Layla Brownfield

   Twitter. Whether we've known, just learned, or maybe still aren't sure, how to use it; we all know exactly what it is. Social media has expanded with Twitter; it's become more fun! It's a quick, easy, and witty way to interact with friends and strangers who we call our followers.    Oh, followers. They seem easy to get, right? Wrong! My first thought when I read up on this module and assignment were, "Oh! Hashtags and tweets? To gain followers? How hard can this be?!" Not super complicated, but not easy, either.     The first step I took was following people I know. I followed friends and classmates to make my Twitter timeline a little more lively and familiar. Then, I followed a few of my favorite celebrities and sports teams so I could stay updated on what was happening and when (which, was very useful, and a lot quicker than Googling news on them and scores!).     After going through some of the links in this module, I knew hashtags wer

   In his TedTalk, Jon Ronson brings up one of the most important, and true, points that relate to social media. The very first minute in, Ronson says, "voiceless people realized that they had a voice". That caught my attention immediately because that is one of the main things I constantly see on Twitter. Twitter, and so many other social media sites, revolve around one major thing; people giving their opinions. Their "voice" is their opinionated and biased tweets-- which are usually a response to something in the news, or something someone else tweeted. Ronson uses the example of, "i f a newspaper ran some racist or homophobic column,   we realized we could do something about it.   We could get them". It's one hundred percent true. For example, log onto Twitter and search up Donald Trump's profile. Click on any of his tweets (seriously, any), and the replies are all over the place. Because most people dislike Trump for the nasty person he i

    Facebook news, in my eyes, isn't real news 99% of the time. When I click onto Facebook, my newsfeed ends up filled with not only crazy, non-sense status updates, but also news articles and links. But, t he news is never “real” news. Most of the time, it tends to be news about which celebrity is sleeping with who, or which designer made the best impression during fashion week. Rarely is it ever something that is actually important and needs to be known all throughout the world. But, I think that is sort of a good thing the more I have thought on it. I would rather be seeing information about fashion week or sports teams than reading something about some sort of terrorist attack (though, tragically, that has happened to become information in the news quite often). Facebook isn’t the only place, though. News is everywhere, except, the one place everyone used to know it from; newspapers. It’s so rare to see someone reading a newspaper. I’d gone into Target recently for grocer

TheFacebook in 2004. Zuckerberg’s role in relation to his Harvard peers, especially cultural differences between the he and Eduardo Saverin, Sean Parker, and the Winkelvosses. (Layla Brownfield) In the movie, The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg has an odd relationship to his peers from Harvard. For one, it seems as if he’s on a different type of creativeness than the rest of them. He creates Facemash, which although it was an extremely immature thing to do, was also very creative. This was 2003, and with the way the movie portrays the Harvard students’ reactions to the ‘Hot or Not’ website being created, it seems as if none of them had ever come across something similar or along the same lines of it. Plus, Zuckerberg created it out of anger-- it only took him four hours! Obviously, he wasn’t in the clearest mindset, yet he was still able to create Facemash and succeed with it (before getting caught by the school, of course!). It may not have been that he was smarter than

       In his TedTalk, one of the very first points Michael Patrick Lynch makes is something I completely agree with. Around a minute in, Lynch says, "... it seems as if the more information we share and access online,   the more difficult it can be for us to tell the difference   between what's real and what's fake.   It's as if we know more but understand less". Now that I have heard him say those words, I realize just how true they are. In a way, it relates to the last TedTalk we listened to, which was by Andreas Ekstrom. Ekstrom talked about how search results are usually biased based on the writer of the article we look at. Lynch saying it's difficult for us to see what may be real versus what may be fake can tie in because biased authors can be twisting truth to make a person look better, or even worse.     Around two minutes in, Lynch asks the audience, "So how are we going to solve this problem of knowledge polarization?". I thi

   In Andreas' Ekstrom's tedtalk, he manages to catch mine, and probably many other listener's, attention with the question he asks; "Why do you Google?". The responses he got from students he had asked in the past were very similar to reasons I Google, along with the fact that Google seems to always provide the exact answer for my homework that I happen to be looking for! Plus, Google is fast, quick, and as simple as search engines seem to get. Other search engine, like Bing, Yahoo, and even Ask, never fail to become confusing. They usually do not provide me with the best results at first, plus, having ads all over the web page is not my favorite thing to see. One big answer that Ekstrom said he always gets goes along the lines of, "With Google, I'm certain to always get the best, unbiased search result".    Around 1:58 in his tedtalk, Ekstrom brings up the point that controversial questions bring up web pages and articles that are not biased, but