I’ve decided to write a response/ review of the talk given to us in weeks 5 and 6 by Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez re: Open access and Social Media.
Open Access
For me these were the two topics we’ve touched on in the module that I am really interested and passionate about. From a young age I was taught about open access and the freedom of information, and it is something that’s been in my mind even more so now that I’m in a environment that is so dependent on these things. I agree with the fact that we should have more open access documents and the digitisation should be a given in most cases for archiving however there’s also the fact of money. As much as we want everything to be free it just isn’t feasible with out current resources, digitisation takes a lot more time and money than most people realise and academic journals are, in some cases, the sole income for some academics. Eventually we’ll get to a time when academics are paid their dues and everyone has a better living wage but until there monetisation of knowledge is still some thing that needs to be done as a sacrifice while work on better outcomes.
Although I realise this is slightly contradictory to the point I just made, the fact that certain information is pay walled, for example: books for school and classes, basic historic archives as well as quite a large amount of general knowledge. Now, I don’t mean pay walled in the outright sense in all cases, in cases such as LSOTR we forget that all the books and journals on there aren’t openly accessible and that our capitation fees go towards paying for our use of this knowledge outlet. Which, in my opinion, creates this knowledge hierarchy among those who have attended college or an institution and those who maybe decided to pursue another path such as an apprenticeship. This alienation through academia is extremely toxic and creates further socio-economic divides that will continue if more resources aren’t made available to the general public.
Social Media
When it comes to social media there’s dozens of debates one can touch on and extrapolate. In the lecture we didn’t so much talk much about the platforms themselves but their use of our data for things such as marketing and political campaigns.
I never found it surprising that our privacy and our data was no longer our own once we embarked on our online social adventures, part of me hold the opinion that anyone who still thinks that they are able to have absolute and sure control over their own privacy and information is only fooling themselves. Sure, there are steps one can take to stop people knowing about you and attempting to keep yourself as safe a s possible but there will always be someone out there who has information on you and will distribute it whether we like to admit it or not. Of course the Cambridge analytica scandal shook people to their cores, that they were prey to psychological endeavors and were manipulated. Personally I’m just surprised they got caught, it seems like quite a sloppy job, but I mean the corporations involved have now become sloppy in their day to day goings on.
For one of the other assignments I did, I responded to an paper re: the trends in the diffusion of misinformation on social media. This was interesting and talked about the measures taken by platforms to stop the spread of ‘fake news’ on their websites and how there’s been a steady decline over the past 2 years in some websites, however, in otheres there been and exponential increase in the spreading of misinformation and pseudoscience in that same time period. I can see how this paper ties in to the general topic of social media and it touches more so on the finer points that we as a community need to actually focus on and bring forward an awareness of. There’s also a certain level of acceptance that needs to be had among us that, we as a people most likely cannot change what will happen with our data in the near future nor can we stop our information getting out but that we can work on making sure future generations have some forms of security and safety concerning these matters
