DB Roundup

This week’s topics were very of the moment, and you all brought some great responses. Several people mentioned they’d never heard the term ‘disinformation’ before, and I hope now you know about it, you find it a useful way to examine trends  in how information moves through the world. I find it is more useful than the overly broad and overused ‘fake news’.

One theme that came back was the connection of this week’s readings to the idea of confirmation bias and filter bubbles. Kalden made the connection by commenting that “personalized searches can lead to an influence on how we see something because people display confirmation bias which can cause misinformation to be spread and taken advantage of to people who use it for personal gain.” Elijah related confirmation bias to our very human need for good news, saying that “what people in troubled times want is something to just tell them they will be good, they will ignore everything else”. 

Weekly Readings & Assignment

This week there are 2 activities due: RQ 2 and DB 6. Both are due by Sunday Oct 11, midnight.

The RQ will have the same format as the previous one: 10 questions, 3 attempts, need a 7/10, highest score counts, regardless of which attempt it is.

This DB is the first step towards the final assignment in this class, the literature review. This week you will choose your topic and formulate your inquiry question. The literature review is an opportunity for you to explore a topic of interest to you.

You are not required to respond to classmates this week (you can if you want, but it is optional).

If you have questions about your topic, please email me. If you have questions about the literature review in general, please post them in General Course Questions. Posting them here allows everyone to benefit from the answers.

Course Admin

I’ll be posting the DB prompts a week or two in advance here for those who would like more time to consider them.

While the DB posts are fairly informal writing, I will encourage everyone to review and revise before you post, with an eye toward clarity. In particular, punctuation goes a long way to ensuring your writing is clear and easily understandable by your readers. If you would like help with your writing, for this or any class, the CCNY Writing Center is a great resource, and is doing virtual appointments.

This week we will have a faculty observer in our class. This means another professor in my department, Prof. Riley-Reid, will be added as a member of our group for 48 hours. During this time, Prof. Riley-Reid will be able to see DB posts. If you have questions or concerns about this, please let me know.

DB Roundup

Everyone’s responses this week were really great, in particular there were so many good analyses of the biases displayed through Google image search results, and what kind of impact that has on people conducting the searches.

Isha’s search for ‘cute children’ prompted her response of “Mostly all are white children with an exception of maybe three pictures, but even those children are very light skin or have features similar to white children.” The result of this results disparity “creates an unrealistic standard that only people who are similar or are white are better looking than all.”

Victoria found that the search results for ‘beautiful women’ to be dissapointing because “they did not show not even one female with no makeup on. In today’s society people think we have a standard of beauty, which persuades women to change their own looks to fit this standard. These results just add to the reasonings of so many women having insecurities because the beauty standard still exists.”

Nicholas noted about the search results for ‘lead singer’ didn’t show the types of results expected, saying “many of the photos looked like lead singers in rock groups. I expected other people to come up as lead singers. Take The Supremes for example. Diana Ross was usually the leader of near every song, so I expected them to be there.”

Zoom Meeting

Just a reminder if you want to drop by all or some of the (optional) Zoom meeting tomorrow between 11am-12:30pm, we’ll be talking about Google and algorithmic bias. If you need the link to the meeting, please email me.

Weekly Readings & Assignment

This week’s readings feel very relevant to our current moment: misinformation, disinformation, and viral ‘fake’ news. The readings are available on the course schedule, as is the week’s DB prompt, which is due on Thursday this week.

DB Roundup

Thanks to everyone for their substantive engagement with this week’s readings. 

Xavier’s insightful comment linked our previous readings about race & media with the digital divide. “The discrepancy present in internet access between people with low income and high income reminded me of “News For All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media”. This is due to the fact that twisted misinformation was helped fuel segregation against minorities especially since minorities only represented a small percentage of media outlets at the time. This was due to the fact that it was more advantageous to play to the majority’s stance. Similarly to working in favor of the majority, broadband services essentially accomplish the same effect by pushing more of its services to communities with individuals who have high income for the sole sake of the company rather than the community as a whole.”

Many people responded to the map of NYC that showed neighborhood discrepancies in terms of internet and computer access. Omar summed up the response that many of you had by saying “I’ve always thought that every community in the city receives the same opportunities of broadband internet and that it didn’t matter where a person lived. I’ve realized that the digital divide will create a wider gap of literacy among the wealthy and the rich and that various countermeasures are needed in order to bridge these gaps.”

And of course, the COVID pandemic has really highlighted the need for access to high quality internet for everyone.

On the topic of net neutrality, several people commented that they saw this as similar to the concept of the filter bubble, and I want to clarify that these are very distinct concepts. Net neutrality is a system level concept about how internet broadly, should be delivered to everyone. Filter bubbles are about how your own search and viewing history inform what content platoform algorithms show you.

