Greetings Rob and anyone else who stumbles upon this blog! I haven't had a blog since my Livejournal as a young teenager (anyone remember those?) nor even participated in social media since I was 22 (so 6 years ago - honestly I'm fairly salty I had to make a Twitter account for this class), so this is territory I haven't explored in a while. However, it's probably good for me, for reasons I'll illustrate in my "Topic 2" section of the response.
My name is Sia Hanna. This will be my last term at LBCC (I'll get my AAOT), and I'll go on to PSU to earn (eventually) a Masters in Social Work with a minor in Spanish. My goal is to put in my 2 years for the govern. Then, I will be able to practice independently and add in herbal and holistic health to my therapeutic practice. Diet, herbal medicines, and lifestyle choices have an enormous, overlooked impact on one's mental, emotional, and social health. This bridges my passions for herbal medicine, the natural world, and psychology/sociology/social justice.
As far as media, I am entering this class with an open mind. It was an elective for my transfer degree which sounded interesting. I have always been a good writer, avid reader, and, as I said, someone with a penchant for social justice. Journalism connects literature and that raw social atmosphere. For a brief time during my life, I considered being a journalist. I really admired journalists and photographers who traveled to remote places or conflict zones, threw themselves fearlessly right into the meat of the story and came back with striking photos and stories that the public could never un-see or un-know. I think I felt that the opportunity to do journalism that way was dwindling. I feared that my stories would be at the mercy of whatever media outlet for which I worked, so I abandoned that idea, viewing journalism as a once grand art, now tainted. Perhaps I am jaded.
I don't know what I will learn, but already even the textbook has caused me to think about things which I hadn't before. For instance, it reveals that way back when the written word was being invented, people had misgivings about its use; they felt that it would make people less able to have face to face conversations. I believe that social media, texting, constant attachment to smartphones, etc do erode our daily interactions (or at least our opportunities to have them with people we don't already know), but it makes me second guess that assessment and wonder if I am just resistant to change when I see that the exact same argument has been used since the time of the written word!
1) Word of mouth
2) School/Classroom atmosphere, research for class
3) Radio, ruch as OPB, KBOO, or whatever sounds interesting as I flip through
The reliability of these sources is actually pretty fluid. Word of mouth, of course, is extremely unreliable. However, if you engage in a discussion with that person about the topic, you can easily see if their knowledge about it seems flimsy/incomplete/poorly informed or if it seems to hold water. If it does, I can (and often do, if I remember) look into the issue later and explore it on my own. I never take anything at face value. School is an extension of word of mouth, but in a more formal setting. I think it is often more reliable than simple word of mouth, but it isn't always that reliable. I have seen many professors try to make up answers to questions instead of just admitting that they don't know, or they will give some completely incorrect, off-the-wall fact or example. We are all humans; we're all doing our best. Taking a variety of subjects really helps because you often study the same things but from different perspectives. For instance, I have taken psychology, sociology, and interpersonal communications classes, and now I am taking this journalism class and a technical writing class. All of them overlap in different ways. For all, social psychology and culture are extremely important. I get a more complete view when looking at all the perspectives, and then can interpret news and events which I read or hear from others in a more critical, informed manner. Radio programs also are usually just enough to peak my interest and sometimes get an emotional response from me regarding a topic. The TedTalk from this class about the kidnapped girls was something I had not heard of which struck a chord with me and is similar to a radio program. Radio programs are sometimes reliable, but usually the station has a particular bias, political leaning, etc. Having a particular bias or political leaning doesn't mean that you are incorrect. A fact is a fact, regardless of whether it is more recognized by one party than another. However, a station which is often "preaching to the choir" shouldn't get too comfortable and just start saying and promoting stories and ideals without doing the hard, as-objective-as-possible research just because they know their audience will likely go along with it. It also may be necessary to seek out the "other side" of the story and to realize that there are actually a lot more than two sides, and often, neither major political party has a clue what's going on.
The accuracy of news (basically the lack thereof) is one of the reasons I stepped away from hardcore political activism a long time ago. I don't necessarily feel like it's a good thing that I stepped away, but I reached a point where I felt that government (including ours) was so corrupt, that I had no feasible way to truly know what was going on and how to successfully change it. I feel the same about a lot of things, such as history, what we hear about other cultures, etc. In reality, the truth is a very slippery little creature which is hard to grab a hold of. You get little pieces of it here and there and try to piece it together in a logical manner, but ultimately we will each die only having gotten a glimmer of it. This is under the best of circumstances. With "fake news" being an actual concept now as something circulating in a viral manner, I think the implications are huge. People can simply find articles and "news" or "research" which already aligns with their view of the world or what makes them feel comfortable. I have heard multiple people try to tell me that Clinton's voting numbers were skewed and based off of fraudulent voting, and that in reality Trump won the popular vote also. Well that is certainly comforting to think that everything just went according to the will of the people, isn't it? In the case of the Nigerian girls in the TedTalk, it's also quite comfortable to be told that something horrendous isn't happening after all, so we don't have to worry about it. Fake news has also pitted people against each other, sometimes in violent ways.
To avoid falling into these traps in my own life, I research things before I spread them. This leads to me actually not spreading things at all very often, since I have very little time for "extracurricular" research, to be honest. For instance, I am subscribed to get emails from various organizations such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. I am totally all for the environmental movement and I think that in our current administration we are making some catastrophic mistakes, but their e-mails are often such inflammatory rhetoric that I delete them immediately. I don't rely on what they say and won't believe it until I read the bill they are referring to or the study they are referencing. Once I do, I can see if this is a real concern, an exaggerated concern, or a non-issue. Instead, I try to learn about systems from the ground up and not jump on buzzwords. It is a difficult process to verify information, but a dialectic excercise which benefits all of society, once engaged.
