Blogging on Politics- FDA Changing Food Labels

Summary:
        On Thursday February 27, 2014 the First Lady Michelle Obama spoke about changing food labels to help fight America’s obesity. Some ideas of how the FDA would change the labels would be by having the calories be bolded, adding added sugar amounts and putting realistic serving sizes. The public has 90 days to comment and express how they feel about this change. Then after that, the change will be in effect. The goal of this change is to make people aware of what their eating and how much. "Obesity, heart disease and other chronic diseases are leading public health problems," says Michael Landa, director of FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. The new label is suppose to help people find what they need to make better food choices.  By having this change it also makes Food Companies make healthier foods. The change is making companies be more honest about whats in their food, so if they still want customers to buy their product they need to make the food healthy for them to eat and want to buy it.  
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Analysis: 
     There are two sides to this new proposal and this is where politics come in. The conservative side believes that people should be able to make their own choices and they don't think the government should have to explain the serving size and all the extra changes. The democratic side feels that as a government we have a social responsibility to the citizens. People can make their own choices on what foods to eat but they would just be able to make better choices if food companies were more honest about their product their selling.  


Interpretation of the implications: 
      What this new food label will do for the consumers is help them make better food choices to be healthier. This is not forcing them to buy things because of the new label it just is there so if people want to and should make better food choices, this new label is perfect for helping people do that.  On the other hand food companies might start making smaller packages to compensate for having to change their portion sizes. Beyond people making better choices, is people having better overall health as a result. Many of the illness Americans face are due to our over indulgence in food, like obesity and type 2 diabetes. Better health makes us need less health care. Another obvious consequence of this change is that companies that make snack and baked foods and junk food might feel pressured to make their food healthier once they see how bad the nutrition content looks on the new label.  So this could be a good or bad thing. In a way it is punishing those type of companies even though there is nothing wrong with having those foods sometimes. It might encourage these companies (Like Sara Lee, Entemann's, or even Tostitos or Lays) to either make all their products healthier or produce some of the indulgent ones, but make and sell more of their healthier products. As a country we need the food industry to get on board with the way people are trying to eat today. After all they are partially responsible for American obesity. They made their unhealthy products, advertised them to kids that they were "cool" things to eat and then the kids put the pressure on the parents to buy them!

“Can Blogs Revolutionize Progressive Politics?”

1. "A blogs are still a state of mind. To their most ardent advocates, blogs are standard-bearers of a core set of democratic values: participation, egalitarianism and transparency."(Renior) Democratic leaders like blogs because they can see what people have to say about the voting instead of just seeing the numbers of whose winning in the race. They also can say what they want to say to voters and get it out there fast, easy and accessible. 

2. Blogging is going to expand digital media convergence because it is allowing voters and the politicians to write whatever they want online and have everyone see it. The participatory culture is using the Internet to express how they feel about the polls and the voting. Blogging is becoming the next big thing because of how accessible and fast it is. 

3. “If television made politics more elitist and less substantive, blogs- and more broadly, netroots tools- have the potential to become engines of truly democratic, bottom-up, issue-rich political participation” (Chaudhry).

4. Blogs let people interact with one another and talk about each others views on politics and allows them to write whatever they want. Anyone can use a blog and it is used in many different ways. It is helpful to everyone and has may opportunities linked with it like the freedom to write whatever you want. 

Virtual Revolution

1. The web favors the English language because that is what most people speak and is the easiest. But not everyone as a whole speaks English, so the web limits people from using it.

2. Wikipedia is known to be a very fast and very available source for web users. But a lot of people do not like it because so many people from all over can edit and write anything they want on any topic on Wikipedia. People see the information from inaccurate and not reliable. On the other hand people who write on it could be putting some very accurate and useful information. This site is a great example of how peoples ideas come together as one. Wikipedia explains some of the digital convergence because it shows how much the web has grown from where it started.

3. The Web makes it possible for different kinds of digital convergence because of TCP/IP protocol. Technology has had the chance to advance and grow and become quicker and more accessible for people.

4. The Internet can become a huge challenge for the traditonal authority because anyone can write whatever they want on the web and no one knows for sure what is true or not.

5. I think getting information free helps everyone in a lot of ways and can help us get free. You can learn so much from the web and it brings all kinds of opportuinites. The only concerns I would have about having complete freedom with the web is downloading illegally and getting scams and virus through all the downloading.

6. The internet has had so many changes from when it first started, theres things people couldn't even have dreamed of that we have now. You have the freedom to do whatever you want on the web. This creates possibility for digital convergence because people from all over come together to make the web how it is today.

7. The Web is such a essential part of everyones daily lives that it has to be free. Some people would not be using the web today because they might not be able to afford it if it cost money. If the web was not free it would be very limited to people and it wouldn't be able to help people who really need it.

Questions for "Historical Development of the Internet and World Wide Web

1. Broadband service is the key to success for online communication because it is high speed and makes it easier for people to watch videos and it makes it possible to get a lot of information from multiple variety of sources. Socially people are "more likely to create and distribute media content than dial-up users, even though upload speeds are still slower than download speeds." The cost of broadband connection can be quite high for people who are lower on the socioeconomic scale, leaving them at a disadvantage.

2. The World Wide Web opens the door to much wider audience because it is available to people all over the world to see the same thing. Once the internet was created it became the dominant web browser because it was free and you could post whatever and whenever you wanted to. The acoustic world is very broad and not limited and the internet can share info with a huge amount of people at the same time.

3. If the government supported the development of broadband Internet for everyone no one would have free range of whatever they wanted to put on the internet. 

4. Another industry that would benefit from this would be marketing. The marking industries make new advertisements due to whats going on rapidly at that time. They will be on top of anything new at that moment and will send out advertisements as soon as something happens. 

5. A common method of online communication that could be improved is Skype. Skype is a great application for video calling face to face with people all over the world. When I use Skype though it usually does lag a lot and the connection is not good. If it would improve and not have problems with me not being able to hear the person I'm talking to or see them, I think people would use it more and be happier with the quality of the video chat. 

Questions for "Digital McLuhan"

1. The acoustic world is how we see the world using our senses and it has no boundaries. The alphabetical visual world had more to it then just print it meant something to the people. The media of television became part of the acoustic world because you see the same screen and images as people do all over the country at any given time.  

2. The alphabet has segregating tendencies because when it first started it could only be seen by one set of eyes at a time and it was difficult to make copies for other people. The printing press reversed this because it was able to make to make copies of texts to more then just one person and so there was more available.

3. The alphabet communicates by finding acoustic space it creates online. The online acoustic world is different from the television, radio or print acoustic world because it’s interactive. You can have online conversations with people online, over the radio and through television they have games that people watch and involve themselves in to interactive with the TV.

4.The two selection criteria are we want media to extend our abilities of communication beyond certain points of just the seeing of the eye of a screen of hearing of media from a tv or radio. We also want media to gather information that may have been lost. In the next 20 years our online communication will continue to replace each other with new and better technologies.