Reader Response Draft 4

In the article “The Perils of Over-sharing in Social Networks”, Emm (2014) talks about the ever increasing danger of using the internet. The author writes about how recent news of authorities and large corporations spying on citizens have surfaced. This problem is further exacerbated since the internet is increasingly being used in many areas of our lives, from communication to monetary transactions. Emm highlights the importance of being careful about what information is made accessible to others online as it may reach unintended audiences with malicious motives. Such seemingly harmless information when pieced together or interpreted by the right person can inadvertently reveal a trove of information about a person. Emm states that these attackers are able to target any device able to connect to the internet, and people are complacent when it comes to protecting their handphones due to attacks being rare. People thus need to act with caution to protect themselves these dangers.

The dangers of the online world shared by the author seem to be exaggerated to gain online readership. Although what he presents in his blogpost is factually true, he scares the readers into believing that they are at risk more than they actually are by introducing out of the ordinary situations as commonplace.

One idea given by Emm is regarding the government collecting data from its citizens. Emm writes about how “many feel uncomfortable” about this collection of information. However, for many ordinary citizens who go about their daily lives, the government monitoring their online activities should not be alarming since there is nothing to hide. As long as the government uses these information gathered in a respectable manner, there is no reason to be worried. After all, this data is used to combat crimes and keep citizens safe. Emm misses the point that some of these information collected under the guise of security purposes, are sometimes used to support the government agenda by blackmailing and spying on dissidents. However, such incidences are believed to be extremely rare and used on a very few vocal people, thus this should not worry the majority.

In his blogpost, Emm writes about the risks of posting information on one’s life online lest someone unintended abuses the information for industrial benefit. Emm is right about how many have access to information which is sensitive and has to be protected. However, he does not establish well the link between posting information on ones personal life and the compromise of sensitive information. The example given by him to explain this point is extremely unlikely to happen, and has been carefully chosen to boost his argument. Indeed it is true that information a person makes public online poses a possible threat to him, but this is heavily dramatized in the article. Emm’s example is inaccurate to the reality of the situation, and is perhaps written for the entertainment of the reader.

Emm then moves on to the social aspect, discussing the consequence of oversharing by using the example of a boss reading an employee's facebook page. Emm again provides his readers with a scenario that applies to a select few. To the minority population who enjoy such lives of late night parties and partake in questionable content, surely even fewer are foolish enough to make such information available to their colleagues and bosses via social media lest they come under scrutiny. This example is nevertheless able to capture the imagination of the reader by providing great entertainment but perhaps little practical use.

Emm's article is dramatized perhaps to provide a getaway to peoples mundane lives, citing examples which are relevant to a small minority but capture the imagination of many. There is however some truth in what Emm is trying to convey. It is true that computers are being targeted and infected with viruses at a rampant rate. However, the most malicious of viruses are usually to steal bank details, credit card numbers, or to create illegal botnets. These are a real threat to the population and their computers, and thus keeping ones computer protected and avoiding shady sites and dubious links are usually more than sufficient in keeping the average man safe.

Emm, D. (2014, March 21). The Perils of Over-sharing in Social Networks [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/david-emm/the-perils-of-over-sharing-in-social-networks_b_5005276.html

Essay Prompt Draft 4

With the commercialisation of the internet, the freedom of information on the internet has led to an overwhelming catalogue of information online, from personal opinion to academic papers. However, having few regulations in cyberspace has resulted in an increasing spread of misinformation and disinformation, some with motives to humour, and others with malicious intent. Regardless of the intent, many people often get fooled by the false content online created by satirical websites. This problem is further exacerbated when the disinformation presented is something which the public wants to believe. Action needs to be taken such that one can accurately judge the content online. Therefore, Google should implement an online content rating system to caution users of the websites that they are visiting, so that they can be warned of what others had to say about that particular website.

Satirical websites result in many misleading articles and social media posts, fooling many into believing such information is true and factual when in fact much is completely made up. Very often such websites indicate in fine print or do not indicate at all that they post satirical articles, contributing to the deception. One example of how such “news” has fooled many would be the article by National Report on how a 15 year old in Los Angeles who “swatted” another gamer was convicted of domestic terrorism and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment (Cruz, 2014). Upon the release of the article, it was widely circulated by many online news websites and social media, many of whom reported it as authentic. According to Barker (2014), the article was shared 200, 000 times on Facebook, and received many comments applauding the decision of the judge. Barkers’ opinion was that the article was more than convincing to deceive the average reader, and would have fooled everyone except for the fact that National Report was the only paper which covered the trial, and this ultimately led to the hoax being unveiled. Scams like these are common. According to Wikipedia, media outlets have reported National Report’s satire as fact 13 times since the creation of the National Report website in 2013. Such satirical news articles are hard for the readers and even media outlets to guard against, given the authentic appearance of the articles.

