Blog Post 3.2 Unrestricted Web Publishing

Choose an online news article published by Time, The New York Times, or The Huffington Post and track its cited sources. Visit each source online and evaluate its credibility based on the guidelines set in Criteria to Evaluate the Credibility of WWW Resources. Draft a blog post that briefly states a potential impact of unrestricted web publishing through mass media as it relates to this article.

Browsing the site of the Huffington Post, I came across an interesting article in the healthy living section. Now let me set the record straight, I am coming off of about two hours of sleep from the night before, and tonight it is past midnight. I can barely function and have been laughing at the dumbest of things for quite some time now. I am way over tired, but hey, what can you do when you have fun filled weekends with the kids. We were gone from 8 a.m Saturday 9/19 until 9 p.m that same night. By the time we got home and settled in, the kids didn’t get to bed till roughly 10 p.m and then my four month old decided to have a night where he woke up every hour until 5 a.m. So fair to say, I didn’t get a lot of sleep. Now back to the story. The article I came across was titled “Is it bad to wear a bra to sleep?” which was featured in the healthy living section of the Huffington post website. Unsure of why I even clicked on the article, I found that it was actually pretty interesting. Now being a man, I would have no clue if there are or aren’t benefits of going to sleep with a bra on, however, I would make an assumption that it would be more beneficial just because of how a bra can hold everything together per say. This is just the opinion of an uneducated male who is naive to the experience.

In order to determine if an article is credible, we should be able to determine if the author has any credibility in the field in which they are writing, as well as, whether or not the article is opinion based, such as sites like theonion.com, or if they are actually based on true facts  (Montecino, 1988). Finding that the author is Amanda Chan, I decide to Google search her and come across with the following: She has written over 20 articles and many pertaining to healthy living topics, she is Senior Editor, Health News, at The Huffington Post. She previously worked as a staff writer for MyHealthNewsDaily (now LiveScience Health). She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communication from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. Right away I am finding that this author is a credible source just based on the fact that she has experience in what she is writing about. I continue to read through the article and am made aware quickly that although it may not be very comfortable to wear a bra to sleep, there are however, no negative health effects that pertain to this situation. The article talks about rumors that state, wearing a bra to bed will cause some sort of breast cancer. That rumor is put to bed quickly as Amber Guth, M.D., an associate professor of surgery and director of the Breast Cancer Surgery Multidisciplinary Fellowship at NYU Langone Medical Center, previously told HuffPost Style, “there is certainly no evidence that sleeping in bras is either helpful or harmful (Chan).” I decided not to google Amber as the author laid out her credentials for me in the article. The article focused a lot on the idea that wearing a bra to sleep could cause cancer and that was debunked by several other sources, including Amber. As stated in the article, “And in general, wearing a bra doesn't seem to have any effect on breast cancer risk. A recent case-control study published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention could find no association between breast cancer risk and bra-wearing among postmenopausal women (Chan).

Again to help prove the point, Amand Chan uses a statement made by Lu Chen, MPH, who is a researcher in the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Chen stated “The risk was similar no matter how many hours per day women wore a bra, whether they wore a bra with an underwire, or at what age they first began wearing a bra, (Chan).” After reading that there are no direct links to cancer from wearing a bra to bed or any other time of the day, I am relieved as I was starting to worry about the impact of women wearing bra’s. I don’t know what I would have done. HINT. Sarcasm involved. The article mentions a few more random details about wearing a bra and about the size of the bra and how a bra that is too tight can dig into your skin, and it credits the Huffington post Women, and Huffington post style for such statements.

I was really pretty intrigued about the whole article and found it to be well written with accurate and credible sources. The author has the knowledge and experience on writing in the Healthy Living section of the post and she is able to bring in quotes from M.D’s and other professionals in the field of women’s health. I am able to establish credibility of the article by using the steps in the criteria to evaluate the credibility of WWW resources helpful hints article (Montecino, 1988) from our reading. The article states how we need to determine if the article we are reading is based on facts, not opinions, whether or not the information we are reading is current and the type of website the information appears on. Amanda Chan covers all this in her article and I, being a male, was even able to learn something about Bra’s and their impact on the the health of women.

Montecino, V (1988, August). Criteria to evaluate the credibility of www resources.Education & Technology Resources,  Retrieved from http://mason.gmu.edu/ website: http://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin/web-eval-sites.htm

Chan, A (2014, September 18). Is it bad to wear a bra to sleep? The Huffington Post, Retrived from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/18/wear-bra-to-sleep_n_5824510.html

How do you know what you know? Name one new thing you learned using a social media site today and explain why you believe it is true. What source did you use to acquire this information? At times, are social media sites reliable for obtaining credible information?

How do you know what you know? You know what you know by experience. When I was a child my parents taught me to ask questions to seek answers and to never be satisfied with an answer I didn't like. When it comes to knowing and believing things, I am really a skeptic on all accounts. I have a very hard time believing something that is told to me or that is written, unless I have experienced it or seen it with my own eyes. My dad has always told me to believe half of what I see and nothing I hear and that has always stayed with me. I generally am one who challenges answers and asks questions to gain a better understanding on something before I can make any type of determination. I truly believe that someone will never really know anything until they allow themselves to open their minds and accept what is perceived as being true. What I mean by that is unless we have first hand knowledge of a situation, we can not fully trust the source and the information being provided, however, if we are able to believe based off our own checks and balances, then we can better understand and prepare ourselves for what we are seeing/reading or hearing.

