Gatekeepers

This course has helped given me a different perspective on digital literacy. Looking at the speed at which technology is being created, I anticipate I will lose my touch if I were to even step away for a second. I can also imagine there will be much to talk about with the repeal of net neutrality in the next course.

For my final paper I chose to focus on social media and how it can be used to improve disaster relief situations. In my paper I started by revisiting the argument between Andrew and David, and looked their argument on Gatekeeping vs. Amateurs. I found that certain processes in disaster relief thrive better with amateurs and some better with gatekeepers.

In one paper I found, a crowdsourcing software implementation, similar to Uber, helped match people who were in need of help with people who needed help (Murali et al., 2016). This can be especially useful when disaster relief may not even be scheduled, but people are able to offer assistance to each other. The most interesting thing I found, though, was that in using crowdsourcing software, we mostly focus on people who are amateurs using the system, but the dynamic of a gatekeeper still does exist within the software. In the case I found the software punishes or rewards people who behave as expected. Additionally, people can be rated and this rating can be viewed by others. This is all to deter misuse and exploitation of the system. At this point we rely on whether or not the design and functionality actually work well enough to maintain a proper workflow so that as many victims get help from volunteers as possible.
I also tried to focus on how social media in the papers I looked at used different levels of communication as stated by Rheingold. I specifically looked at different levels of collective action and how certain applications may support networking, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration (Rheingold, 2014, pp. 153-154). I found that most applications these days are achieving a collaborative level of collective action.

I also wanted to quickly share some of the data from my case study. I did my case study on Equifax and used Twitter and Google’s Natural Language API to generate some meaningful data for my study. The Google API focuses on Sentiment which is basically how positive or negative the words used in a sentence are. I calculated average sentiment per tweet. I then used a free tool called Tableau to visualize tweets made by Equifax over time. I recommend Tableau for anyone who needs to make a chart and share it quickly, I found it about as good as any paid ones I have used in the past.

Twitter Equifax Data

https://public.tableau.com/profile/miriam6169#!/vizhome/EquifaxData/Story1

References

Murali, S., Krishnapriya, V., Thomas, A. (2016). Crowdsourcing for disaster relief: A multi-platform model. 2016 IEEE Distributed Computing, VLSI, Electrical Circuits and Robotics (DISCOVER), pp. 264-268. doi: 10.1109/DISCOVER.2016.7806269

Rheingold, H. (2012). Net Smart. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Cross-Cultural Communication

Although we have built communication bridges across the ocean, the cultural differences in our adaptation remain unique in each cultural context.  Accommodating these barriers has proven to be one of the most difficult and complex tasks I have encountered.

I enjoyed looking at the different emails given by Barry Thatcher to the team in Mexico (Spilka, 2010, pp. 172-173).  It is evident that the emails are much more formal in Mexico than in the USA for business relations.  Beyond formalities, it is evident that the revised email follows some cultural process that just doesn’t exist in our culture.  Re-introducing myself in an email to someone would feel very awkward, especially if we’ve been communicating for a while.

Several times I have been in charge of managing an offshore team.  Many of the areas we have employed the teams from have very different “hierarchical and interpersonal values” (Spilka, 2010, p. 170).  Depending on the culture, the workers may be either too proud or too scared to communicate effectively.  When email is one of the main forms of communication, this can be very problematic.  The biggest issue I encounter is that questions that should be asked are not asked.  Sometimes I will need to take Barry Thatcher’s approach by formalizing an email that shows respect.  Other times I will need to show that I am approachable and accessible for them to communicate as a peer rather than a manager.  If we do have someone from the same cultural background locally we will sometimes employ them to help build the relationship.

I have travelled to meet the offshore team a few times.  It’s funny that even though technology has given us so much, travelling to meet and break some bread with offshore teams builds this relationship better than any email has ever done.  Even communicating with team mates across the USA is helped by being able to put a face to a name.  Bernadette Longo states that “People value human relations” (Spilka, 2010, p. 156).  This is evident in this case.

Barry Thatcher also examines cultural differences in layout and composition of a website.  Almost a decade ago I studied abroad in South Korea.  I remember trying to navigate the websites there and it was almost impossible.  Even if I was able to translate the page, the cultural differences in layout and process were much different.  I had also wanted to use the popular social media site, Cyworld, but was quickly denied because it required a Korean Social Security number.  Finding the correct websites were also difficult without the ability to read or write in Korean.  Although Google could bring up some results, the cultural knowledge was mostly inaccessible.