The current solution put forward by the Singapore government to tackle this problem is the regulation of news websites. News websites, satirical or not, have perceived reliability due to the term “news” being used, and thus clamping down on websites that claim to be news but are instead downright misleading is a good approach. In this approach, the government takes the role of deciding if the website reports news which actually took place, and if necessary, takes action to remove misleading websites. This is, however, a limited approach. It takes time to implement and identify errant websites, and is only applicable to Singaporean news websites.

A better solution would be for Google to implement an online content rating system which relies on public feedback to better warn users of the content that they are reading. After an online user has visited a website or read some news on social media, that person can choose to write a user review on their web browser which would then pick the majority review response and display it for other users who are visiting the website or reading the news. This method relies on user feedback, and thus a vast number of websites can be moderated. This is especially useful since websites with heavy traffic will receive more feedback from a wider range of people, enhancing the credibility. Examples of tags that websites could have by the Google browser could take the form of “this website is known for satirical content” or “this website has been flagged for extreme views”.  Had National Report been flagged as a satirical website, many people would have not been fooled so easily by the article and such a spectacle could have been avoided easily.

While the internet has stayed relatively free from regulations since its inception, implementation of an internet content rating system by web browsers are long overdue. In the implementation of such a system, care has to be made that user’s privacy details are not unnecessarily revealed, or websites could be manipulated and abused to show false ratings. In the end, the onus is on the users to verify if the content they are viewing comes from reliable sources. There is only so many measures that the Singapore government and organisations such as Google can do to prevent the spreading of false information. Ultimately, some discretion is needed before one shares “news” over social media.

Critical Reflection Draft

Write a critically reflective post on the topic “The Role of Peer and Tutor Feedback." Explain your view of that feedback, how it impacted your developing writing skills, and  whether/how you might have transferred content, organization and language skills learned in the course to writing assignments within any other module. This should be 300 to 400 words.

Background: like an intro of your life.

Starting from our first online assignment, peer and tutor feedback has been an integral part of the ES1102 learning journey

Peer feed back

+usefulness

Peer feedback is valuable in helping correct many of the surface mistakes being made, as well as giving alternative viewpoints and insights to the students writing which might have been missed by him.

                -receiving
Useful, however the feedback is often not targeted. Feedback is mostly superficial and rarely targets the fundamental problems of an essay, but rather just the minor details of spelling and grammatical errors.

Accuracy of the feedback. The feedback is coming from a peer, and sometimes, this feedback is inaccurate. Although majority of the feedback is valid, not everything which is feedback is true. Knowing this means that students now have to carefully discern if the feedback given is legitimate, and what is the context. Is the content in question out right wrong, or is the peer merely suggesting an alternate form of writing style, when there are no mistakes to begin with.

                -giving

+ A positive thing about feedback is that it forces a student to improve through giving feedback. As a student is giving feedback, he has to take into consideration about what is being required in his peers writing, and thus learning it for himself in the process.

Extremely difficult to give feedback.

Firstly, we are untrained. Although we are given a “crash course” with pointers on what to do, almost as much time is spent understanding what is required within the rubrics than actually reading and giving feedback on the essay.

Secondly to give feedback, one needs to be able to tell what is wrong. Many students have different styles of writing and rarely know a different way of writing apart from their own, thus when reading another person’s essay it is not clear where the mistakes are, since students themselves would have phrased the same content in another way. When a student is unsure of even their own writing, which should be the general reality since they have to attend a course like ES1102, asking them to give feedback on similarly skilled writers would reap a mediocre result at best.

Tutor feedback

                -receiving (frequency of feedback)
Very useful, however there are limitations on the amount of tutor feedback given, since each essay takes very long to read and the teacher has many students.

Presentation Reflection

The thought of presenting my essay idea to the whole class is an intimidating one. Although I consider myself to be confident, and have done many presentations before, preparing and executing a presentation is no easy task. I ran through the content I was going to present in my head many times, as well as practice presenting in front of my laptop. However, practicing at home and delivering in school are vastly different.
Although I fumbled by forgetting to mention one major aspect of my project, I managed to quickly recover by moving on quickly without it being visually obvious to the audience. I believe that performance during a presentation depends on preparation. On hindsight, I should have practiced presenting more so that I would have been more confident during my presentation

Critical Reflection

Starting from our first online assignment, peer and tutor feedback has been an integral part of the ES1102 learning journey.

Peer feedback is valuable in helping correct many of the surface mistakes being made, as well as giving alternative viewpoints and insights to the students writing which might have been missed by them. However these feedback given is often not targeted. Feedback given by students are mostly superficial and rarely targets the fundamental problems of an essay, but instead targets the minor details of spelling and grammatical errors.

Accuracy of the feedback given by peers is also another issue. The feedback by peers can sometimes be inaccurate. Although majority of the feedback given is valid, not everything reflected is feedback is true. Knowing this means that students now have to carefully discern if the feedback given is legitimate, and in what context. In some cases the peer may merely be suggesting an alternate form of writing style, when there were no mistakes to begin with.

A positive thing about feedback is that it forces a student to improve through giving feedback. As a student is giving feedback, he has to take into consideration about what is being required in his peers writing, and thus learning it for himself in the process.

