This week’s hilarious class discussion, and the deliriousness of most of our table heavily impacted the level of discussion we could have on Elliot’s prompt: list something interesting from the readings and something even more interesting from the symposium and write them on the board.
First, I ran into an debate with Elliot on whether he actually meant for us to physically write on the board or ‘virtually’ and when. Not a good start. Safe to say I was pretty darn exhausted after a long week of work. But, still in that fantastic state of mind where you find every mistake you make utterly hilarious… and, you don’t even mind when Luke and Luke tease you about not knowing how to work your own blog.
See that guys ^ that’s some NICE linking. So I believe #helpsophie is now redundant. YAY.
Anyway… massive segway there just to prove a linking point! So, I asked my table based on the symposium lecture… How do they validate things?
The first response quite literally staggered me, from our very own Bella: “From Twitter.. duh!”
The second was: “Wikipedia or google or something…”
This lecture also happened to be on the afternoon after Robin Williams was claimed to have died. Having heard something in the rumour mill along these lines, I had clicked onto Google and seen that yes, his Wikipedia page repeated this. But, that only one news source had reported on it. It only took half an hour more to work out that Robin Williams had in fact passed away. In the shock of it all, I wondered: How do I know that this is correct? It’s all over Facebook, but how do I check the validity of these claims?
I realised I look straight to the internet search engine, because I know it’s updated constantly throughout the day and the night and that even though there will be a lot of noise out there, that pretty quickly someone will silence the questions. Someone like… The Guardian… The Age.
And, even though Bella’s statement about Twitter surprised me, when you think about it, Twitter, although being a platform with so many intertwining voices, can bring news to your attention quicker than almost any other form of media today. I’m not so certain on confirming news via this platform, but I’d sure start to question an event or point in history if I saw it mentioned or trending.