exactly where you are and exactly what you are doing at any given time. Lastly, a lot of websites prompt you to answer a series of “secret” questions when creating an account. For these security like questions you should lie, and make up something different. For example, one of the usual questions that we see is “what is your maiden name” instead of using your maiden name use a made up name or another surname that you can come up with.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton