Heiroglyphs: What I've Learned

Regarding our class' first EOTO presentations, I found myself taking away a lot of new information about communication technology that I had never heard of before. Discovering how the roots of so many of the fundamental pieces of written print are in China was interesting, and the ways in which modern digital media developed so exponentially quickly says a lot about where we're headed.

However, I found that the single presentation with which I learned the most interesting facts was with regard to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Beforehand, from what I had known from a basic understanding, hieroglyphics were a series of picture symbols used to document the history of certain gods and religious practices the Egyptians would perform. What I wasn't expecting, however, was that the word "hieroglyph" wasn't an Egyptian word at all. In reality, the word is derived from the Greek "hieroglyphikos" which translates to "sacred carvings." This is a more personal connection for me since I'm half Greek, so after seeing and hearing the word with my familiar mindset of the Greek language it instantly connected how this might be a Greek word, and I found myself surprised that I hadn't considered that fact earlier.

The second key new fact I learned was that hieroglyphics are somehow able to match almost 1 to 1 with the Latin alphabet. I'm sure that the importance of the Rosetta Stone was a key factor in this, and it might be possible that hieroglyphics only received this "new" method of translation after the fact, but the fact that the unique picture symbols they used can be traced to the language I speak still fascinated me.

Overall, I feel that language is one of the most interesting parts of communication science that goes too often overlooked. The idea that there are seemingly countless different dialects around the world, as well as how they can all be translated over to one another, is a fact that I find so interesting in the scope of human development. Hieroglyphs are just a single piece of that immense puzzle, and I was glad to see it included in our assignment focusing on the importance of communication.

Anti-War Where?

As I began to research the websites provided for this week's assignment I was unexpectedly surprised by just how different the content within them seemed to be from anything else I had considered to be a "news article" before then. The passion that shines through with how strongly the writers on these sites disapprove of the idea of America going to war is impressive, and there's no shortage of articles covering almost every single foreign dispute that our country has entered within the last decade.

The spotlight post from Antiwar was "The US Empire is Accelerating Toward Global Conflict on 2 Fronts." I found it very surprising for an American-written article to have the brutality to state the hard fact that "while this war is indeed insanely dangerous, it's not because of any of the words coming out of Vladimir Putin's mouth." It's surprising because this is, admittedly, the truth that "mainstream" media is trying to sweep under the rug: the fact that President Biden has shown a repeated and explicit commitment to send our country into a global and potentially nuclear war against the other superpowers of the world.

It makes sense on the surface to me why stories like this aren't getting more exposure, it isn't necessarily popular to sing the praise of your country's enemies after all. However, I also feel relieved that there's still even the opportunity for journalists to voice their opinions freely like this without fear of breaking the law. Examples of censorship such as how "hidden" websites and other anti-war news outlets get shafted below "mainstream" news are certainly disheartening, but it's still good to see that the fundamental personal rights our founding fathers intended for us are still being upheld.

The History and Relevance of the Printing Press

"The three inventions that forever changed the world: gunpowder, the nautical compass, and the printing press."

That quote came from English philosopher Francis Bacon, most popularly credited with developing the modern scientific method. It's no surprise that the reputation of the printing press is one of the most well-recognized in history, as it truly did usher in a brand new era of communication and discovery of knowledge. The number of key moments in human history that come from being able to mass produce a piece of writing is countless. Pivotal events like the Italian Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution would never have come to pass if it weren't for the ability to share all the new radical ideas being explored in those times. 

For a clear understanding of why this is such a big deal, the most important thing to do is to consider the technology's history. similar to the development of paper and mailing services, printing has its roots in Ancient China. The earliest known printed text in history is the Diamond Sutra, an ancient Buddhist text from 868 A.D. These first prints from around this time would use wooden blocks, and would mark the very beginning of moveable type being used for different characters. As a result of this change, the traditional method of writing hand-written scrolls was invalidated. The modern book format we see today would become the standard from then on in China.

Much later on in the West, German engineer Johannes Gutenberg would experiment with his own version of the printing press. In 1450 his technology was perfected, and the Gutenberg Press became the first reputable piece of printing equipment in Europe. The key difference between this and what was being used in China was that Gutenberg's press used metal plates instead of wood, which led to a much more dependable system that didn't need to be renewed after a certain amount of time. The printing press technology would spread rapidly throughout Europe, starting in Italy in 1467, then Spain and Portugal and England all by 1476. Eventually, in 1605, the first newspapers were being printed starting with "Relation" in France.

