1. Personally, I really like the whole idea behind this assignment. People are constantly complaining about what their teacher made them read the night before and how boring it was. Now we get to blame ourselves or at least the people around us. Sooo beware…don’t pick anything boring or you will have the entire class to answer to! The topics that people choose should reflect what people my age believe is important for everyone to know out the many topics that the media covers. I’m not really one for watching the news at night..personally I find it somewhat depressing. Hopefully, this assignment will bring me back up to speed with some of the most current and/or the most important events.
2. After reviewing the assignment, there were a few topics that I believe I may want to look into. One of the first options that popped into my head, was the idea of global warming. I know that this has been a big subject in the news recently and I think that it would be good to bring to the attention of people my age. I would also like to explore eating disorders. If I did this topic, I would take a look at celebrities and the effect of their media portrayal. I overhear on a fairly regular basis girls of an average weight, saying that they are “too fat”. I think that the media has a very large part to do with this. I also think that it would be interesting to look into what is being done to find alternative fuel sources. People are constantly complaining about gas prices and worrying us with the fact that oil isn’t always going to be there for us to use. The only problem with this topic is that I think it would be hard to find sources. There haven’t really been many suggested solutions to the problem and therefore the media hasn’t really jumped on the chance to write about alternative fuel sources.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Part 1.
Out of the two articles, I chose to read “Which Media Do You Trust?”. This article seemed to me to be very poorly written. I felt as if the author kept almost repeating himself in different ways all about the same topic. He focused heavily on the fact that the trust in blogs was small, which after the first paragraph I clearly understood, yet he felt the need to continue further into a second paragraph. The article seemed to me to be a bunch numbers followed by a poorly thought out argument. Printed out, the article was only two short pages long, yet when I was finished I felt as if I had been reading for days. I’m not sure if that’s the author’s fault or if the topic he talked about bored me. Personally, I believe it to have been both. The author seems dumbfounded by the fact that people tended to choose TV as their most trustworthy source of information. In my opinion, I don’t see where else anyone would choose to get their information. After hearing over and over again from high school teachers that you have to be careful about finding credible information on the internet, I can understand why that option is out. As for the newspaper, they report the same thing that the TV news broadcasts report anyways!
Part 2.
Mark Glaser, the author of “Which Media Do You Trust?”, chose to claim that the trust of “the masses” of certain media sources was based already on media. Mr. Glaser stated that only twenty-five percent of “the masses” believed that blogs were credible. He then went on to state how he felt that the trust in blogs is based upon the preexisting media stereotype that “blogs have none of the great fact-checking of mainstream media, so they have no credibility”. Angered as Mr. Glaser was, he stated that this general statement should not stand true for every blog. He explained that the trustworthiness of a blog depends on who’s writing and his/her credibility with the audience. For this argument, I have a counterargument in the form of a situation. If a person is looking for something that contains the news, why would he or she search the internet and run the risk of running into a phony site? Many people have never encountered a legitimate blog once in their time of surfing the internet, so why in the world would they decide to look for a blog with the news? Taking a step back from these arguments, I pose a simple question to the author: if you believe that blogs deserve more credibility, how do you plan on proving the credibility to “the masses”. Simply enough, this argument/claim does not have enough of a realistic view or solution, to make it credible.
Out of the two articles, I chose to read “Which Media Do You Trust?”. This article seemed to me to be very poorly written. I felt as if the author kept almost repeating himself in different ways all about the same topic. He focused heavily on the fact that the trust in blogs was small, which after the first paragraph I clearly understood, yet he felt the need to continue further into a second paragraph. The article seemed to me to be a bunch numbers followed by a poorly thought out argument. Printed out, the article was only two short pages long, yet when I was finished I felt as if I had been reading for days. I’m not sure if that’s the author’s fault or if the topic he talked about bored me. Personally, I believe it to have been both. The author seems dumbfounded by the fact that people tended to choose TV as their most trustworthy source of information. In my opinion, I don’t see where else anyone would choose to get their information. After hearing over and over again from high school teachers that you have to be careful about finding credible information on the internet, I can understand why that option is out. As for the newspaper, they report the same thing that the TV news broadcasts report anyways!
Part 2.
Mark Glaser, the author of “Which Media Do You Trust?”, chose to claim that the trust of “the masses” of certain media sources was based already on media. Mr. Glaser stated that only twenty-five percent of “the masses” believed that blogs were credible. He then went on to state how he felt that the trust in blogs is based upon the preexisting media stereotype that “blogs have none of the great fact-checking of mainstream media, so they have no credibility”. Angered as Mr. Glaser was, he stated that this general statement should not stand true for every blog. He explained that the trustworthiness of a blog depends on who’s writing and his/her credibility with the audience. For this argument, I have a counterargument in the form of a situation. If a person is looking for something that contains the news, why would he or she search the internet and run the risk of running into a phony site? Many people have never encountered a legitimate blog once in their time of surfing the internet, so why in the world would they decide to look for a blog with the news? Taking a step back from these arguments, I pose a simple question to the author: if you believe that blogs deserve more credibility, how do you plan on proving the credibility to “the masses”. Simply enough, this argument/claim does not have enough of a realistic view or solution, to make it credible.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
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