On Tuesday’s discussion we talked about how media has affected and impacted individuals and society. I believe that the way we use media has become more of a bane than a benefit and I am not a fan of it. There are an unlimited amount of articles and resources at the tip of our fingers, but the veracity of most of these links are questionable. Most media sources are misleading, exaggerated or even downplayed, yet it is our job as the readers and information seekers to detect the faulty information. Say for example you want to look up a medical procedure for your Bio Medical Ethics class. Instead of finding useful and important information on the procedure, you are more likely to find opinionated blog posts with inaccurate information. If I do not careful sift through the links from Google, I can very well misquote someone or get incorrect information. But this is easier said than done. Like we had said in class, it is easier to just find the first link that looks the most accurate and sounds the best rather than gathering all the information, analyzing it and making sense of it for ourselves.
I had also thought it was interesting to know that it is not just the authors or posters or authors who are affecting the materials we are reading. Search engines and social media sites are selling our information, like what we search and our likes, to advertisers. I recently noticed this myself after searching song lyrics from The Book of Mormon. I suddenly began getting commercials from Hulu about Mormonism and becoming a Mormon. I do not mind it since I do not care about the commercials, but knowing that although I set my Facebook settings and Google settings to private, my information is still out there. So what information is safe to give out without having to be bombarded with advertisements that do not pertain to us? I guess it goes to further show that any information we chose to put out there stays out there.
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