P8: Literacy in Three Metaphors and New Literacy

I wrote in P1 of this unit about my news sources and the various ways that I obtain news. I mentioned various sources on the Internet, friends, and the newspaper. I mention in the post that "I also learn about a  lot of news through word of mouth. If a friend comes to me with a situation or event I haven't heard of, my first instinct is to search for it online." I think that learning about news events by "word of mouth" can be helpful in keeping up to date but can also lead to miscommunication and misinformation. 


For example, on my way up to the mountains for a snowboarding trip a friend in the back seat mentioned that Kim Jong-Un had been assassinated in China. She verified the story online and we all speculated as to who did it and what that would mean for North Korea. I didn't check the news that weekend and when I came back I was shocked to hear that Kim Jong-Un was alive and kicking. It turns out that the story had been leaked by an intern at a news company and had exploded on Twitter. American officials announced that they had no reason to believe the North Korean leader had been killed and that this was all a hoax. 


In this way, "word of mouth" can be detrimental to a news story and can cause confusion. I think that this is also a good example of "word of mouth" on the Internet through social networking. Twitter, Facebook and even Tumblr can be sources of misinformation because things get re-tweeted, re-posted, or re-blogged without any fact checking. I think that this parallels real life because things can often be misheard or misunderstood when transferred from one person to another in conversation; like the old kids game telephone. We live in a complex age of information and with this come many risks. I think that it is important to rely on sources that you trust and to be sure to do your own independent research on things that are especially pertinent to you.