Sarah Letteer

      While the first print books came from Johann Gutenberg in 1448, the first automated readers would not come until 1949, when Angela Ruiz Robles attempted the first one. Her work would go unpatented and largely unnoticed until the internet was invented and ebooks became more than just a concept. In 1971, Michael Hart got unprecedented access to early computers and decided that it would be beneficial to digitize some important writing such as the Declaration of Independence, the Bible, and the Constitution and make them available for people to download. It would take ebooks quite a while to catch on, not really hitting their stride until 1999, but once they found a niche in the market, they have settled in to stay.      While ebooks were once predicted to entirely take over the book market, as this history of ebooks points out, people rarely buy ebooks as gifts the way they do physical books. For me personally, I prefer physical books b...

      The world of movies has been irrevocably changed with the advent of new technology, particularly social media. And no, not just in the way that you think, with marketing being easier than ever to target to specific audiences and it being simpler to stream new movie trailers every day. Movie fans have found themselves on an unprecedented level ground with the creators of their favorite movies on social media like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Movie stars and directors used to live in Hollywood ivory towers that were barely accessible even through fan mail sent to a studio address; now fans can talk to stars and creators directly in their own homes, whenever and however they happen to feel like.       Fans on social media have created the culture known as "fandom" where they come together to discuss, transform, and bask in the glory of their chosen media. When I say transform, I mean the genre of fanfiction, a phenomenon that th...

          Silicon Valley Bank recently collapsed after forty years in business after it failed to raise outside capital to recoup its investments. Fascinatingly, this collapse happened in around 48 hours after word about the bank's instability made its way through the tightly knit collection of clientele, and the ease of online banking made it painfully simple for all of those customers to pull hundreds of thousands of dollars out of their accounts. The hysteria that so many bought into in the collapse of SVB would not have been possible without Twitter, Slack, Whatsapp, email, and text messages all connecting these high profile clientele together.         When we all have such easy and instant access to each other and our money, it becomes incredibly easy to make snap decisions about what to do with it. When you are a business with a lot of money to throw around, this can become a huge issue. Without the gover...