week 8

One of the most interesting topics from today's presentations was the viral spreading of misleading headlines that usually don't reflect their content. I actually remember when the Bernie article was spreading, because it was all over my news feed. I would attribute half of that sharing to the college liberals in my age cohort who didn't read it, a fourth to those who just don't like Trump who didn't read it, and maybe a fourth who actually read the article. It's amazing that people have endless time to scroll through their whole feed of Sally's dinner content, Fred's weekend travel plans, Sue's kids' potty training accomplishments for the day, but no time to read an article with thousands of shares. I hardly share things in general, but when I do I always read it first. One time my best friend tagged me in a headline of a Friends reunion quoting David Schwimmer, however the article didn't even spell the actors name right. I never told her it was a false article.
With all of the reenforcement of researching through multiple articles or publications, it's funny how this doesn't apply to Facebook. People share everything and anything on Facebook, when you would think since everything is so public that they would use more caution. Some days my whole feed is just shared posts and I have to get off of Facebook, because I'm there to see people's lives and opinions...not blindly shared articles or poor grammar text photos. With the technology age we're in, schools should consider educating students in social media usage & etiquette. I know that is not an important factor to focus on as an educator, but it is what's relevant. Our children are not prepared for the real world after graduation because we focus on adverbs and fractions, instead of "common sense" internet usage and paying taxes.
I realize this has diverged from my initial topic, but we need more awareness in our technology/ social media use, so that we're not constantly blindly spreading false/ misleading articles.