The article I chose was about consumer health crisis and hearing loss with Apple iPods. The article explored how Apple took care of complaints and dealt with the hearing loss allegations. Apple faced a lawsuit on January 31st, 2006 by John Patterson, who complained that his iPod had high volume settings without warnings and the design of the white headphones lead to hearing loss. The ironic part of the lawsuit was that they did not test Patterson’s hearing or whether he had previous hearing loss. This article primarily shows how apple dealt with the situation, and they devised their own test. The study took 146 stories on hearing loss that people attributed to apple iPods. Apple dealt with the situation by creating new volume controlling software updates. Consumers also wanted an apology from Apple, but they never received one. Some complaints addressed new headphones, warnings, and restrictions on volume. These complaints and law suits lead Apple to create new headphones. Negative publicity in the media forced the company to confront hearing loss issues. Another big contributor is Apple is a large MP3 company and because of its popularity the hearing loss was mostly blamed on Apple instead of the other companies. The study also figured out that the larger the corporation size, the higher the visibility and its need to confront health issues that affect its users.
If I were to read with the grain, I would agree with those people who complain that the Apple headphones are a contributor to hearing loss. However, truly I think that they did not even test John Patterson’s hearing so they have no data or evidence that the headphones cause hearing loss. It also depends on which setting you listen to your iPod, whether you keep it on full volume or high volume. Also it is not the company’s fault because if you believe that the headphones are making you lose your hearing you can easily replace them with standard headphones, some choices are personal decisions.
Reflections of Three Text Messaging Articles
I was really surprised someone would conduct a whole experiment on instant messaging emotion icons. I always take those things for granted and do not think they mean anything like it is just an ordinary smiley face. I guess to an extent they show a person’s emotions, but at the same time I do not realize it. In the text messaging articles, I never paid attention to the way I would text my friends with different abbreviations for words. We always just understand what each other are saying. I never looked at texting from a linguistic aspect and its cool how in France and Germany they have different texting abbreviations. I never looked at texting as a way to go back in time like how Crystal compared it to Morse code and other communication techniques. The article that really surprised me was the one from Red Oxygen that said the US lacks in text messaging when compared to Europe and Asia. It was right, however saying that teenagers are the ones that made it popular because we do not want to waste out minutes and we can text all day long. Also corporate companies use texting to get in touch with their employees so it is a valuable tool.
Scholarly Articles
I think the importance of scholarly articles is for experts to display their expertise and knowledge in a way that is recognized as valuable information. The information is referenced and a lot of is not common knowledge. They are valuable resources to obtain research from regarding various subject matters.
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