Introduction, Fake News, and Reliability

Hello, my name is Gus.

I am currently going to LBCC to get my general associate's degree. I initially moved to Oregon to attend SOU down in Ashland, but not having a complete idea of what kind of education I wanted to pursue put school on the back burner for me. Even now, I'm not sure what I want to study, but that is one of the strengths of community college. I am trying out multiple types of classes to find an area of study that draws me in, one of those classes being the reason for the creation of this blog, Media and Society. By the time it comes to transferring to a university at the end of this school year, I hope to have found a career path. I work full time in addition to attending college with full time credits as well, so time balancing has become something I have been forced to learn. In many ways, it has forced me to grow a lot in a relatively short amount of time. I work at Costco as an optician, something that I would not have thought of as a career path until I got the opportunity to train in the department. It goes to show that while still having a loose plan, I'm not sure where life will take me. 

I am taking Media and Society in that effort to broaden my knowledge. I've always been interested in how information is delivered to people and how the same story can be told in an endless number of ways. Politics is an easy example of this, with so much happening in such a short amount of time. I'm excited to learn more about how media is presented to the masses and what I can do to be more aware and think critically about the news I am consuming. 

When I am not working or studying, I am normally playing video games or doomscrolling. I definitely do not have the healthiest relationship with technology, so I try to limit my usage of it with a small amount of success. I primarily get my news sources from the social media I am on, being TikTok and Instagram. TikTok is short form content, so I don't really consider it the most reliable, however, it is a good source to see how people are reacting to recent events. The news profiles I follow on Instagram are a bit better at delivering information in the context it deserves, rather than half a minute long videos. I won't lie, the main reason these platforms are my main source of news is the convenience of them. The content is normally easy to engage with(or ignore if I'm not in the mood for it.) When it comes to professional media sources, I do not go out of my way to watch any networks, but I do browse trending stories on CNN from time to time. When it comes to knowing the authenticity and reliability of a source, I think it's important to see a story from multiple angles. People are always going to disagree and find the perspectives that are, at the very least, consistent critical thoughts. Instead of people or networks just reporting an issue, putting in commentary with statistics and social awareness is going to make me find a source much more reliable. 

When it comes to fake news, I'm a bit pessimistic about the future of media. With how advanced and rampant AI is in being able to generate extremely convincing, outright fake videos and audio, plenty of people will be misinformed. News is a speed game, being some of the first people to report on something generates a lot of revenue and buzz for your site or platform, so it may be more and more likely for news and media to willfuly ignorant to the information they are putting out. I know I have fallen for fake videos before, and I would consider myself decently aware of the chances of videos being AI, so I have to imagine more offline folks will have no idea what to believe when a story is rapidly unfolding. If that's the case, they will surely just fall back on their bias, promoting an environment that lacks critical thought. The best thing I can do to make sure a story is truthful is just verify from multiple sources, ones I trust and even ones I don't, to see how they are reporting on it. I try not to talk about recent stories or media unless I feel fairly confident in my view of them. The best thing I can recommend is to slow down and wait and see as a story unfolds. I'm curious if that opinion will change as I learn more in this class, and I'm excited to see where it goes!