An artifact of media that I have chosen to write about is the cell phone. The reason I chose to write about the cell phone is because it is the most common device that people use to look at media other than a TV. People spend hours a day looking at their phones and that’s why it has become such an important place to share media. In fact, American adults spend more than 11 hours per day watching, reading, listening to or simply interacting with media. The theory that I will be using to analyze this media artifact is semiotics. By definition, semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. This is great to analyze the cell phone because there are so many signs and symbols used within a cellphone and there’s even more ways to interpret them. With regards to social media use, people can go on several different sites to use media and read it as well. With so many different sites, there is also so much to be interpreted when scrolling through each media. People can read and write whatever they want on some of the sites and each of the posts made can be interpreted differently by everyone who reads it.

Undoubtably social media has gained popularity over the years, but with the rise in social media use, there has also been a rise in teen depression. San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge headed a research study to identify the correlation between the increased use of social media and depression of teens and young adults. The data she has collected shows that symptoms of major depression has a 52 percent increase in teens and 63 percent increase in young adults also showing that girls are more susceptible to major depression. Twenge says she “can only point out correlations and not the causes.” For example, the rate at which young people are using social media has risen to a 85 percent use rate per day since 2009. The link between social media and depression here is well put by Mary Fristad, a child psychologist at Ohio State University, saying that teens are “more worried about peer-status and approval” and social media is the key aspect that magnifies those feelings.

This articles claims are well supported by the evidence shown because instead of strictly using statistics to prove a point, it brings in the viewpoints of many psychologists and behavior therapists to further back up the claims. To offer up a rebuttal, I would contradict my point in saying the articles claims are not well backed up due to the fact that the statistics seem to be creating a correlation that could possibly not even be there. This would fall under triangulation 2.o because this article could be making something out to be harmful to teens and young adults that might not even be the problem.

One of my specific interests, from the beginning, is sports. From a very young age I began participating in several sports such football, basketball, track, and baseball, and I continue to involve myself in the world of sports to this day. Since I’ve been involved for so long, I have a significant knowledge of each sport and what goes on inside and outside. All the sports I mentioned are part of a large public sphere, especially on the professional level where millions of people around the world talk about it. Others who are also interested in this buy tickets to go to these events, there are also television stations dedicated to sports, and talk about it is all over social media. The most common, when its comes a public forum, is simply people talking to each other about their favorite team or who they want to win a certain game. Talk about sports is everywhere, not only on professional sports but college and high school as well. With friends and family, I always talk about the game we are watching, whether it is about a nice play that happened, what an athlete could have done better, or trade talks that are going on the league. To say the least, the world of sports includes a large number of followers therefore making it a large public sphere.

Pinterest is a social media website as well as a mobile application that helps people find information with the use of pictures. It is widely used around the world by its 150 million users, racking up a worth of 5 billion dollars. With so many people using it worldwide, it makes one think, who is the target demographic for Pinterest? Looking at the statistics, it is apparent that women use Pinterest far more than men do, with 45 percent of all adult women online using the website while only 17 percent of all adult men online using the website. It is very noticeable that women use Pinterest more than men in general, but what about the social media’s employees? Some crazy statisticsshow that 92 percent of all employees are either white or Asian which is similar to that of Twitter (88 percent) and Google (91 percent). Looking further into the employee demographic, 79 percent of tech jobs and 81 percent of the leadership roles are filled by men. It may seem like Pinterest is mainly employed by men, but another statistic would say otherwise. 79 percent of tech jobs are filled by men but more importantly, 66 percent of all business-related positions are filled by women. This is very efficient, in my opinion, to have women in the business side of things to relate better since the larger audience of Pinterest is women.

The iPhone X is a very popular phone seen just about anywhere you go. With the phone being used so much, you would think the details and ways to navigate it are well known and easy. The iPhone X is the first phone in Apple’s lineup to not include home button, which makes it difficult for users to understand how they are supposed work their phone. With no home button, the phone is strictly gesture based, meaning certain swipes on the phone from different places will allow you to go through the phone in a much smoother way. These gestures include a swipe up from the bottom to go home, a swipe down from the top right corner to pull up the control center, a swipe up and pause from the bottom to see recent apps, and finally a swipe down from top middle to see notifications. This article will include a link to Apple’s official website for more detail. All of this can be done due to phones A11 processing chip that provides significant power to easily run the phone. The powerful chip also helps run the iPhone X’s 12 megapixel wide-angel and telephoto camera producing stunning pictures. Another unique attribute of the phone that is worth noting, is the option for 64 GB or 256 GB of storage, both letting the user to hold a large amount of data with them. Everything noted in this post is all to show the amount of power that a smartphone uses. While there is little that people can do to use less energy from their phone, there are things that companies, like Apple, can do. Making phones more efficient in their power usage can lower the amount of energy they use. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208204

Thanks for joining me!

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