Two Truths and a Lie-Week 4

Two Truths and a Lie: a game we have all played at one point or another. It's a common ice breaker used amongst teachers and professionals to foster comraderie and a sense of team. 

Each person has to come up with two things about themselves that are true and one that isn't. After sharing all three facts, the remaining players need to guess which one is the lie, in the hopes of all sharing a laugh.

I hate this game. I hated it in school, I hated it during sorority recruitment, and I hated it during professional development workshops. 

I hate it even more when I have to figure out the truths and lies on the internet.

As a teacher, I do my best to prepare my students for evaluating sources on the internet. Yet the problem is that this world is evolving faster than I can teach them and there is so much more they need to know.

In the past, I've taught my students the ABC's of website credibility:

• Author-Authority : Who created it?
• Bias-What is the purpose? Is it objective?
• Content-Can you cross check? Is it a credible source?
• Date & Design-When was it created? Has it been updated?

However, while my students excel at the activities  associated with the lesson, the skill don't seem to transfer to everyday use. The population of students, and Americans, we are fostering are increasingly more lazy and do not care to take the time to assess a website or a source.

How have we gotten so far away from questioning our government? Questioning the things we read?

Also, after reading the article "How Much of the Internet is Fake? Turns Out a Lot of it, Actually", I was even more concerned. I never gave much thought to whenever a source would check if I was human. Click on all the images that have a mountain in it. Click on all the boxes that have a stop light in it. And on and on it went, and on and on I clicked. But after reading this article, it's alarming to see just how much of the internet are bots and fake. The article mentions the transition of our country into the post-inversion phase, suggesting, "The “fakeness” of the post-Inversion internet is less a calculable falsehood and more a particular quality of experience — the uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not “real” but is also undeniably not “fake,” and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, as you turn it over in your head."

My head hurts.

What doesn't hurt my head, is watching the newest episodes of "Do Not Track"-I am really enjoying these! Episode two was centered around cookies to track us and I can safely say that now I want some chocolate chip cookies!

One thing I found so interesting is this idea of why we can't so no to cookies when we're asked? Is it the creamy goodness? The warm feeling you get one you eat one? Or is it because companies control our internet cookies and if we're bad and say "no" then we don't get our cookies and we don't get our website!

The video defines cookies as an identification number that websites use to remember us the next time we come back to the website. I feel okay with that. I chose to go to that website, and for me personally, it's shoes and clothes and new recipes to try.

But I do see that's a problem in general, that companies can do this. Before I get to that though, I just wanted to touch on the problem being that there are so many third parties attached to these cookies that are buying and tracking our information. How exactly they are using that information to target me-I'm not sure yet.

I also thought it was so interesting when the episode asked: How much are you willing to pay for them? I never realized the history behind the internet, and that we had a pretty great ten years without ads or cookies or intrusions. Apparently the public decided that they are cheap and would not be paying a monthly fee for the services the internet provides. That because companies can play this game due to their funds, and we have chosen not to, we have essentially allowed this to become a problem. I think that's probably something most American's don't know. So if we want to raise awareness, maybe change the rhetoric. If we can't make them care about their privacy, let's show them in dollars how much they really are paying. And could they get it cheaper? For example, when the video asked me to evaluate how much I would pay for Facebook, I said "$0". I can live without facebook. I HAVE lived without facebook haha so if I had to start paying I would just get rid of it (which I hope would be most people's answer because it's just a form of social entertainment-Now if you asked me to get rid of my BRAVO network, it would be a different story). But when it asked me about Google, I decided I would pay a monthly fee of $50 for all of it's resources. (However, as I type this I am reconsidering, because I'd have to read the fine print on the Terms of service to ensure that that $50 would be all inclusive and not contingent on anything) Turns out though that Google only makes $45 off of me. Interesting!