Rob - Final Presentation

Summary and Thesis: The topic for my final activist media product is net neutrality. There is no greater a threat to the sanctity of our democracy than net neutrality, and we almost lost it this summer. For those that do not know, net neutrality is “the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites” (1). This means that if you place an order online to Dominos, an internet service provider cannot slow down, stop, or in any way manipulate your order because they are being paid by Pizza Hut to direct orders to Pizza Hut’s site. This also means that ISP’s (internet service providers) cannot charge companies extra money for faster connections. If net neutrality was not around, it is hard to imagine websites like Facebook and Twitter gaining much traction as startups when they have to pay extra to get reliable speeds for their visitors.
For the actual activist media presentation, I am going to create a series of fake advertisements that play off the “Meth; Not Even Once” commercials. However, instead of meth, the subject of the ad will be on their computer, trying to access a website. However, they will be stopped because either their connection speed will be too low or the ISP will charge them for access to the website, and this will help illustrate the some of the effects of potentially losing net neutrality . The goal of these fake adds is to make sure people understand how important net neutrality is to our country and society.

For my final presentation, I was going to use two peices of activist media that have already been created and viewed hundreds of thousands of times, but are still very effective in conveying the importance of net neutrality.  The first is this image.