To try to accommodate communication gaps across cultures, my company has its own CMS specifically for different cultures.  Each user will have their own culture profile configured, and when they look up templates for documents, they will be specific to the region they are located in.  If they are creating a document to be distributed in a different country, they can retrieve the document for that specified culture.  This approach seems to embrace the fact that we all have different approaches to how we communicate digitally.  At the same time, I cannot imagine having to maintain that system.  Possibly, it may also create a sense of exclusion rather than inclusion for certain contexts.

Right now, the solution for cultural divides seem more human than machine.  I can’t really see this changing either, as cultural understanding requires empathy, and is a dynamic being.

 

11/16/2017 Edit:

Attaching some examples of emails from other cultures. The one on the left is an email to my husband from some Brazilian Vendors, and the one on the right is from Spanish vendors. It’s interesting to note the formality differences in the messages. 

Content Management Systems and Digital Literacy

Hart-Davidson hits the nail on the head, Content Management Systems (CMS) “do not do that work by themselves” (p. 14). A CMS can give a company what they are willing to put into it. They are not a solution, they are a tool. They are exactly what we make of it. Hart-Davidson states that “technical communicators typically come to play many different roles and deploy diverse sets of skills over the course of a career” when using CMS (p. 134). The roles mentioned must be assumed, but to successfully integrate the CMS into the company, the company must also integrate one or more company processes into the system to really benefit from it.

Training or some kind of education on how the company uses a CMS is a key to success. I’ve used quite a few systems and have seen excellent and poor uses of them in companies. When companies don’t have any rules around how a CMS is used, it becomes a free-for-all of good and bad information. It’s confusing. There is a plethora of online content available online for learning how to use and manage CMS systems online. However, even if you know how to use the system, this may not be how the company uses it.  The video below only touches on some common mistakes in administrating SharePoint itself and it’s over an hour long.

Michael J. Salvo and Paula Rosinski both discuss “mapping” and “signposting” in information design (pp. 112-114). These concepts are a big part of UX and extremely important to ensure users can become literate in a system. I’ve found these levels of user interface designs are not well applied to most CMS. At one of the companies I worked for I had to redesign the front-end of a SharePoint site to make it more accessible and simplified for others in the company. This tells me that we have a long way to go in our design of CMS from a design perspective. Confusion in using the interface itself will almost surely create inconsistent data, especially when most people will have access to the system.

Process in how you use a CMS is key to making the system useful. Yes, it can allow versioning of documents, but when people are not required to update or sign off on documentation, it can create data that looks trustworthy but is not. Most systems have workflows integrated into them, but unless going through that workflow is a part of a sign off process for the deployment of a product, then why would people go through the hassle?

To make sure our documentation is trustworthy, my team and I will link our documents to specific releases of software. This way it will be clearer in what context you can assume a document may be relevant for. In terms of metadata we make sure that everything is under our team’s section in the system. We also have the option to tag certain customers if the document is specifically relevant to that context. The process we employ around this ensures that we do not have to continually maintain every document, but instead deploy documentation at our own pace and as needed.

I don’t think I could live without a CMS at a company these days, because the alternatives are much worse. But literacy in these systems remains a problem. This is probably due to the fact that the users are not the same as the customer. Additionally, I see many systems treated as a golden solution instead of a platform. It will be interesting to see how these systems and their usages evolve over time.

Playbook

I found this week’s reading fairly awkward as it included software engineers as technical communicators. Software Engineer is a very misused term to begin with. Rachel Spilka’s book gave me the feeling that they used to be more document centric, but now they are more jack-of-all trades developers and managers, sometimes dev ops, and sometimes just programmers. A lot of software industry titles trend towards a jack-of-all trades type of job, hence the new title “Full-Stack engineer”. Full-stack engineers are usually developers who know all aspects of how to build a web application. Why pay multiple people when you can get just one that knows how to do everything? Initially, a technical communicator sounded like a far fetch in the software engineer’s knowledge tool-box.

When I was studying for my computer science degree, most professors seemed to verbally accept the fact that most of us were just not going to be gifted in the writing department. It was not a required or emphasized aspect even though I had a software engineering emphasis. In the industry, I cannot disagree with this either. Most legacy code I have worked on is not documented from the technical side at all. It’s not always because of talent or ability, but honestly the last thing most of my colleagues want to do after coding is sit down and write sufficient documentation for days after that. Additionally, one extra line of code has the potential to change most or all of a document on the system functionality. Documentation is looked at by our management as a nice to have, but it’s not a show-stopper if it’s not there. We are never interviewed on our writing skills. This first-hand knowledge made me raise an eyebrow when Spilka listed software engineers as technical communicators from the late 90’s to now.

