This week in class we continued our discussion of Verifed, and we also talked about the progress we’re making on our projects. We touched base briefly with our groups for our final project as well. In Verifed, this week’s chapters talked about Wikipedia, the peer review process for academic journals, video tricks, and native advertisements.
Wikipedia has a bad reputation, handed down to us from our middle and high school teachers. But, in reality, it’s a great jumping-off point for further research and finding sources. Also, its standards are much higher than most folks give it credit for. It’s notoriously difficult to pull off a Wikipedia hoax due to the diligence of its fact-checkers and moderators.
Something we discussed that was totally new to me was the actual process of getting an academic piece peer-reviewed. I knew that label meant other experts in the field had read the paper and agreed with it, but I didn’t know how that process worked. Basically, an author sends their work to an editor of a journal, and that editor can either reject it or send it to the peers in question. The reviewers can accept it, reject it, or offer feedback about what should be changed before resubmission.
This process usually works as intended, but sometimes things slip through the cracks, or a journal could be entirely fraudulent, offering pay-to-publish services. That’s why it’s still so important to follow SIFT, even if a piece is peer reviewed.
Videos, too, are a place where we must be careful. It’s easy to pull a clip out of its larger context, or reframe it in such a way that the original meaning is distorted. It’s also easier than ever to completely fake videos using tools like generative AI. The authors of Verified urged us to “measure twice, cut once,” but in regards to sharing news we find online. Check it twice–make sure we really know what we’re looking at–before sharing it to anyone else.
The last topic we covered was native ads. I had never heard of these before, but I have definitely come across them. These are ads strategically engineered to look just like a regular piece of media shared to a website, newspaper, or social media site. They blend in perfectly, and it’s easy to be fooled, thinking you’re watching another silly video or reading another unbiased piece of news. The regulations around advertising get fuzzy here, and many are able to slip into futher obscurity using non-specific language like “content partner,” “with,” and “content solutions” instead of simply “Advertisement.”
Within these discussions, we also had a productive and heartening talk about some rhetorical devices we can pay attention to in order to get through to the people we care about. It was a great reminder that approaching a conversation ready to argue or prove why the other party is wrong is almost never the most productive way to get someone to see your perspective.
Even when emotions run high and it’s easy to get worked up, practice self-control, patience, kindness, gentleness, and the other Fruits of the Spirit in order to make sure you’re being fair to your conversation partner. Really listen to them. Don’t embarrass them. Build a real relationship, and that’s when you’ll start to see that people are more open to listening to opposing views than we often give them credit for.
Comments
2 responses to “Peer Review, Ads, and Rhetoric”
You provided a really great overview of everything that was discussed in the chapters we read. I forgot that academic peer review was one of the biggest topics in the chapters, so I am glad you refreshed my memory on it. Also, I like that you pulled the line “measure twice, cut once” from the reading. I really like the way the book helps us in thinking about the things we do with internet information in a way that feels so simple. I feel like I rarely really double check information like that. I tend to just send things and be like: I don’t know if it’s true or might want to look into this. That tends to be my mentality with internet information that I want to share. Whereas with information that others share to me, I’m searching it up more than likely before I believe it.
As someone who was told using Wikipedia was a horrid sin, it’s been a game changer for fact checking my research. I’ve used it in the past to brush up on my knowledge, but using it in the way Verified suggests has been helpful for quickly vetting a source. Videos are a hard medium to vet, especially if there is not a whole lot of coverage on the particular clip you are concerned with. I can’t tell you how many short political video clips I’ve seen on Instagram that I just know are taken out of context. It’s become so easy for media to be distorted. I didn’t know a whole lot about native ads, either. It was very disheartening to see to what lengths people will go to hide them/cover up as not sponsored.