Chapter 4 Summary
When I use the internet some of the things that I do on the norm are checking the weather for the week, seeing what breaking news stories have occurred throughout the week, and even to find a new job. So while taking a look over Chapter 4 this helped me understand how all of this separate information is organized all over the internet. I was completely oblivious to how much the search engine actually filters out when I am looking for apartments, products like on amazon for example, jobs. All this is doing is pulling information from an ENORMOUS database and showing it off in a way that is easy for the consumer to filter out and find only the things the user wants to actively search for.
Almost daily I am looking at the news, seeing all of the crazy or weird things that have happened in my immediate area or even just in the state, I just love seeing stories from all over the place. While looking over the chapter, I found out that most if not all news sites are just news aggregation websites which their sole purpose is to collect stories from multiple sources, but the biggest problem is that they could be very biased with the original authors opinions rather than just strict facts. Using blogs and wikis could be very useful in specific aspects, but a lot of them are biased information and you have to be careful what parts of the article that you use. I use weather sites and news apps daily on my phone, my computer, tablet, but it is actually very interesting to see how the sites update their information constantly and why it is not always accurate and why sometimes it is.
Another topic I learned in this chapter and that I found very interesting was using the web for jobs, housing, and health information. When looking for all of these things, the websites use databases and different interfaces so the consumer can filter out all of the options that do not apply to them and they will only see search results that contain what they are actually looking for. These include things such as salary/hourly pay rate, location of the job whether it is home work or at the site location. And for health information, googling this information could be almost all misinformation if you are not careful enough. Google likes to give you the most extreme results saying you have a disease/condition that you have not even been in contact with. So with all of this information it is suggested to use official medical or government websites which are 100% more trustworthy.
One of the last things I read that I found very interesting was copyright use and plagiarism. For the longest time I have always been (especially as a student) pretty wary of this topic. Because even though teachers and the librarians tell us EVERYTHING not to do so we can stay out of trouble I always thought I was gonna get in trouble for cheating. The United States has a fair use act that allows students to use a decent amount of original work for their own work but as long as they cite it correctly. Most of my time in school every single time I have had to cite my sources for anything we used MLA format and is always made into the last page of the document.