Well Informed 2.0 Democracy

Most of us are aware of the sh*thole America is in economically.


As society has changed over time, there has been a generational influence on politics. The media gatekeepers of the 70's did not have the same format of broadcasting information as they do now, which should be obvious. With the social media boom of the 2010's, information is more accessible now than ever before. With this new format, where everyone with an account is a contributor, we are able to keep up to date with everything news-worthy around us. The problem with this is that every hops on the bias trains. If an account you follow is trashing Donald Trump, you will see thousands of replies that build off of it, or argue against it and are offended. It's sad to say that a lot of our generation's political ideas come from the memes we see on Twitter and Facebook.


While I'm not a Trump supporter myself, it pains me to see my peers get their opinions from ridiculous and non-credible sources. But then again, what is a credible source these days? Every news source has their own bias. Unless you're physically in the presence of a Presidential rally, or witness a live debate, each source that reports on politics will have their own bias towards it.


I've done some research on the current campaign to bring myself to an eye-opening conclusion. Whether the meme-viewers like it or not, Donald Trump is a legitimate top candidate for the coming election. 75% of the Republican party believe Trump will represent the Republicans as their nominee (Trubowitz, 2016). Rubio dropped out after Trump won in his home state of Florida, a critical state with 99 delegates. Although Trump finished second to John Kasich in Ohio, he received a healthy amount of votes at the primary. As I'm currently writing this, Trump barely trails Cruz in delegate votes in Iowa, another critical state for the candidates. By the way, Hilary Clinton took home the win for the Democrats in both Florida and Ohio, and is currently winning Iowa too, for all of the Bernie Sanders supporters out there.


The information is out there to get yourself informed about what's going on. It's a common misunderstanding that we don't have a voice in who becomes President. While that may be partially true, we do have an influence on creating the top nominees for the Electoral College.


The country will be led by someone we may not like. Whether they get us out of our economic debacle or not isn't entirely in the President's hands anyways.


Get off of Twitter, or go "move to Canada".

Trubowitz, Peter. "How the “Trump factor” came to dominate the 2016 election." USApp–American Politics and Policy Blog (2016).

On The Media- Amazon Shifting Times

Barnes & Noble used to be the go-to place to find any book from any genre. From the new Harry Potter, to another Stephen King novel, Barnes & Noble was the Disneyland for bookworms.


Borders, the used-to-be rival of booksellers to Barnes & Noble, went out of business in 2011.


From about 2009-2014, Amazon ate these companies for breakfast with their e-book. Readers everywhere were switching to handheld devices-styled reading, making it convenient to continuously blow through books at the online hand. In April, 2014, Forbes estimated that Amazon e-books were bringing in $265-$530 million a year (Forbes, 2014). Around 13 million Amazon Kindles were being sold every years since 2007 (Forbes, 2014). The reason the Kindles are so popular is because an e-book is typically much cheaper than its hard copy- anywhere from $4 for an e-book and $20 for the hard copy. For a frequent reader, it's no wonder the Kindle was so popular.


Barnes & Noble has tried to keep up to date with the market demand for handheld devices and the e-book system when they released their own version, the Nook, which did not hail in comparison to the sales of the Kindle. It's been a flop so far, and CNN Money reports sales of the Nook have plummeted 32% since 2014 (CNN, 2015). Barnes & Noble has closed many of their stores in hopes to maintain business through keeping up with online changes. The company has lost several CEO's in the last few years as well.


While Amazon is sitting well with their e-readers, as they are in complete control of the market, there has been recent buzz about what the future holds for the company, and the entire market of books. Amazon is beginning to open stores that sell books by the hard copy. They have shifted back to the ways of the mid-2000's before the release of e-readers. Why?


They have already taken out it's wholesale rivals, Barnes & Noble and Borders. The fact of the matter is, Amazon is hot, Amazon is popular, and everyone loves them. Their book industry is just a small feature of them, and they happen to control the market of it. So the real question is- why not? While Barnes & Noble may be seeing a Borders-like ending to their business run, they will at least be able to hold on a little while longer. They may not be able to compete with Amazon in the e-reader market, but Barnes & Noble will always be the ground-breaking innovator of wholesale hard-copy books.


Nonetheless, the ball is in Amazon's court.




To read more, check out:


http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/04/investing/barnes-and-noble-sales-nook-amazon/


http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/04/02/estimating-kindle-e-book-sales-for-amazon/#60f51c95bfcd