Class Blog December 21, 2017 - Ajit Pai on Net Neutrality, and RPO vs The Real World

Today's class began with the healthy reminder that we must have at least one Be Reel blog post finished by the end of 2017! Mr. Rivers gave us a few pointers and said to always consider the audience when writing the blogs (and in all of our writing but our blogs in this case). He reminded us to:

1. Deliberately title article
2. Credit relevant artists
3. Provide necessary content
4. Summarize plot
5. Evaluate content
6. Evaluate meaning/theme
7. Conclude

Mr. Rivers also reminded us that our blogs are now worth a whole 50pts now instead of 30pts.

The rest of our class that day consisted of a discussion about Ajit Pai and his new video he posted on the internet about Net Neutrality. The video talks about 7 things that you can still do while net neutrality is not around. For those of you who do not know who Ajit Pai is, he is the American attorney who serves as the Chairman of the United States Federal Communications Commission. He is also the first Indian American to hold the office. As a class, we discussed what audience Ajit Pai was trying to reach, what the tone of the video was, and also what the purpose of the video was within his video. As a class we came up with:

What was his audience?

The youth (using the harlem shake, fidget spinners, nerf guns, buying xmas gifts online, “gram”)

What was the purpose?

To let the young people know that it is going to be okay

To make it seem like nothing will change

To hide the truth

To discredit previous politicians

Tone?

Condescending (superior)

Satirical

Self-depricating

Overall, this video was very bad, and as a class we all were able to agree on that for sure. This was obviously going to be a hit or miss situation, and Ajit Pai struck out a good 5 times or so. The entire video was the most cringe worthy thing that you will ever watch! If you would still like to watch this video, here is a link to most of it (trust me, you don't want to see the whole thing anyway):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqONIPwidQw

Next, we began our connection of the real world to RPO. Some of the comparisons that we were able to come up with before the bell rang were as follows;

RPO VS 2017

Obama is Halliday? - After Halliday left the oasis it changed and was taken over vs Trump taking over and changing everything after Obama.

Sorrento is Ajit Pai - bad guy because they are trying to get more people to pay.

After today's class, it really kept me thinking about how disconnected some people are from the world (Ajit Pai). That, allowed me to connect to Ready Player One and think about many ways that the real world and RPO are similar. Arguably, you can say that the Oasis is like social media in a way, because some people become so consumed in it that they forget what the real world is like.