Social media plays a part in my life every single minute of every single day, whether I want it to or not. Facebook keeps me up to date with what all my friends are doing and what the latest trend or stories are. Take today for example, I woke up at 7:00 a.m, looked at my phone and saw that I had an update from Facebook. I open my Facebook app and the first thing that hits me is a story from the Chicago Tribune about Adrian Peterson, who is one of the best running backs in the National Football League (NFL). Because of everything that has been going on in the NFL and because of my almost crazy obsession with anything sports related, this caught my eye. The Chicago Tribune isn't really a source that I have viewed so I was unsure if the information was accurate or not. The article talked about how Peterson was found guilty and charged with child abuse for beating his child and leaving him with cuts, scrapes and bruises all over his body. It didn't go into great detail but only talked about how he would be deactivated for his game this Sunday 9/14/2014 and how this legal matter was something that the NFL needed to look into. At this point, I was so curious about the story and because of the lack of detail, I needed to check multiple sites such as ESPN, NESN, CBS Sports and Profootballrumors.com, in order to recover as much detail as I could so I could make a determination for me, as to whether or not the information I am reading is credible. After finding out that Peterson turned himself in to authorities within hours of being charged and hearing the remorse in his voice from his interview, I quickly looked into what caused this behavior. I read in the articles that he was trying to discipline his child for causing harm to another child, and in order to get his message across, he treated his son with the same form of discipline that he was treated with. That meant he told his son to go get a tree branch or a switch and bring it back so he could spank the child with it. Come to find out, Peterson didn't seem to realize that this is not okay in today's time and that what we grew up with and how he was disciplined cannot be accepted today. The article talked about how before and after he disciplines his kids, he talks and explains to them why they are getting the discipline and then after how he is sorry and tells them that he is trying to teach them a lesson. What I am trying to get at is the first update I received at 7:00 a.m led me to this story. The original story I received what choppy and really just gave a headline with no exact details. I didn't trust the source and retreated to other sources I did trust. Once confirming the real story, I have since deemed the Chicago Tribune as a credible source and will continue to trust their stories.

Although I found the above story to be true and I learned about it from a Social Media website, I would not use Social media platforms as the only reliable source of information. For the most part, I think that social media plays a huge part in the falsification of information due in large part because it allows for anyone to post anything at any time. Twitter allows for many different iterations of a news story and is available for the world to see at the touch of a button. Social media can be reliable, however, I like to research multiple media outlets before making any determinations of what is accurate or not. I have said time and time again that it is the media's job to entertain us, so I have a real hard time believing everything I read and hear, unless I have experienced it for myself.

What forms of new media do you use daily?

If I have to go a day without using my phone in order to check my sports pages that I love, then I am apt to go crazy. I constantly use the internet to check up on anything sports related to keep me sane. I browse Facebook daily, even though I believe I have posted something maybe a total of 3 times in 8 years since I  have had it. I really just get on every morning to see what people posted and how outrageous some of the posts really are.  I do use it to interact occasionally with friends and family but I have most of their phone numbers so texting works just as fine. I frequently check while I am at work and it a slow period of the day. I have no idea how to use Twitter or Instagram or any other cool social media outlet and I don’t think I really want to learn, as I have a hard enough time keeping up with what I do use. I am really not into all the gadgets and technology buzz that everyone else seems into. I have a pretty new phone with millions of apps and features on it and I hardly use any of them, let alone even know what most of them do. I am pretty simple with the technology. If I can keep up to date with sports and the occasional random Facebook updates, then my day is complete. I tend to  gravitate more to the video games on a daily basis then I do anything else.

How has new social media influenced your perspective of events?

Using social media to stay up to date is possibly one of the most difficult things to do. First, you never know what story to believe, you log onto Facebook and you have certain people posting articles about the latest topics, you have other people challenging those posts and articles, then you see a web page that has completely different information. It is very hard to trust anything nowadays that you read as you never know who is reporting actual facts. Most media outlets now are trying to be the first one to get a story out and  if that means part of their story is fabricated and they have to backtrack later, then that is what it is. Social media has influenced my perspective of events by allowing me access to multiple platforms to seek out what information and news I am looking for. Also, social media has afforded the opportunity to be updated quickly in a real time fashion with any breaking news. It is very hard however to really believe what you see on say Facebook, Yahoo or whatever news outlet you are viewing, when you see multiple stories on the  same subject and they all talk about different things. Take for instance the missing Malaysian airline that was reported. The first thing I saw about that was on Facebook as someone posted an article which stated that the plane had been missing but there were parts of the plane in the water and a dive team was searching. Then the next few hours, articles came out about how they had no information about the missing plane and another about how they felt the plane may have gone off course and landed somewhere else. They prematurely stated that everyone was dead before any research was conducted.  Its articles and news like this, that make it hard to truly believe  anything you read. .

Are these positive or negative influences?

Social media has both positive and negative influences when it comes to news and the impact on my life. I follow Facebook and get most of my “breaking news” from articles that people post on their and in a way, even though I never watch the news on tv, I feel like I am somewhat in the loop of what is going on. If I read something that I find interesting, I will take the time to Google more information about it and will continue to gather more facts to fully understand it. This is what I consider the positive of social media and how news is reported and how it impacts me. The negative is the fact that with social media, anything at any time can be reported by anyone. To many times I see a Facebook posts about someone ranting about something they are uninformed about and making themselves look ignorant to everyone, then they backtrack and posts something about how they were just frustrated or they try to use bogus facts to back up their claim. The dangers in social media such as real time transactions are a huge negative for news and for me. To be fully honest, I really don’t follow current events that close, because I feel that everything we ever read about is negative and there's never any positive news being reported and also, I am really not one who worries or cares what is going on as long as it is not impacting me or my friends and family.  It is great to be able to have the ability to keep up with what is currently going on in the world today, but I really have too much going on in my life to spend a lot of time reading about it and really getting involved with it.