The History of Motion Pictures

For this week's assignment, I was chosen to research the history of Motion Pictures. This was actually very exciting for me because I hope to someday write and produce a film of my own and am planning on going to get my masters in writing for film and television.

In one of my first Journalism classes, Video Production, we learned about the first film ever made, The Horse in Motion (1878) by Eadweard Muybridge.

The film was essentially just a series of photos that were made to be viewed rapidly to create the illusion of motion. It was made with a device called the zoetrope, which was created by Eadweard Muybridge as well. He also created the zoogyroscope in 1879, which projected his motion pictures to an audience.

It wasn't until ten years later that the first motion-picture showing consecutive action, not just a series of photos was made. The film was called The Roundhay Garden Scene.

In 1890 Thomas Edison and his assistant, William Dickson, created a device that could record moving pictures. The device was the Kinetograph.

Then in 1892, the duo announced the invention of the Kinetoscope, which projected moving images onto a screen. Edison began holding public film screenings in 1894 that were referred to as "Kinetograph Parlors".

It's so interesting to look back and see how far we have come. The things we can do now while creating a film are so incredible, but it all started with a series of photos showing a horse galloping.

The beauty of motion pictures is that they tell a story. No matter how simple, no matter how short or how long, they tell a story.

Film has become a way to express emotions or educate in a creative way. However, it's also paved the way for propaganda.

As Tom Sherak, President of the Oscars put it:

“Film is a reflection of society, both present, and past. I think the film and its innovations sometimes have to catch up to society but sometimes it leads society too… Movies are a form of communication and that communication, those stories, come from societies - no just where society is presently and what it’s doing now - but where society has been”

Why Are Antiwar Voices Always Silenced?

As we learned in class, the Sedition Act that was first passed in 1798 and then again in 1918, essentially made it illegal to criticize the government. Of course, it was worded in a way that didn't explicitly say you can't criticize the government. Never the less, it was a clear violation of the First Amendment.

The act was later appealed in 1920, however, antiwar voices who criticize the government are still being silenced.

This country was founded on criticizing the government, so why do we suppress those who do?

In my opinion, it's due to the fact that nobody wants dirt thrown on their name, especially the United States government. No government is perfect, that's for sure, which is why many of them don't like when antiwar voices criticize their decisions or expose their secrets.

It could be much worse. We could live in a country where we are brutally tortured for speaking out against the government. Our country grants a lot of freedoms, that's not to say that these freedoms are always enacted correctly.

On the American Conservative, one of the first articles to come up is about how all the medicine we need to fight the Coronavirus is in China. According to the article "about 80 percent of our core chemicals for generic medicines comes from China."

The site exposing this leads for more and more people to criticize how the government is handling this outbreak.

On the other side of the coin, when people discuss anti-war ideas, a lot of the times they are seen as being "anti-American." This could be due to the fact that the government likes to lead us to believe that war, and the deaths of innocent civilians, is just good old American payback. But it's not that simple.

If we are going to shout from the rooftops about how the 2nd amendment was our "god-given right", then we should also shout from the rooftops that criticizing the government and its decisions is also our god-given right.

Facebook Leaving Consumers Exposed

Earlier this year, an unsecured online database had linked people's names to their phone numbers from the Facebook database.

A UK cybersecurity researcher Elliott Murray believed that the database contained the same data Facebook had claimed they had gotten rid of. The site was very quickly removed.

Upon reading this, of course, my reaction was fear. In this day and age, where technology literally rules our every move, privacy is a huge issue of concern.

A couple months ago, someone used my pictures and pretended to be me with some people that I used to work with. At the time my Instagram was public, so I can't imagine if someone could just grab my phone number like that at the time and the random texts I would be receiving because they thought they were once talking to me.

Facebook or any other social media app or website shouldn't have an unprotected database because it puts consumers at risk and leaves them exposed to numerous cybercrimes essentially. It's really scary to think that data that should be password-protected can be accessed by anyone that has a browser and the right IP address. Due to this, internet users are at extreme risk for scam phone calls that could potentially lead to Identity Theft. Having access to this kind of information helps scammers prove their "legitimacy" to you.

If your data gets exposed like this, you have to treat the situation the same way as if your information had been stolen/a data breached had occurred.  There is an Identity Theft Resource Center that offers a service called Breach Clarity that helps guide you threw how to handle your situation.

There are no previous legal implications that could be followed in a situation like this. However, with time and the more issues like this occur, I'm sure it will face legal ramifications at some point.

History and Workings of the Supreme Court

Today, we view the Supreme Court as a fair and just court, however, the road to this faith in the court was not that easy.

After the Constitution was ratified, the government moved to Washington in 1801. The Supreme Court arrived at an unfinished capital with a temporary workspace. They were not seen as equal to the other branches of government.

The fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, was the first one to strike down the act of congress as unconstitutional in Marbury v. Madison. He earned the court's respect as a co-equal branch of government. This changed the way the court was viewed in the publics' eyes and in the other two branches of government's eyes.

This faith and respect in the court lasted about 50 years until Dread Scott claimed freedom under an act of Congress in the case of Scott v. Sandford. Roger Brooke Tany was the Chief Justice at the time, and under his court, they ruled that Congress had no power to ban slavery and that black people could never be citizens. This decision ultimately weakened the court's authority, which was a bit surprising to me at first. I know the country was very divided at the time, but I am shocked that people actually displayed their genuine reactions of disgust when it came to slavery, especially during this time. I just feel like people were even more scared to have a conversation about racism and especially with slavery going on, that it surprises me people were in open opposition to it.

Eventually, this issue was resolved by the civil war, and the constitution was amended to abolish slavery. I wonder what our country would have looked like if the Supreme Court had decided differently back then.

As I stated early, the court is now respected amongst many today. But how did we get here? Well, many of today's justice's say they have very specific ways of going about cases, but they have respect for each other and for the law and they take that all into consideration when picking cases and when making a decision.

I think one of the most note-worthy things about today's justices is that they take any case from any person regardless of background, sex, race, and situation/crime. This might be the reason for the respect we see today for the court.

Once justices come to a decision, they write an opinion that usually takes about four weeks. Once the opinion is released, it is given to the press to become public knowledge. It's interesting to think about how they might have handled this back in the 1800s. They wrote in newspapers and then wrote to their friends in other states and word eventually traveled, but that probably took months. Nowadays, once an opinion is released it is readily available for anyone in the world within minutes.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court has of course gotten more technically savvy, but they have also learned from their previous mistakes to be fair and just when it comes to enacting the law.