Thoughts on Wikipedia

I believe that Wikipedia can be useful for people to get information that they don't intend to use in a paper or for anything else where the information needs to be factual without a doubt. For example, Wikipedia can be a great resource for someone to look up a topic that they had heard about but knew nothing about just to get a general overview of it.

I generally use Wikipedia to look up people such as actors and other artists that I like to find out a little bit of background on them just because it's interesting to me. I also like to use it to look up places that I would like to visit some day to read a bit about their history.

Wikipedia has been gathering quite a bit of resources for a lot of entries and I think that helps the entries with the most resources listed to be more credible because it shows that the information was gathered from other places and wasn't just written based on what someone thought.

Final bib and abstract

Final bib
Final abstract

Response to videos

I think the main idea that I took away from these videos and the background knowledge I have about things like the numa numa trend and other things mentioned is the way that YouTube allows every day people to do simple things that can quickly become extraordinary for a variety of reasons. They could do something simple and rather stupid and it could become extraordinarily popular be being ridiculed, or someone could record a simple video of themselves singing a song at their computer and if it's shared enough, it will likely be viewed by someone that can do something with their talents and they'll become extraordinarily famous. Social media and YouTube in particular have made it incredibly possible for people to share typical moments in their lives and have those moments turned into something fascinating.

Abstract and bib drafts

Abstract draft

Bib draft

Thoughts on Lovink

Lovink refers to blogs as being a more modern version of the homepages that people used to create for themselves/their interests. I had never thought of blogs as being similar to personal homepages, but after it was brought up in Lovink's post, I can definitely see the similarities.

He speaks about blogs combining personal thoughts such as what has been going on in that person's life with things that they find interesting going on in the world. People are then able to easily write about these things even if they have no actual knowledge about them. The problem with this, Lovink says, is that blogs are inherently easy to find by others looking for information based on tags that a blog writer can associate with their post. If a blog writer writes a post with enough conviction, what they write could easily be interpreted as being factual by people who happen upon it after entering certain search terms.