An EMErging Blogger

I'm seeing a lot of conversation in EME6414 these last few days about fake news and Accuracy. I am a librarian and have taught a huge number of information literacy classes, so I thought I would discuss what this means in the world of Social Media today. What is Fake News?  There is a very large Wikipedia page  devoted to this, but essentially fake news is a type of journalism that is intended to spread false information or hoaxes. Typically, it is distributed for financial gain or to change the public opinion. It has the potential to be quite damaging when it is taken for truth.  Fake News has been around for a centuries, but has not gone by the current name until recently. Previously it was considered misinformation, slander, lies, or propaganda. This is not new, but has certainly come to our attention more recently with the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump. Why is this a problem? People aren't reading and evaluating information on social media. They see thei...

As I was reading the 2011 article "Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media" by Jan H. Kietzmann, Kristopher Hermkens, Ian P. McCarthy, and Bruno S. Silvestre, I paused on the section about the "conversations" building block of social media. This sentence jumped out at me: "...the conversations are like pieces of a rapidly changing puzzle which, when aggregated, combine to produce an overall image or message."  This reminded me of the recent change in Twitter archival methods by the Library of Congress. Did you know that up until January 2018, the LOC archived every single tweet  made by everyone ? That's right! They made the agreement in 2010 to archive tweets since Twitter's inception in 2006. Who knew that Twitter would grow to include hundreds of billions of tweets!  The agreement included just the text of the tweets , which means that any media posted with a tweet was lost. The LOC was ...

This is the beginning. Hello! Welcome to my journey of web 2.0 and social media exploration. Over the next six weeks (or more) this blog will be my platform for investigating social media networks, examining the way people interact, scrutinizing internet privacy, and reflecting on the digital footprint in general. I am a noob. I haven't really maintained a traditional blog before. I kept one for about a week when I traveled a few years ago, and wrote a post or two about LASIK eye surgery in another. I'm sure that I will get better at blogging as time passes and I start to learn about all of the nifty tools Blogger offers. Sometime in 2001 or 2002 I had a LiveJournal to communicate with my friends. I used that for probably 3-4 years, until Facebook came out for college students. I never treated LiveJournal as a true blog, and have certainly never considered Facebook as one, although I do know it has the 'notes' feature. For me, blogging is scary. My bigg...