What I realized part way through reading was that the documentation Rachel Spilka is referring to has changed just like how the job titles have changed. The documentation that a software engineer will generate is kind of dynamic and is not always a formal breed of documentation. Spilka states a couple times in the book that the job of technical communicators has changed audiences, that they have changed from being experts to novice. It seems to me that the responsibility for creating power user documentation has been assumed primarily by software engineers, architects and system engineers, while technical writers create more customer-facing or public documentation.

So, how do software engineers document? We document when we want to ensure that we don’t have to work more than we want. The documentation that we do produce is aimed at fellow engineers so we don’t have to repeat ourselves too much when new people are hired or start working on what we have already built. We also document for production systems for installation and troubleshooting guides for when things go very wrong. Both of these types of documents we call “playbooks” for our engineering sector. These playbooks seem very similar to the initial documentation that was created by technical communicators in the 70’s (Spilka, R., ed., 2010, 22).

We keep these playbooks on a content management system that is accessible by the entire company, so if they want they can just go to our page and try to find the answer to their question before talking to us. We can also receive comments on the content management system so that all discussions on the documentation are public. Sometimes the documentation just looks like notes and sometimes it looks like a proper installation document depending on its purpose. We also document even less formally by creating static and dynamic charts and graphs for the design of our system. These can be the most useful in explaining functionality to other software engineers. We also document by putting comments in code to explain exactly what we are trying to do algorithmically. All of these forms of documentation fully take advantage of the technological changes that have been granted to us to make technical communication more efficient.

This book was written in 2010 so I feel like a revision could occur to navigate even more technical communication responsibilities in businesses today. For example, System Engineers have a huge role in technical communication between all components of a technical product. I feel like this specific role could be very helpful in identifying where some of the technical communication responsibilities have been dispersed in today’s world. Spilka does mention that the content would probably be irrelevant for the types of companies that I work at. Additionally, every company is vastly different in how they incorporate technical platforms and integrate with engineering processes. I can only imagine the challenges Spilka encountered in trying to compile the history of technical communication.

Ajax: Real Time Collective Action

A big buzzword in my field is “Real-Time”.  Every company wants real time applications with automatically updating interfaces for increased usability.  Real-time allows users to think less and do more.  People don’t have to request for the latest statuses when they are already using a web application, the application will tell them there is an update.

Jack Jameison discusses Ajax’s role in the Web 2.0 world in his article Many (to platform) to many: Web 2.0 application infrastructures.  Ajax is simply a combination of technologies that allows user interfaces to be updated automatically when the server tells it to.  An application that uses this technology allows interfaces to automatically send or receive messages from a server without provocation from the user.  This has drastically changed how use the internet, and what we expect from it.

Jameison voices his skepticism about web technologies such as Ajax because this revokes control from users, giving less visibility into how they are really interacting with the web application.  One example might be that you receive a message you don’t want to respond to from someone online.  Now they have a status to tell the other user that you read that message just from you being online and it popping up on your screen.  Now the situation may be awkward, and can definitely be an unintended behaviour.

While real-time applications do come with unintended behaviours, they have also opened up new doors for how we communicate with each other online.  Rheingold discusses and divides “collective action” in the online world as three different categories: cooperation, coordination, and collaboration (p. 153).  Collective action has been empowered by real time capabilities of the web. Automatically updating interfaces helps provide a more active feeling to participation when you know that someone has read or replied to your comments online.  Collective action has become much easier, especially with the development of smart phones.  Most people in my city use Facebook to communicate and arrange meetings.  Too many times I’ll be notified that the location of the meetup has changed or people have had to change the time.  This helps encourage a level of trust between people who are trying to coordinate meetups.  I do not miss the days when I was stood up because nobody could tell me that the plans had changed.

Real-time applications give the ability to broadcast messages to users of a system, whether it’s an amber alert or your current location.  Sharla Stone discusses in her article Real-Time Disaster Relief how applications were developed just for tracking people who needed help in disastrous situations.  The applications provided the ability to track rescue requests in real time, find resources for people who needed help, and help in information sharing where it was previously difficult to do without the help of technology.

Applications and movements like this always inspire me and make me want to join.  Hopefully I will be able to participate in something as meaningful as this in the future.

