356 | Week 8 | Google changes 'to fight piracy' by highlighting legal sites

Google announces that illegal sites will be demoted on their results page, offering top spots to paying companies.

Pros: Legitimate successful companies are encouraged to keep doing well. Google needs to make money somehow, this placates that.

Cons: Non paying sites are demoted. Makes some research harder for researchers. Kind of pointless, insignificant, maybe just a front to say "hey look we're doing the moral thing", but really it's a ploy to make more money.

By taking down illegal downloading sites to the pages a few back, it only makes them harder to find, IF we were looking for them. Frequent illegal downloaders know exactly where to look, bumping it a few pages down wont do anything if they don't use google to find their torrent pages.

I heard an argument made that artists need to make money, so it was nice of Google to bump down torrent sites so that they'd keep their money. My argument against this is that artists usually make bank on just their shows alone -- album sales go to their representatives and a percentage to the artist.

I also think that part of the music experience is being able to share it. I think I heard an article from Childish Gambino (Donald Glover, Community) saying exactly this. He would rather his music be a shared valuable between fans than selling out to a record company. I think he also said he put them out himself? But most of what I have from him I found from Soundcloud.

356 | Week 8 | The Global Flow of Visual Culture

Cultural Imperialism and Beyond

On page 398, the book talks about other countries breaking the laws of radio and television broadcasting into another countries airwaves. This was one example provided about cultural imperialism invading through the airwaves of another country, like when the U.S. broadcasted "The Voice of America" globally during the Cold War.

I jumped to the second about CNN having become a battleground for control over shaping world opinion. Someone asked me what I thought about the ebola breakout recently, and my brother next to me sighed heavily and told us that the "ebola breakout" was a distraction to cover up violent acts and deaths in the Ferguson 'riots' (rhetoric breakdown?: riots here shouldn't be the right word...I think the whole point of the protest was non-violence, so I also think that "riot" was a word given to us by media to scare us...or something...just some quick thoughts, but it sounds legitimate to me).