Matthew Nickerson
LIBR1101
Blog Homework 3/5
In using these new sites I found
two that were appealing in helping me along with my topic. The site “Reddit.com”
allowed me to find some very useful articles right off the bat with a comprehensive
library of user promoted articles. It was helpful because most of the results
were due to votes by people on the site to promote better quality articles as
well as well written pieces. Reddit allowed me to find news articles in regards
to the title “Health” and listed some very clear and concise articles from
nutrition all the way down to a story about a cured child of HIV, although the
last one did not relate to my topic, it is still relevant in the sake of
healthcare. Not only can you search through categories, but can also search
through subreddit catageories that can take you from a major category such as “health”
and direct you to subreddits such as “ADHD” and “Vegetarian” allowing users to
go from category to subcategories of those categories.
Twitter is a great social media
tool due to the brief nature of “tweeting”. Tweeting allows a user to put a few
characters in a line and have that information accessible to millions of people
across the globe. In regards to my topic, doctors and health professionals such
as “Julian Michaels” or authors of vegetarian books may be useful in promoting
better information. Twitter makes things public and accessible which is good
for celebrities to get things out as well as products from businesses. If I was
interested in including something from “Kashi” or “Whole Foods” in my paper, I could
find information from their twitter page that may help me out in my resources.
I personally only use Facebook due
to communication. I use very little social media as I see it mainly as a
distraction and only wastes peoples time if there not using it in the right
way. I tried using twitter personally but did not enjoy. I could see the
benefits of a celebrity or business using twitter, but personal tweets by
random people and seeing a timeline full of hundreds to possibly thousands of
tweets every day is not in my interest. Twitter is a great social media tool,
but It can be extremely distracting and can also lead people to be misinformed
through the fact that you are not able to put over a certain amount of
characters in the tweet box.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteMatthew,
ReplyDeleteThat's great you were able to browse through Reddit's organization system effectively and find some interesting content. The user voting functionality definitely does help filter us away from low-quality content, but we'll talk in class about some other pros and cons of this system compared to a more traditionally edited information source.
And I definitely agree that these social platforms, such as Twitter, can be a bit of a double-edged sword. As you mention, the public sharing and unmatched dissemination potential are positive, but these networks can also be highly distracting as well as misleading due to the fact that they must be so brief (140 characters). We'll be addressing these issues as well in the next couple of class sessions.