Another week of Verified showing me new ways of how people and businesses can take advantage of the Internet.

Forgive me for the long title, but it was the best way to encapsulate this post and this week in general.

Anyway, more Verified!! This week we were asked to read chapters 6-9. And while there were some good strategies laid out in these chapters, I felt that there was a lot of info-dumping as well, especially about sites like Wikipedia as discussed in chapter 7. These chapters also included discussions of scholarly articles, videos on the Internet, and stealth advertising (as well as how advertising has changed in general because of social media). 

Out of all the readings this week I think that chapter 6 was the one that I already knew the most about. Being able to parse which articles may be more reliable than others, taking note of the number of citations (and what the article has been cited in), and doing research on the author are all things I had been doing previously. However, there were two insights in this chapter that I hadn’t given much thought before. One of those is the peer review process. While I knew that peer-review was a thing that happened, I wasn’t aware of the process and, for example, that the process was double-blind (meaning that neither the reviewers nor the author know each other and everything is anonymous). Another aspect that I was unfamiliar with was literature reviews. Maybe this is embarrassing, but before reading this I had no idea that literature reviews even existed and had no clue how useful they were. 

As I said above, chapter 7 is all about Wikipedia; it’s advantages, it’s pitfalls, and why it’s more reliable now as a starting point than it once was. It was interesting to learn that Wikipedia has automatic bots checking for unfamiliar IP addresses that have made changes to the site and human editors that also look for erroneous information on their various pages.

Chapter 8 is honestly one of the more unnerving chapters in terms of how information can be manipulated on the Internet. It talks about how the context of a situation can be altered or altogether destroyed by manipulating a video. The authors use the Fulton County ballot incident to frame this concept. Basically, although protocol was followed by the workers in Georgia, a video that was posted to the Internet told a very different story. People all over the country, lacking the proper context of the situation, were convinced that the workers were committed some kind of crime right there on video. However, as is revealed later, it became clear that the video was showing a percent of a fraction of the story. While this was the most informative chapter for me, it was also the most unsettling as far as future consequences go.

The last chapter we read this week, chapter 9, talked about stealth advertising and advertising in general on the Internet. Most of this wasn’t anything new to me, but I did find it interesting that advertisements are more effective if they’re made to blend in and look like regular content.