The rest of the story is pretty linear from there. The exponential spread of printing presses around the world made it so omnipotent that it was essentially required for anyone looking to project out their content. It's hard to name a written document from after the 18th century that isn't a piece of  governmental history, and things only became more universal once the age of computers and digital print arose.

On paper, it's very easy to see what makes printing so appealing for individual people. With print being a new key source of self-expression people are going to want to use it to project their own ideas out into the world. Furthermore, with this new wider distribution of texts people are going to want to seek out this new information that's being presented to them, and thus indulge themselves in ideas they hadn't been exposed to before.

The Importance of Free Expression: It's Good to Disagree

The rights we are granted by the First Amendment can only get us so far without our own desire to express ourselves. The individual outlook we have on the world around us and our desire to vocalize it is what drives the idea of democracy forward. The First Amendment is the much-needed barrier that the Constitution gives us to help us truly feel like individuals within our country, and as a result the idea of free expression garners much attention. 

When looking at what free expression can accomplish for us, the easiest answer lies in its ability to help us connect. The connection doesn't necessarily have to be a positive one, it can also just as easily exist in the form of antagonizing others we don't agree with. It only makes sense for things to be this way though, because you can't have a free-thinking group of people without there being both some conflict and some agreement. 

Take, for example, the concept of "self-fulfillment." People express themselves to create their own identity, learn the identities of others, and then form a bond with them based on whether or not they find things they have in common.  You can see this happening within any topic you might be discussing with others, and the important thing isn't whether or not people agree or disagree with you, but that the discussion itself is allowing you to formulate different opinions about everyone individually. If we can't have a conversation where people are able to project their opinions and develop relationships, then the idea of self-fulfillment through free expression becomes lost.

I, personally find this concept to be the most appealing of everything as well as the one I appreciate the most. While, of course, I don't like the idea of people arguing over sometimes trivial matters, I've also been raised in a country that teaches us opinions are important. There may be government censorship and personal censorship and even sometimes a chilling effect the government has on its people, but the ability to speak our minds can never be taken away, and it's thanks to that earlier mentioned protection the First Amendment offers us. 

On the other side of that coin comes the question of how many people expressing their beliefs impact their society as a whole. For the most part, our wildly varying opinions actually work to help the country more than hurt it. This is also something I feel is very important to study the state of our country, because I've seen the positive and negative effects that free expression has on the people around me. We don't seem very stable right now what with how divided people are in the world of politics. It's now reached a point in my family where it's rare to hear my own parents refer to a Republican as something other than a "Trump supporter." Quite a few intense flares have come from my father if he's ever goaded to talk with someone whose political agenda doesn't match his own. It's a rare instance where I feel that the idea of free expression promoting tolerance is completely false. Instead, the ability for my father to speak his mind almost fuels his desire to prove others who don't agree with his political views wrong. I might be in the minority with this opinion, but I still think it's something interesting to think about because of how my experiences almost perfectly contradict what free expression is meant to partially represent.

5 Sources for News Info

Although I think that knowing what's going on in our country and the world is essential, I'm sorry to say that I don't consider myself to be very well informed. Never as a kid did I ever find myself gravitating towards the news, but I would always sit down with my parents every night as we watched it with dinner. I feel that since coming to college and being able to live on my own terms for the first time in my life, I've become less involved with current events than ever because of my not needing to watch with my parents anymore. It sometimes makes me subconsciously wonder if it's ok to ignore the news like this, but it all boils down to me never finding it interesting or fulfilling.

However, I do strongly agree that being able to know the truth about what's happening in the world is necessary. If it becomes as difficult as I've been told it is to find non-biased news sources, then there's no telling just how polarized everyone's opinions may become. Throughout my life, I've been able to discover a handful of sources that report good stories, although I don't know how skewed some of the things I've known to be "news" are in truth. These are my 5 sources for how I've gotten the news throughout my life.

1. NBC Nightly News: This is the news I had mentioned sitting down to watch with my parents every night for most of my life. From back when Brian Williams was host, it's the one channel I most associate with "news broadcasting." As I grew up I did slowly begin to learn to watch the news with a more critical eye and, in my opinion, I think this is a very clean source in terms of how they present their stories. Everything is well written and well put together, with a focus on presenting statistical facts and concrete truths about the situations they cover. Throughout the Covid pandemic's early months they dedicated almost their entire runtime to covering as much as they could about how the world was doing as well as what we should be doing to stay safe. In short, I believe NBC to be a very reliable source if someone is looking for objective reporting, and I'm content with calling it my primary source of news consumption.
   
