W13 Readings

Blossom Link was quite interesting- it expands on how the social media works. The primary goal is the audience. People write and share with their followers. Just imagine, a web of connectives all over the world.  The content are renewable, re-used like never before.  The example of this is the wiki instruction by Eastern Tennessee State University. The knowledge and experience is passed down via the wiki. However the downside of re-used is repeating the information to the point it become hard to trace toward back the original source. The information about  Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia were new to me. I didn't realize wikipedia is based on free software. There was a part in the dialogue which he mentioned how the voting process on the article works in the wikipedia- the volunteers enforce the rules of neutrality. I'm not sure if the neutrality can be fully used in the websites. I also wonder about the possibility of the users to become closed-minded due to the information source they choose to use. This reminded me of an article in Washington Post online newspaper- this omsbudman talked about comments section, free speech versus the user policy. There was a online commentator mentioning that this troll who was spouting racist lines like "The president should be white person." Now, this line falls in free speech- however this comment was removed due to language use. The commentator said his comment was more offensive because it included "scum"; however it was not removed. If you want to read further about this, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-post-should-moderate-its-comments-gently/2012/03/30/gIQA7tW4lS_story.html