Society today is fully integrated with social media and like a school cliché, word and news gets around quickly. Now of course there are already well established news and media in the form of newspapers and television broadcasts, but the papers are slow and who has the time or diligence to constantly watch the news on TV? We have become strongly attached to social media and are constantly looking forward to entertainment. I know I am. So now where we get our news? Well if you're not actively looking for breaking news, you probably are scanning Twitter or Facebook or some other website for something interesting.
I often get my news like this. People would post something interesting they would find, then it would I come across it while scrolling the page. If it is worthy and attractive enough to gain my attention I'll take a closer look at it. Like an outrageous rumor one might hear at school; the juicer, the better. Then it'll spread like wildfire, someone comes across it, shares it, more people see it, and more people share it.
Now the "it"....what is "it"? Be it an actual real life event or something quite silly. I'll leave your imaginations to give yourself examples. But this is something mentioned during a MOOC talk I listened to on the topic of "Media and News Literacy". Often silly things gain more attention than serious news, and whose to say what is the truth? If juicy rumors spread quickly through the school, would fantastic stories overshadow more pressing matters? That is something called the "Tragedy of the Commons".
I am wondering about your use of the term The Tragedy of the Commons, compared to its original use in the work of Garrett Hardin, as shared with Dr. Delano in his #Metaliteracy MOOC talk. I wonder if you would care to explain more fully?
ReplyDeleteI rather looked at the unregulated aspect of his speech of the Tragedy of the Commons. As Dr. Delano pointed out at the sustainability decline with free access to physical things like national parks and land, I focused on the pattern of social behavior. When left to our own devices people likely keep things unclean and left around debris in our wake. I relate it similarly in how media and news is treated. Gossipers grab at the things that interest them and spread it like a virus. Order and importance of actual events and "what matters in the world" may be garbled by what is particularly trending.
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