The Fridge is Full and There is Nothing to Eat!

I can go to the store and buy $300 worth of groceries, but when I look at the fridge after doing chores all day the last thing I want is to figure out what to make for dinner. There are just too many choices. This same phenomenon seems to happen with any other bountiful option of choices, whether it’s Netflix, or Spotify, it feels like I have even less options than when I had a collection of entertainment that could fit on half a bookshelf. With the bountiful amount of content and information available online, how are we getting anything done?

Metadata

Rheingold reminds us that this is not the first time an overabundance of information was made available to us. Rheingold reiterates that the printing press influenced scholars to “sharpen disciplines” and “define genres” to handle “the information overload of the 16^th century” (p. 54). Genres and disciplines in this case are just metadata to help sift through the overload of data. And we are handling the internet in much of the same way. We use tagging online to help categorize and organize knowledge. The difference is that tagging is done by a large population of the internet rather than a few scholars.

The online entertainment businesses help consumers figure out what they want using categorization as well as recommendations. Anderson notes that recommendations for related content helped fuel book sales for content that may not have been previously considered (p. 2). Online entertainment has drastically helped increase the supply in business by the very nature of the delivery platform. Companies no longer have to worry about having enough popular content on their shelves since their shelves are just disk space and network constraints. Anderson also notes that the profitability of niche content is now more evident than ever. This means markets for niche content are much less risky than when we were limited to time slots on TV and in movie theaters.  But again, the overabundance of content is hard to sift through as a consumer. Meta-services like CanIStream.It have come around just to help people try to find if they are already paying for the service that hosts content they want to watch. Additionally, services like Netflix and Amazon both have recommended content and user generated ratings for every movie or episode that you can view to get a feeling for the level of quality.

Quality

The internet has given humans a greater voice on the internet, whether it is Yelp, online reviews, or online content from “amateurs.” And this is great, because we can potentially find better representations of public opinions.  The Cluetrain Manifesto highlights the new voice that people have been handed now that the internet can help us stand up to big corporations.

Unfortunately, this voice also leads to a large amount of bad content from uneducated and ill-willed people. This creates the need to have a level of skepticism when trying to find good information sources. Rheingold’s chapter on Crap Detection looks at some heuristics for finding trustworthy information. Services that help debunk bad information or review bad services can help us navigate these problems, but sometimes even that is not enough.  The level of internet security for a lot of this online content is not upheld to the same PCI compliance standards as banking, and we’ve seen how well that has gone. But that’s not to say we should no longer use it. Any channel of communication, whether it is the internet, phones, letters, books, or person-to-person communication, can be exploited. As such we should remain skeptical, critical, and keep up with where we get our information from, and where we put it.

This brings up the desire for content filtering and governance for these very reasons. Rheingold brings up Socrates’ skepticism of the written word, highlighting how without scholars to guide knowledge exchange there can be dangerous consequences (pp. 60-61). There appears to be an on-going trend throughout history to put governances and restrictions on knowledge. I fear that this option will set us back and make the internet unusable. Like I said before, everything can be exploited.

Conclusion

With more information than ever before, we are finding ways to manage and organize information into smaller amounts of information until it is exactly what we need. We are even creating services to help discover which services we should use.  With all the dangers that the amount of information being generated can impose, we must be careful about governances and restrictions, there is a fine line in protecting people’s minds and censorship.

 

Adapting our Lives in a Web 2.0 World

All three readings this week seemed to focus on the ways that the world has adapted to social media and services.  In the workplace, our education system, and our personal lives, we have changed how we interact and communicate with each other. There are also new opportunities that social media and services can give us that we have no fully explored yet.  This leads to the question; how can we fully take advantage of these new opportunities when we do not fully understand how much or little limitations we have?  I will explore aspects of success and failure with both education and work-related adaptations to online services and social media.

Education

The classroom is no longer limited to school hours or physical boundaries.  Online classes and academic services used by schools are helping education reach and accommodate more students.  Ferro et al. argues that education has expanded to be more inclusive and participatory.  Students do not have to wait until class starts, as online resources can help them keep in close communication.  Online forums for classes have always been helpful for commonly asked questions by students to help everyone involved in the class more efficiently share knowledge and misunderstandings in coursework.

