Although I am not part of the fair trade group, I follow Apple closely. They are currently being sued by the Justice Department along with publishers in an anti-trust lawsuit surrounded around collusion to raise e-book prices.
Recently, the Kony2012 video has gone viral on YouTube and Facebook. Many Facebook users have spread the link mindlessly in an effort to make themselves seem like a humanitarian or just simply because they don’t know what’s going on in the world but follow their friends. The video was about contributing to Invisible Children, an organization thats “mission” is to help the kids of Uganda and bring Joseph Kony to justice. However, the situation is very different than what Invisible Children states in their video and the money that you can spend on “kits” full of bracelets and shirts and posters, isn’t really going to all the right places. The article I have attached is from the Foreign Policy blog and offers facts behind what is really going on with this situation.
According to the attached New York Times article, CNN is interested in buying out Mashable, a popular website “which specializes in stories about technology and social media.” This article says that an acquisition of Mashable, “Would make a statement about CNN’s interest in startups and social media.” As technology advances, major news corporations are having to shift their traditional models to make the news more interesting for generations brought up on technology.
I am part of the media group and one of the things we are looking to discuss is the impact of social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter on how the general public consumes the news and information. The article I have attached is about the man who lived nearby the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s camp. When the entire world was completely in the dark as to what was happening, a man was tweeting the raid from his home and it got some attention. This just shows the power of the world wide web and social networking coming together to share information as it’s happening despite the most covert of missions.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/10/tech/social-media/twitter-osama-death/index.html?hpt=hp_bn6
Looking through gizmodo.com, a popular tech blog, I came across this article. Although I’m not part of this group, I thought I would share this because I think it is an important thing to keep in mind.
The factories that Apple uses are also shared with many other big tech companies. However, because Apple has the reputation of being such a great company, people have put a lot of emphasis on Apple being the bad guy. This is not truly the case because Apple is one of the only companies that is actually taking steps to improve conditions. Sure, two wrongs don’t make a right but I just thought the group doing this topic should see the other side of things if they haven’t already.
http://gizmodo.com/5892176/but-whats-everyone-else-doing-about-labor-conditions
