Topical Blog Post #14

Going off of my experiment last week, this week I posted something that was much less controversial. My post literally said this "I don't understand how some people choose not to eat meat. If I could have an all meat diet, I would" This post was not confrontational to anyone. But here are three responses that I got.
"What you don't think vegans are people too? People like you are what's wrong with the world"

"well you are what you eat--a pig" (lol at that one)

"good thing you like to murder thousands of innocent animals" (she then posted a link to an article that was about factory farming).

I was shocked that a post this simple and about MY PERSONAL PREFERENCES got that much attention and people were actually offended by it. While this post wasn't necessarily political, it demonstrates that people attack almost anything you say on social media. It is dividing us more and more and the "discussions" that take place are close to meaningless.

Topical Blog Post #13

Today I shared two different articles on my Facebook feed as an experiment. I posted one article that was for abortion and one article that was against it and I waited to see what people's reactions to my posts would be. The results were very similar with each article. On the one that was for abortion, some people commented how they agreed with the article. However, there were about six or seven comments made that attacked the view. Rather than attacking the article, they attacked me. I was called a "baby-killer", "murderer" and one person said they were going to unfriend me. On the article against abortion, the same thing happened. Only now people told me how disgusted they were that I thought I had the power to tell woman what to do with their bodies. One woman said "wow you're against abortion? I imagine you're against woman's rights and the LGBT community too right? Honestly people like you disgust me, idk how you can even live with yourself honestly" Pretty dramatic stuff. I thought i drove my point that it is impossible to have a real discussion on social media. It really is a battle ground.

Topical Blog Post #12

Here is a link to a article that states how social media is dividing/polarizing America's political sphere:
http://pac.org/does-social-media-drive-polarization/

This article is a good summary of my argument that social media is polarizing politics and why that might be the case.

Girl vs. Women-language matters

I think it is very true that language can be very demeaning to a person’s status. This is demonstrated very well in the video through the use “girl” vs “women” type language. I see a direct parallel with language about men as well. I think of terms that people throw around to describe men. Terms such as: “kid”, “boy”, and “bud”. From my own experience, I absolutely hate it when someone older than me calls me bud. It implies that I am of a lesser status than them and it implies that I am less experienced and/or knowledgeable then they are. Terms like this are demeaning both intentionally and maybe even unintentionally. This is why we have to be careful with our choice of language. Each word in every language carries both denotation and connotation either of which can be offensive and/or demeaning to certain individuals or groups of people.   

Topical Blog Post #11

The Ted Talk we all just watched "The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a direct parallel to my topic. Earlier in my blog posts, I addressed a concept known as confirmation bias. Once again this means that people only look at the side of things they tend to agree with and they block out everything else. Her idea of a single story relates to this because people only ever look at one side of politics when it comes to social media. They never gain the full story/information that is presented. Also, by not researching the other side of the argument, biases and stereotypes are created. Just look at Republicans and Democrats, they generalize and dehumanize each other all the time. But in reality they probably don't truly know what the other side is fighting for and why.

The Danger of a Single Story

From this Ted Talk, the biggest thing I took away was that a single story entails the creation of stereotypes. The reason we tend to believe certain things about particular individuals or groups of people is because we have only ever been presented a single story of those people. In other words, we have only been presented one perspective on how that group or individual is portrayed. In order for us to be able to eliminate these stereotypes we must see past the single story and learn to see things in three dimensions rather than as a single flat surface. Once we look past these single surface we are able to see people for who they are and not what society has portrayed them to be.

Topical Blog Post #10

I held my focus group the other day, I interviewed six people who have all had extensive experience in politics, law and social media. Constitutional Lawyer Von Keetch brought up an interesting point. He said “…social media does not have the power to present a valid argument based on the fact that it can never provide someone with the full story”. I have taken the point to call this idea the "snapshot effect". Meaning that social media can only provide a snapshot of a news story or political information. It fails to provide the whole story which can lead to misinformation or even falsified information. Social media is causing a whole lot of uniformed people.