How I Know What I Know: Thank You Social Media!

Today while on Facebook I saw that a friend had posted the link for a video on upworthy.com. The video, which was originally a short film made for the GE Focus Forward campaign, tells the story of a doctor who cured a 6-year old girl's Leukemia by injecting her with the HIV virus. The HIV, which had been altered so it could not spread actual HIV, acts to genetically alter the patients T-Cells so they recognize the cancer as an intruder and begins to fight them off. The procedure worked, and just 3 weeks later the patient, Emily Whitehead, was in remission. It was such an incredible story and I so badly wanted it to be true. To be honest, though, I've become so cynical about everything I see these days, that I didn't know if I could actually believe that something so incredible had really happened. I wanted it to be true, but people have made up stories for publicity before. So, I went on a hunt to see if the story was legitimate. 

It turns out, the doctor in the film is really a doctor and he is Dr. Carl June, an immunologist who spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy studying HIV and bone marrow transplants. He is now a researcher at the University of PennsyIvania where, after his wife succumbed to ovarian cancer in 2001, he has worked to perfect a gene therapy to cure cancer. I found the story on MSN, NBC, Bloomberg Businessweek and even The New York Times. This was a story that went viral that was actually true.

I think that sometimes, yes, social media sites can be reliable for obtaining credible information, but at the same time I still feel like it's our responsibility to find out if what we're reading is true. You should never take one source at face value without doing your own investigating. As educated individuals we can combat the effort of others who are posting things that aren't true on social media sites by doing our part to make sure everything that we offer to cyberspace is accurate and worth sharing with others. If we aren't doing our own research and making sure the content we're producing is true, then who will? If It weren't for social media platforms like Facebook, this story would not have garnered as much attention as it has, and in the world we live in, we need as many positive news pieces as we can get. 


If anyone would like to view the video on Upworthy, or would like to know more about the Focus Forward Campaign or wants to watch some more of their videos, here are the links:

Upworthy Video
Focus Forward Films

New Media: Positive or Negative?

As a young adult and a recent college graduate, I find myself using new media every single day. Social media in general is where a lot of my time is spent. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is check my Facebook, browse tweets on Twitter, and watch new videos from the users I subscribe to on YouTube. If I do not complete this ritual, my day simply doesn't feel right. I never used to feel this way, but I don't think I could ever go back to how I used to start my mornings.

I grew up in a small town where high-speed Internet wasn't available and cell service could only be achieved by driving 30 minutes outside of town, so my morning ritual was vastly different when I was in middle/high-school. I remember waking up every morning extremely early to watch the news with my parents before my Dad went to work on the farm (how cliche, right?) and my mom had to wake my little sister up for school. Then I would get on our land line (gasp!) and call my friends to see what they were wearing, what gossip I had missed from the night before and what we had planned for after school. Then I packed up my books and my portable CD player and headed out the door for the day. Those were slower, simpler times. Today, though, that's just not how the world works.

Today we have everything we need at the touch of a button. If I want to know the latest breaking news stories, I can follow a trusted media source on Twitter and receive headlines instantly. If I want to know what my friends are doing or what the plans are for the weekend, I can check their status updates or write on their wall, and check my event invitations on Facebook. These forms of new media allow people to remain in tune with what is happening in the world whether it be international, national, or local news, nearly effortlessly. You don't have to go out and buy a newspaper or sit down in front of the television waiting for newscasts. New media allows for people to maintain their fast-paced lifestyles and remain knowledgeable on what is going on in the world. In this way new media has had a positive influence on me and my life in general, but I do see how it can also have a negative influence as well.

New media like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram allow for people to instantly post anything and everything that one wants. There are no rules that say you can only post things that are factual and unbiased. Because of this, people must be critical of everything they read. Just because someone says something via social media does not necessarily mean it has any factual basis in reality. For example, I saw on Facebook a that someone had posted this quote as a status update: "Well behaved women rarely make history." This person attributed the quote to Marilyn Monroe. A few weeks later I saw someone post the same quote attributing it to Eleanor Roosevelt. The truth is, the person who really said this was actually neither of those women, but Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Harvard University professor. Although this was a somewhat harmless mistake, it should serve as a lesson that not everything we read on the Internet is true.

Access is another reason that people may find new media to be a negative influence. Not everyone can afford devices that allow them to partake in new media, and besides the financial burden, generations that did not grow up in the digital age may just flat out refuse to partake in new media. This lack of access leads to something known as the knowledge gap and is one of the biggest reasons why part of the population is uninformed and indifferent to what is going on in the world. I could rant about this topic for hours, but we'll save that for another day.

In my opinion, if you have access to new media and are willing to give it a chance, it has more of a positive influence than a negative influence on individuals and the population as a whole and I think it will continue to have more of a positive influence in the next few years.


--Samantha