Process Post #7

This week, I have been focusing on organizing my website and sorting each post into proper categories. I have been trying to work with my blog as if I am the user and see what needs to be done to improve it’s usability. Observing another person’s blog and examining their design choices through this weeks peer review also encouraged me to update my design. I am currently still trying to figure out what categories I want to create and how I want to use them, however I think that I will need to create more content posts before I make some of those decisions as I do not always know what I am going to want to post in the future.

I also started thinking about my essay this week just to get an idea of what I want to write about. I decided to focus on the first prompt about social media as a source of news and the issue of misinformation. I found this week’s Washington Post reading about the shutdown of a social media misinformation project very interesting and I am hoping I can use what I have learned from it in forming an opinion for the essay. More specifically, the article mentions how Twitter “has worked to end the platform’s long-standing openness to free, real-time research” (Harwell and Menn, 2023), which is interesting to me as I use Twitter for mostly news purposes however maybe that hasn’t been the best idea thus far. Additionally, Jeffrey Gottfried and Jacob Liedke’s work uses results from a survey to explain that “half of 18- to 29-year-olds in the United States say they have some or a lot of trust in the information they get from social media sites” (Gettfried and Liedke, 2022), which brings me to the idea that I may need to look at age as a factor at play when users of social media view news on specific platforms, and how that facilitates their reaction to this information/misinformation.

#posiel

References:

Harwell, D., & Menn, J. (2023, February 3). Harvard is shutting down project that studied social media misinformation. The Washington Post. Retrieved March 3, 2023, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/02/misinformation-harvard-donovan-close/

Gottfried, J., & Liedke, J. (2022). Trust in social media is changing. here’s how it breaks down by age. World Economic Forum. Retrieved March 3, 2023, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/11/social-media-adults-information-news-platforms/