   
   
2. The New York Times: I've never been a fan of reading the paper, but being a New Yorker makes it almost impossible to escape the omnipresent newspaper that is the NY Times. After so much time spent with these papers around my house, I can say I'm utterly impressed with how broad of a scope the Times covers. Business, Arts, The Science Times, Sports, there's a guarantee that if you were to read over everything from a given day's paper you'd have a full scope of topics to uncover about the world that day. (Link to online website: https://www.nytimes.com/)
   
   
   
3. ABC World News: This next one is a news source that I've noticed my parents beginning to transition to rather than just exclusively watching NBC.  The first of which is ABC, which I find is similar to NBC in many ways. Just because of how it's also thorough in its presentation and does objective reporting, I would say that this is, again, a good news source to rely on. I wish I had more to say but I'm finding the words difficult. It seems to be almost a mirror image of NBC's presentation, sometimes even down to the stories they may both report on a given day.
   
   
   
4. CNN: This one is hard for me to consider a "main" source of news for me, but because I'm so limited in what I can say I use for news this one almost earns its inclusion by extension. The reason I have CNN here is because of how it's built into the technology I use, mainly being my mobile devices. Oftentimes I'll be using my phone and CNN will be on display alerting me about some viral story, and again by no means is this something I consider a good way to consume news, but it's still something.
   
   
   
5. Twitter: Again, like with CNN, this one I count by extension. I don't use any social media whatsoever, with the one exception being Twitter which I mainly use as a platform for posting/viewing illustrations. However, being how it's the way Twitter works, I'll always be seeing people retweet about other people talking about big things going on in the world. Furthermore, there is a dedicated news feature in the app which uses actually reputable news sources rather than random people spewing commentary, but I don't use the feature at all. I know that these last few sources are incredibly flimsy, but like I've talked about earlier I don't go out of my way to look for news stories, so my range of sources is incredibly limited in what I can talk about.

The Importance of the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court, for many, is an object of discrepancy in our modern political world. Quite a few landmark cases have happened just in my lifetime that have sent shock waves across America with their results. However, behind all the sensationalism it generates, there's a surprisingly interesting and important history to be found that highlights just how important the judicial branch of our government is in properly upholding the rights of its citizens. 

Established in 1789, the Supreme Court has been there since the beginning along with the rest of our constitutional government. Its main purpose in those times was to act as an object of judicial authority, an establishment that could resolve conflicts between state and federal law. For a short while in its infancy, it did just that, but it wasn’t until chief justice John Marshal came into his position that everything began to alter. The most famous case in the Supreme Court’s history was Marbury vs. Madison in 1803, no one will argue that. The key reason for this is because of what John Marshal declared in his case brief: The Supreme Court has the ability to determine whether the actions of either Congress or the president are constitutional or not. This new power called judicial review is what transformed the judicial branch from an afterthought to the great equalizer in our government's system of checks and balances.

The most interesting thing I found in my research regarding the Supreme Court relates to this. As it turns out, the chief justice is the one who presides over trials involving the impeachment of the President, which is something I wasn’t aware of as it was occurring with President Trump. I never knew that members appointed to the Court were given responsibilities outside of reviewing cases and their analysis of the constitution. It’s thanks to the article from History.com that I chose to dig deeper regarding this, so I’m glad to have had it shared with me to give me that extra little initiative.

I feel that the most important thing to take away here, a surprise to no one, is the essential property of judicial review the Court has. It’s something I’ve covered extensively in multiple classes, all the way back to high school and even middle school in my case, but it really is for good reason. The ability to challenge laws and, by extension, the constitution itself is impressive in its own right, but I feel what makes it so impactful is because of how it relates to citizens through how the court works. Without these cases to review, sometimes involving ordinary people, the Court’s impact wouldn’t nearly feel as significant. I feel that the connection they have to the people is what makes these cases resonate so strongly with the general public. West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, Obergefell v. Hodges, and even the recent uproar surrounding Roe v. Wade are all proof of that. In finality, though, I think that it’s because of this massively influential part of our government that there still is, to an extent, that sense of checks and balances which were the intention of our founding fathers.

References:

https://www.history.com/topics/us-government/supreme-court-facts

Ginsberg, Benjamin, et al. We the People (Essentials Edition). Available from: Yuzu, (13th Edition). W. W. Norton, 2021.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/28/23186627/supreme-court-climate-court-case-west-virginia-epa-power-plant-emissions