Tim Wu calls net neutrality “a network design principle. The idea is that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally. This allows the network to carry every form of information and support every kind of application.” He uses the analogy of the electric grid. Your apartment gets the same electricity as your next door neighbor’s apartment, regardless of what you as individuals plug in.

Movies!

CCNY Libraries has recently added a trial of a database of streaming video called Kanopy. I encourage you to take advantage of it before our trial ends on October 8th. Specifically, I recommend this documentary, Digital Disconnect – Fake News, Privacy and Democracy, which touches on many of the topics and themes of this class: ISP monopolies, journalism in the age of the internet, privacy, fake news, and more. It is only 64 minutes and well worth your time.

Course Admin

Grades

I sent everyone an email with a link to a document where I track your DB, RQ & assignment completion. I’ll do my best to update it weekly, so you can check in on it whenever you need. If you didn’t get the email, let me know and I’ll re-send it to you.

Weekly Zoom Meetings

The weekly Zoom meetings are optional, but are a good opportunity to ask clarifying questions and engage in discussion about the readings. They are generally held Mondays 11am, but next week will be Tuesday 11am, due to the Monday holiday. 

Weekly Readings & Assignment

This week’s readings build on our previous topics in two areas: evaluating information and how algorithms shape our experience of searching for information online. The readings are available on the course schedule, as is the week’s DB prompt.

Thanks to everyone who attended today’s Zoom discussion! We touch on topics like the reliability of Wikipedia, celebrity and sports news sites, people’s experiences of trying out library database searching, and how the pandemic has changed the perception of internet access from nice-to-have to have-to-have utility. 

Although the discussions are optional–the work of the class is still in the weekly DBs–if your schedule allows it, I encourage folks to attend at least one Zoom discussion this semester. 

Weekly Readings & Assignment

This week’s readings focus on the concepts of the digital divide and net neutrality. I find the ‘reading’ that is an interactive map of NYC to be particularly interesting, and I encourage you to play around with the different layers of information available. 

The DB prompt is available here, and on the course schedule. I’ve included a sample reading response from a previous class that demonstrates how to integrate readings together on a common theme. You can also find the sample reading response in the group library.

Hi All,

DB Roundup

Thanks for your detailed and thoughtful responses to your media use. One thing I noticed was that no one said anything about reading any print media (magazines, newspapers) or radio, and only Panagiotis specifically mentioned podcasts.

There were a lot of commonalities among everyone’s responses. Many people use YouTube to learn new things, and how effective people thought YouTube’s algorithm is on constantly providing more suggested videos to watch. Social media use as relaxation and a response to boredom, or just out of habit were also common

A handful of people occasionally watched TV news, but most of you get your news through social media, including Maya who specified the personalization as important “I like to choose what news outlets and even individual activists and journalists I follow daily.” This personalization is in part what makes social media platforms so enjoyable to use, and also reinforces the filter bubble effect.

Yuxiang noted that because of the Coronavirus, having internet access is incredibly important in order for people to work and go to school, saying, “Personally, I can’t imagine how an internet outage, even for just one day, could jeopardize my education progress.” This is a great point, and one we’ll cover next week when our topics are the digital divide and net neutrality.

Weekly Readings & Assignment

This week we have one reading on the concept of objectivity in journalism, and two short readings as an introduction to library databases, as well as some initial exploration into doing research using the CCNY Libraries OneSearch tool. As always, the readings are linked in the course schedule.

The assignment this week is a reading quiz, which is also linked in the schedule, and as a DB. 

Finally, we’ll start our weekly face to face meetings via Zoom on Monday Sept 14. I’ll send log in info separately, so keep an eye out for that.

Sarah

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for your introductions, it was great seeing everyone! If you haven’t already replied to two classmates, please do so this week. You can respond in Flipgrid with a video, or in the discussion board forum in writing. If you haven’t posted your own introduction video, please do so ASAP.

The readings for this week are linked in the schedule, and the week’s discussion board is up and linked in the schedule as well as here. This DB will require a bit of advance planning, so take a look at it today. Here is a short description. A full description is on the DB topic

• Track your media use over the course of one (12 or 24 hour) day. Write a reflection on the data you’ve gathered on yourself. Consider patterns, deviations, habits. 300-500 words.

If you didn’t already see the discussion board guidelines and rubric, you can find it under Assignments. Remember, each week you’re responsible for your own post, and two substantive responses to classmates.

On the administrative side, going forward, most class communications will be through the Commons–either annoucement posts like this one, or emails through our group. You can change the email address in your Commons account (instructions here) to the email you’re most likely to check regularly, even if that isn’t a CCNY or CUNY email.

A number of you indicated interest in weekly in-person video meetings. Those will start Monday Sept 14. I’ll send a Zoom link for those next week, along with what to prepare for the meeting.