Part 1:
This article opens with a description of the shooting of Michael Brown, and the social reaction it inspired. Within a month #ferguson had been shared over 8 million times on Twitter alone. After this, the reading starts to delve into what kind of social research can be done on a topic such as this through the platform of Twitter. While social media is a great way to spread information, it comes with inherent bias, that only builds as it is shared person to person. As the article explained, many related posts were shared without #ferguson. Ignoring those would mean ignoring another very real piece of the Ferguson puzzle. Continuing on, the article discusses the risks of hashtag activism. The benefits of awareness, and the downfall of swift replacement movements pushing one another aside. The article closes out by recognizing that the internet alone is not enough of a reliable platform to understand every angle of these social movements.
Part 2:
The complications involved in using a hashtag to lead cultural research is similar to what many anthropologists go through when examining excavated sites, discovering the specifics of human history. Unfortunately a half hour of searching did not yield the results I was looking for, however I remember being told about a specific study in an introductory anthropology class a few years ago. This study involved a group of people living in a small community for a few months while embracing the lifestyle of people from a specific era. Once this study had concluded and the researchers were able to look over the site, it was near exactly what they had seen in their field excavations. Including a small divot in the dirt just inside the front door of their living space. This specific divot had confounded many researchers for years, and as a result it was attributed to religion. When the subjects of this study were asked, they simply brushed it off and explained that the chickens would come inside for a dust bath to dry off when it was raining out. Something that seems so simple and obvious to us as we live through it, like hashtags, may become a complicated concept to grasp in the future. While we absolutely can, and should, try to understand these things for ourselves as we live through them, the future will undoubtedly shed a light we simply don't have yet. I really appreciate the approach this reading took, it's a very interesting and realistic way to look at social media.
This article opens with a description of the shooting of Michael Brown, and the social reaction it inspired. Within a month #ferguson had been shared over 8 million times on Twitter alone. After this, the reading starts to delve into what kind of social research can be done on a topic such as this through the platform of Twitter. While social media is a great way to spread information, it comes with inherent bias, that only builds as it is shared person to person. As the article explained, many related posts were shared without #ferguson. Ignoring those would mean ignoring another very real piece of the Ferguson puzzle. Continuing on, the article discusses the risks of hashtag activism. The benefits of awareness, and the downfall of swift replacement movements pushing one another aside. The article closes out by recognizing that the internet alone is not enough of a reliable platform to understand every angle of these social movements.
Part 2:
The complications involved in using a hashtag to lead cultural research is similar to what many anthropologists go through when examining excavated sites, discovering the specifics of human history. Unfortunately a half hour of searching did not yield the results I was looking for, however I remember being told about a specific study in an introductory anthropology class a few years ago. This study involved a group of people living in a small community for a few months while embracing the lifestyle of people from a specific era. Once this study had concluded and the researchers were able to look over the site, it was near exactly what they had seen in their field excavations. Including a small divot in the dirt just inside the front door of their living space. This specific divot had confounded many researchers for years, and as a result it was attributed to religion. When the subjects of this study were asked, they simply brushed it off and explained that the chickens would come inside for a dust bath to dry off when it was raining out. Something that seems so simple and obvious to us as we live through it, like hashtags, may become a complicated concept to grasp in the future. While we absolutely can, and should, try to understand these things for ourselves as we live through them, the future will undoubtedly shed a light we simply don't have yet. I really appreciate the approach this reading took, it's a very interesting and realistic way to look at social media.
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