Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Catching the Eye

I submit that the large majority of what we know about current politics or the current presidential election largely comes from social media. I know that as we are scrolling through Facebook or Instagram certain things catch our eye. We only stop scrolling for a moment to see something funny, or some misleading quote about a U.S. presidential candidate. We rarely take the time to further investigate any of the stands taken by the parties or their candidates. Upon scrolling on Facebook for 5 minutes here are some of the "funny" or "interesting" things that I have found.



While these images entertain us (I know they caught your eye) I believe that they are contributing to us "losing" our identities, and our knowledge. We are wandering through this digital wilderness and little tidbits of information like this are misleading and only leads to nonsensical claims. In addition, political lobbying of this kind is highly emotionally charged and usually has no facts to back it up. 

2 comments:

  1. Before reading these posts I didn't realize what a problem media is in the elections. I didn't realize how uninformed most of us are. I often thought that perhaps I was the only one who was not as informed as I should have been. I think that you are completely correct in saying that we are often swayed by the memes and illegitimate information. should the election be based on who has the best memes? I think not!

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  2. Images are powerful, and we have a tendency to remember them. Because of the digital society that we live in, however, we've caused facebook memes and posts like the examples that you gave to be almost our sole source of information. We can't do this. One thing that I'm learning is that it takes work to vote intelligently--facts aren't readily available.

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