I cannot argue that using online services for school isn’t helpful, but I do feel like it has a long way to go.  With the budget limitations every education system has, it is difficult to quickly improve and create a more efficient online educational environment.  I am currently enrolled in two Universities and taking online courses with both.  The other University I am getting my Master’s degree in computer science.  Compared to my bachelors which was all in person, this experience has been much more of an independent journey.  Half of the fun of college was meeting people and talking to them about literally anything but school.   I do think that online courses can be improved in relation to this.  For example, what if we were provided with, encouraged, or expected to use an active communication service, like a chat service, to get to know each other and collaborate with better.  Forums and email give us passive communication, and this can lead to students and teachers only discussing what they need to get work completed.  It feels much less likely we will actually get to know small details about each other when we have our real lives offline.  Longo states that community can be as much “an act of exclusion as it is an inclusion” (p. 5).  It seems as though the online classroom has created a community that is more academic than social.

Work

When reading Pigg’s article about distributed work I was quite surprised in the direction that was taken. I thought it would focus on a company like mine with offshore workers, but instead it was much simpler.  The study on Dave and his fatherhood blog was completely inspiring.  I was very impressed by his ability to establish a niche community in a boundary-less environment of the internet.  I love that the internet gives a voice to people like this.  In the book industry, you may have the best idea, but getting published is still chalked up to luck.  Now we have this uncharted opportunity to be both a writer and an entrepreneur.  Being successful may still have to do with luck, but getting your work into a public domain is trivial.

Pigg also brings up room for improvement in the work environment especially when considering employees restrictions involving “cyberslacking” and internet monitoring.   Although it may be obvious that certain websites may be inappropriate for work, the nature of my job relies heavily on access to multiple services and social media sites.  One example is that we have Skype and most chat options blocked on our internal network.  Half of my team members live in Maryland whom I have to call daily, so we end up creatively huddling around phones and sharing web communication tool accounts just to do our jobs.  Additionally, integration with certain social media sites can be required depending on the projects we are working on.  To do this we have to ask special permission from IT to do jobs assigned to us.  Ferro et al. explores the expanding usage of social media and online services that people use to complete their jobs today.  It looks as though we will need to reevaluate our approach and the tradeoffs of restrictions vs. employee efficiency.

Both work and education have gone through a lot of trial and error in order to adapt and take advantage of online technologies.  Although there seem to be a lot of potential innovations, these aspects of our lives have budgetary limitations that cannot afford error.  At the rate technology is changing these parts of our lives may never fully embrace the newest capabilities available, but they are definitely opening up new opportunities.

How is Social Media Evolving?

Social Media has evolved and adapted to accommodate the way we as humans want to communicate with each other.  The boom of social media has triggered an ongoing cycle of refinement as we find new ways we want, or don’t want, to use social media.  A corrective behavioural pattern can be observed over time based on demands and problems.

Many social media sites have evolved into frameworks for people to use the application as they need. This is to accommodate users so they don’t have to have accounts with a new service for every group they have.  Boyd et al. closely review the history and refinement of Social Network Sites, and highlights the demand for niche online connections.  These types of sites give smaller groups a sense of community that they could get without having to physically find people. These days many network sites have designed themselves to support these niche sets of people in the form of Facebook Groups and Subreddits.  Boyd et al. also bring up the rise of user-generated content sites.  Sharing videos, music or photos no longer requires your own hosted website.  This is another version of adaptation to address a social media problem.

Social media evolution has successfully brought more users to a few very popular sites.  Consequently, this evolution of digital media is creating a level of data that we never had before.  Jonathan Zittrain brings up how we can observe when two people are going to be in a relationship by looking at their data on Facebook.  This type of pattern can only be observed by comparing many data sets in order to identify patterns.  This level of intelligence is opening up a variety of jobs such as Data Scientists and Analytics, which are symptoms of the boom in social media usage.

This level of information has also brought up less desired symptoms.  Privacy being one of the big issues.   What does social media owe us in terms of privacy and are they allowed to profit off of it?  Uber could be an example of taking it one step too far by tracking the location of a user even when they’ve been dropped off.  But if Uber had disclosed that they tracked passengers would that be okay?  Theoretically speaking, Uber could have disclosed the information and most of their users could have jumped ship.  Alternatively, they could have become the cheaper option to Lift because of the extra money being made by openly selling or publishing the data.

Using data for profit can also be seen in the rise of targeted advertisements.  There is a lot of controversy over targeted advertisements because users feel violated.  This is still an ongoing debate on whether or not this is ethical.  This is another form of social media evolution to accommodate users, but not necessarily with the user’s interest in mind.

