It’s on the Internet so it must be true, right?!

I like the way that the internet plays with political campaigners since of integrity. I mean, before now a contender had town hall meetings and shook hands with everyone. The internet has provided a smoke screen that the communications directors for Politian’s can hide behind. The phrase, “well if it is on the internet and a politician said it, well then, it must be true” only had the power because the omniscient world wide web is full of only accurate information, right?

On the positive side or maybe it is entertainment purposes, as voters we can keep update on all of the debates. Working as much as we do we cannot always catch the local news to find out the latest on the campaign trail. The internet provides minute by minute updates of stories whether true or false. It is for us to decide what accurate information is and what is not. Like the “Longtail provides and we decide!”

Maybe to that note, the negative side of the longtail, especially in Policitcs is that there is so much information it is really easy to find someone else who believes what we do, so instead of educating ourselves, we might just settle for someone who agrees with us because it was on the internet, so it must be true! We might not look for a well rounded non-biased answer. Know your sources and your candidates I say.

Looks like Grace found the answer :factcheck.org.

Politics and Media 2.0

I really enjoyed last class. I feel using the internet with Politics is giving us a greater opportunity to be in the know about what is going on in the world. I like the fact that if we do not like a contender, we can make funny pictures of him and stick it on our blog. Freedom of expression. I like that if we like a contender, we can advocate him on our blog or Facebook. Since the US is so big, and there are so many people involved, and many elections to vote in, the idea of having the internet at hand to discover whats going on is amazing. We can not always watch every speech given by every person running for an office, that is why social networks and blogs are interesting to have on smartphones. Otherwise, we may miss out on all the "interesting" stuff that people like Ann Coulter come up with. And, we all know that we would not want that.
I like the fact that the long tail offers me everything that I want. Sometimes I want to know what is going on, and I want to know it in lay mans terms. Sometimes I want to know what the legal obligations are in making such a law. I want to know what is going on in Congress, but I don't want to sit and watch CSPAN. Thanks to the long tail, I am offered that in a variety of forms on the internet, and I can pick and chose what to read, and who to follow. Do I want to go mainstream, or do I want to follow someone who is speaking from their heart and not caring as much about the ratings? Its my choice. Since I am a fan of the long tail, Ill have the leave the Jerry Springer show that is appearing daily on mainstream media and go to little Suzy Joe who is blogging about why she does or does not like what someone running for office has to say and why she doesn't think they are appropriate for that office. To me, the long tail offers us more opportunity to get the truth, and to read pure hearted journalism (finding some pure unbiased people), who care about the issues at hand instead of what someone is wearing, or what someone looks like. Since we have become a nation who cares only what people wear and how they look, the issues have become second most important, when it should remain the most important thing that determines whether someone is elected. I say no to mainstream politics and yes to the long tail once again!!



Whoo hoo for the Long Tail

Fact-checking in the Age of Internet Culture Jammers

FactCheck.org is a website I've found to be highly accurate when it comes to checking the claims of politicians. Its a non-profit site run by the Annenburg Public Policy Center that actually attempts to match up the claims with facts. For any given story, a group of students combs through available data to determine accuracy. In the heat of the political season, that is not always easy to do for the average citizen, so a website of this type is critical for truth finding. The fact is that politicians regularly stretch the truth or the lie as far as is possible. They rationalize truth in their own favor, which is why a resource like Factcheck is one of those long-tail commodities that can be helpful for the average you and me voters.

From the site:

We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

Politics in the age of the internet may be difficult to follow. Faced with the all-you-can-read buffet du jour, it's hard to distinguish the signal from the noise and its that signal/noise ratio that politicians count on to get their message across or to block the messages of others (i.e. p. 225 culture jamming). Fact-check serves as a sort of Snopes filter for political rumors, for example, in their Viral Spiral where they debunk internet rumors propagated by email.