Can Social Media Resolve Social Diviisons?


 Inequality: Can Social Media Resolve Divisions?

               This essay was very interesting to read.  I was not aware that segregation still happened a lot today.  The story about Keke was sad to read because she lost her father due to gang violence.  I do not think this essay is inquiry because it is separated into sections and each section provides a lot of information but I did not read any questions.  This essay is both informative and opinioned in my opinion.

               I think this essay fits Huxley’s three directions on how to write a successful essay.  This essay was personal, objective, and universal in many ways.  I’ll start by analyzing Keke’s story.  It was personal in the fact that she lost her father and held a lot on anger due to what happened.  It is also personal because there was an interview a Hispanic fifteen year old who explained, “If it comes down to it, we have to supposedly stick to our own races… That’s just the unwritten code of high school nowadays.”  The topic of racism and segregation can be both objective and universal.  One can ask how does racism still exist today?  What are the causes of segregation?

               The essay goes on to talk about the biases in technology.  It is stated, “Society has often heralded technology as a tool to end social divisions.”  This statement is objective.  According to the essay, “New communication media often inspire the hope that they can and will be used to bridge cultural divides.  This hope gets projected onto new technologies in ways that suggest that the technology itself does the work of addressing cultural divisions.”  The topic is clearly focused on cultural division.  What is cultural division?  What causes cultural division? 

The author gets personal in the next sentence by using first person.  He states, “As I describe throughout this book, the mere existence of new technology neither creates nor magically solves new problems.  In fact, their construction typically reinforces existing social divisions.”  Objective and universal questions can be asked like, what is considered new technology?  How does it create or solve problems?  What is defined as social division?  At the end of this section, it is concluded that the internet does not have the power to reverse societal ills, but it does have the potential to make them more visible.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Consider Your Sources

Source 1 Section 1: Park, Alice. “Childhood Obesity Rates Are Still Rising .” Time , 26 Apr. 2016. Section 2:             This article was written by Alice Park with the purpose of stating the fact that childhood obesity rates are still rising.   The author supports her claim by factual evidence.   She uses Asheley Skinner who is an associate professor medicine at Duke University.   Asheley and her colleagues found that obesity is continuing to climb based on national surveys that they analyzed over the past 15 years.   Alice Park states in her article, “In the latest survey, conducted from 2013 to 2014, 33% of children were overweight, and 26% were considered obese.”   Another fact that was used as evidence was “The prevalence of overweight and obesity increased steadily year by year from 1994 to 2014.   For overweight, it went up from 28.8% in 1999 to 33.4% and for the least severe type of obesity, from 14.6% to 17.4%.”   Alice Park uses facts from the national survey
Read more

Loneliness of the Interconnected

This excerpt was interesting.   I have never read about a cult before and the beliefs held by Dorothy Martin were strange.   The whole concept of cognitive dissonance is cool.   Cognitive dissonance is defined as a situation in which a person is forced to believe two mutually incompatible ideas at the same time.     A psychologist named Leon Festinger sought to understand what happens at the crisis moment, which is when an immovable object of a core belief comes into conflict with the irresistible force of an undeniable contrary fact.   This is the reason why he chose to study an apocalyptic cult.   Festinger’s theory was based upon the assumption that cognitive dissonance is very uncomfortable for humans.   When confronted with pain, humans attempt to resolve it with whatever mechanisms are at hand.   The implications of this issue can be shifted to today too because it happens in modern day as well and not just in 1955 when this case study happened. Today, humans seek shelt
Read more

Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex

               This article was very interesting in the fact that a young man that goes by the name Boris made a good amount of money on posting information that isn’t even true on websites.   This is not morally right, but it made him some big bucks and caused him to drop out of school, which is a big decision.   There is one paragraph in the article that describes what Boris looks like and reveals more about him and you ask yourself, “So What?”                The answer to “So What?” is that Boris decided to start some websites of his own.   Boris figured out how to make money by posting big ads in his posts, so that one in five visitors to a page would end up clicking on an ad.   “His RPM- revenue per 1,000 impressions- hovered around $15, he says.   He fed the beast with diligence.”   You may not think that fifteen dollars is a lot but Boris worked hard to prepare posts for the following day and it ended up paying off for him because he was making decent enough money to buy
Read more