Jonathan Zittrain also discusses the algorithms behind digital media and how they can influence a user’s perception.  This brings up the ethics on changing algorithms to accurately portray current events.  This entire discussion is a grey area.   For example, when you look at “Popular” articles on a social media site, what does that mean?  Who determines what is popular? Many user-generated content sites use an algorithm for determining this, is this ethical?  And if a site profits by altering the algorithm, should there be consequences?  There appears to be a demand for some kind of governance but it is unclear what it should be.

Problems like privacy and governance will open up new ways for certain social media sites to either thrive or fail.  In the end, we should see new adaptations of social media for every new problem or demand that comes up.

Continuous Integration

There are very specific digital cultures that people need to understand when approaching certain social media platforms. For example, I should not talk about my personal life on LinkedIn, and I should not share company information over Facebook messenger. “The Rhetoric of Reach” suggests that understanding this culture is necessary before even approaching social media as a means of technical communication. The paper also suggests that these cultural boundaries are becoming looser. What the executive of a company says on Twitter can change the stock of the company in addition to their public image and employment.

My company recently became active in social media and made a huge deal out of it. Multiple emails and were given on how to publicly present ourselves when interacting as a member of the company on social media. The purpose of the social media was purely business driven. And I really don’t blame them after all the social media mishaps that have occurred online. When an employee posts the public often sums up that one user’s comment with the entire company’s world view. This level of scepticism is unfortunately a new standard.
On a more positive note, the understanding of digital cultures can help influence and “reach” more people. A couple of my friends worked at a company called Klout. Klout specialises in helping improve social media using scores and metrics for a user trying to get more viewers, or “reach.” It kind of seems like a credit bureau but for your social media. Of course, services like this cost money so it may not be in scope for a group of students doing a class project. For the more serious people trying to monetize and influence the world, however, this may be a great option. The fact that a company like this even exists is commentary on the quickly increasing trend and power that social media has.
Another form of “reach” I’ve noticed is the trend in monetary crowdsourcing sites, such as GoFundMe. The number of shares for each campaign are often in the thousands to promote more donations I actually did a small project this summer and observed how the sentiment metric of Tweets and stories influenced the overall success of a GoFundMe campaign. From the small amount of data, I had it appeared that positive stories and Tweets tended to be associated with successful campaigns.
The reasons people use social media are growing beyond entertainment. And in return social media is having more influence over things like money and our jobs. Staying literate in technology and the culture that surrounds it seems to more necessary than ever.

Blogging Literacy, Trends, and Journalism

Back in the days of LiveJournal and MySpace I got into the groove of writing blogs for everyone to see.  I would primarily write about emotionally driven subjects that nobody would ever listen to in person.  There was some fun in waiting to see if anyone would comment or view the posts that I made.  I especially loved DeviantArt because I could get public feedback over artistic pieces I posted online.  Over time the concept of privacy and permissions became more popular so I stayed with social media platforms that only displayed content to people I knew.  Additionally, the culture of blogging changed as well.

 

These days I use blogs for sourcing a lot of my information for work.  I read technology blogs often to get first hand experiences of how to create things with certain technologies.  They often give new perspectives that you cannot find from any book. You can also publicly solve problems online with groups of people you would not be able to find locally.  This aspect of technology blogs is a great way for engineers to network or get hired with new companies.  Technology blogging gives a great feeling of community and inspiration.

 

This article highlights the trends in blogging in today’s digital world.  Blogs are bringing more graphical inspiration, less comments, more content, and more inspiration.  Many blogs don’t even have one dedicated blogger, but a collaboration of many influential writers.  In regards to graphical inspiration, you can observe the new, or not so new, trend of food blogging.  Rather than a lengthy post about one topic, food blogs have a specific graphical standard they are upheld to. Many food bloggers benefit from a great camera to take pictures of the food.  I will find myself choosing recipes specifically for the beautiful pictures, regardless of whether or not the recipe seems to make sense.  I find myself actually trusting visual aids more than the content of the articles. And I can’t seem to stop myself.

 

Upon reading many of the articles on blogging literacy, I find myself wondering what the real difference between a blog and a news outlet is.  I suppose at this point they seem to be the same, as many examples listed, like Huffington Post, are treated like news outlets.   Now that everything has a digital version it is hard to differentiate between the two, especially when the content is the same.  Additionally, certain goals seem the same, more content and more viewers.  Unfortunately, the concept of journalism does not seem like a shared goal.  With the emerging technology, trusted sources of news may not be so easy to find.