# Web Search and Evaluation

## Reading Response

Did you see those fake hurricane Sandy pictures? If you were on social media in November 2012, you saw those pictures and most likely believed them. “Democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish.” (Wineburg, 2016) is a statement right out of the School of Education report done by the Stanford graduate school. This study shows that even though students have a bounty of information constantly within our reach, their lack of preparedness to decipher and filter that information is lacking to an alarming degree. After reading the article, “Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world” by Joyce Valenza, and the ways in which our information sources are influenced by writers and their agendas and their own opinions, I couldn’t agree more.

We even have different types of fake news that range from partially true with exaggerations through satirical sites and purely fabricated and sensational news that renders users impossibly curious. This post-truth (a word defined by the Oxford dictionary as “…objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”) climate and the prevalence of social media has made accurate and true information access almost impossible to decipher. These elements, in conjunction, have made credibility decisions much more complicated and burdensome. Thereby, driving 62% of U.S. adults to get news from social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit (Blazina & Shearer, 2016)

Joyce, through her article, is able to boil down why we as users need to continue improving our New Literacy as we keep encountering these “new consumption and production landscapes” (Valenza, 2016). From my experience, I know how misleading the internet can be and, over time, I have learned to be skeptical of anything I see. My question is, what are some beliefs and opinions we hold based off of news that we never triangulated credibility for? And how dangerous are these echo chambers of information that every user propagates?

References
Blazina, C., & Shearer, E. (2016). News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016. NUMBERS, FACTS AND TRENDS SHAPING THE WORLD, 2-3.

Valenza, J. (2016, November 26). Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” worl. Retrieved from SLG Blog Network: https://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2016/11/26/truth-truthiness-triangulation-and-the-librarian-way-a-news-literacy-toolkit-for-a-post-truth-world/

Wineburg, S. a. (2016). Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning. Stanford Digital Repository, 5-6.

## Google Exercise

1) What would you query to see how many pages on the English Wikipedia site contain the exact phrase “Northeastern University”? How many results did you get?

A) I typed -- "Northeastern University" site:en.wikipedia.org
and got 5,050 results


2) What would you query to see web pages about the skate fish without mention of the phrase “ice rink”? (Hint: It can still mention “ice” or “rink” but not “ice rink.”)

A) I typed -- skate fish -"ice rink"


3) What would you query to see web pages about the Northeastern Huskies from the first day of 2001 through the last day of 2002?

A) I typed -- "Northeastern Huskies". and used the tools menu to specify the dates Jan1,2001 - Dec 31,2002


4) Find me the top image of the exact phrase “penguin pair” with a “Creative Commons” usage right.

A) I used the Advanced Image Search tool at https://www.google.com/advanced_image_search as seen below.


The image result of this search exercise were these two cute penguins.


..

## Questionable Credibility Website Exercise

For this activity, I want to take a look at the infamous subreddit known as r/wallstreetbets. This subreddit came to fore and was vastly popularized during the chaos surrounding the skyrocketing of the stock price of the publicly traded company GameStop. While this forum may have started off as just a place for day traders and investors to gain information about the stock market and subsequently plan their future trades, it quickly devolved into a muddled pool of supporting "meme stocks" that were much more volatile and thus increasing in value very quickly which enticed people to start following this "wave to the moon." This sensationalism around the site also meant the influx of many fake posts that boasted fake earnings in these meme stocks as well as links to predatory links posing to lead to day trading training resources.

The majority of this site exists as a space where people post screenshots of their earnings with the only thing attached to them is the username of the reddit user/ author, strong opinions on stock price future trends with cropped images of graphs with no links and memes surrounding the performance of a particular stock or the market trends. The major lack of possibility of triangulation of the information presented on this website along with the prevalence of "container collapse" makes the information available on this website to be very questionable and unverifiable. This lack of information allows authors on this site to cherry-pick data points and present an image that may by completely fake, altered or exaggerated. There are instances where certain posts are tagged as "News" which gives them more credibility that rely on the anxious mind of the average day trader to make quick from-the-gut decisions.

## Wikipedia Evaluation Exercise

1)a. This version of the Wiki page states that "Reagle was a longtime member of the World Wide Web Consortium" or (W3C) which is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. I would add the years during which Joseph Reagle worked at the W3C or at least the fact that it was based out of MIT or that he was listed as one of MIT Technology Review's TR35. If this suggested information is not added Wikipedia's policy dictates that all contentious material about living people that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed. The policy on Wikipedia: Verifiability states that information needs to be verifiable (from a reliable source) and maintain a neutral point of view if two reliable sources disagree.

1)b. The site does not have a reference for the book or any indication of where it is published and is hence, poorly cited and not proven with stats that it is bestselling. The reference should be as follows, Good faith collaboration: The culture of Wikipedia. History and foundations of information science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262518208. JSTOR j.ctt5hhhnf. OCLC 496282188.[17]

2). The oldest version of the page was created on 21:57, 1 August 2011