However, it is extremely difficult for students to create this feedback. Firstly, the students giving feedback have no formal training. Although students are given a “crash course” with pointers on what to do, almost as much time is spent understanding what is required within the rubrics than actually reading and giving feedback on the essay. Secondly to give feedback, one needs to be able to tell what is wrong. Many students have different styles of writing and rarely know a different way of writing apart from their own, thus when reading another person’s essay it is not clear where the mistakes are, since students themselves would have phrased the same content in another way. When a student is unsure of even their own writing, asking them to give feedback on similarly skilled writers would reap a mediocre result at best.

Tutor feedback is very useful in addressing the problems of the essays, as well as giving good pointers. However there are limitations on the amount of tutor feedback given, since each essay takes very long to read and each teacher has many students.

Essay prompt draft 3

With the commercialisation of the internet, the freedom of information on the internet has led to an overwhelming catalogue of information online, from personal opinion to academic papers. However, little regulations in cyberspace has resulted in an increasing spread of misinformation and disinformation, some with motives to humour, and others with malicious intent. Regardless of the intent, many people often get fooled by the false content online created by satirical websites. This problem is further exacerbated when the disinformation presented is something which the public wants to believe. Action needs to be taken such that one can accurately judge the content online. Therefore, google should implement an online content rating system to caution users of the websites that they are visiting, so that they can be warned of what others had to say about that particular website.

Satirical websites result in many misleading articles and social media posts, fooling many into believing these information are true and factual when in fact they were completely made up. Very often such websites indicate in fine print or do not indicate at all that they post satirical articles, contributing to the deception. One example of how such “news” has fooled many would be the article by National Report on how a 15 year old who “swatted” another gamer, was convicted of domestic terrorism and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment. Upon the release of the article, it was widely circulated by many online news websites and social media, all of which believed the articles authenticity. According to Barker from The Daily Dot, the article was shared 200, 000 times on Facebook, and received many comments applauding the decision of the judge. Barkers’ opinion was that the article was more than convincing to deceive the average reader, and would have fooled everyone except for the fact that National Report was the only paper which covered the trial, and this ultimately led to the hoax being unveiled. Scams like these are common. According to Wikipedia, media outlets have reported National Report’s satire as fact 13 times since the creation of the National Report website in 2013. Such satirical news are hard for the readers and even media outlets to guard against, given the authentic appearance of the articles.

The current solution put forward by the Singapore government to tackle this problem is the regulation of news websites. News websites, satirical or not, have perceived reliability due to the term “news” being used, and thus clamping down on websites that claim to be news but are instead downright misleading is a good approach. In this approach, the government takes the role of deciding if the news reported is newsworthy, and if necessary, takes action to remove misleading websites. This is however a limited approach which takes time to implement and identify errant websites, and is only applicable to Singaporean news websites.

A better solution would be for Google to implement an online content rating system which relies on public feedback to better warn users of the content that they are exposed to. After an online user has visited a website or read some news on social media, they can choose to write a user review on their web browser which would then pick the majority review response and display it for other users who are visiting the website or reading the news. This method relies on user feedback and thus a vast number of websites can be moderated. This is especially useful since websites with heavy traffic will receive more feedback from a wider range of people, enhancing the credibility. Examples of tags that websites could have by the Google browser could take the form of: “this website is known for satirical content”, or “this website has been flagged for extreme views”.  Had National Report been flagged as a satirical website, many people would have not been fooled so easily by the article and such a spectacle could have been avoided easily.

While the internet has stayed relatively free from regulations since its inception, implementation of an internet content rating system by web browsers are long overdue. In the implementation of such a system, care has to be made that user’s privacies are not unnecessarily intruded upon, or websites becoming able to be manipulated and abused to show false ratings. In the end, the onus is on the user to verify if the content they are viewing come from reliable sources. According to Montgomery, the publisher of National Report, it is the readers fault for being deceived by satirical news and spreading misinformation over social media as genuine news, since they themselves did not cross reference the authenticity of the news before spreading it. There is only so much measures taken by the government and organisations such as Google can do to prevent the spreading of false information. Ultimately, some discretion is needed before one shares “news” over social media.

Barker, I. (2014, September 04). No, a teen wasn’t just sentenced to 25 years in prison for swatting. The Daily Dot. Retrieved from http://www.dailydot.com/esports/15-year-old-swatting-prison-sentence-hoax/

National Report. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved March 30, 2015, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Report

Peace, Chiu. (2013, May 28). 10 online news sites must follow traditional media regulations: MDA. [Supplemental material]. Yahoo Newsroom. Retrieved from https://sg.news.yahoo.com/10-online-news-sites-must-follow-traditional-media-regulations--mda-103906167.html

Essay Prompt Draft 2

Because in Singapore politics, the vocal minority are able to express their views over social media, resulting in dissidents spreading hate and deceiving readers, the ministry of education (MOE) should start educating teenagers to be well discerning of false information.

A worrying trend has begun, whereby people content with a particular system do little to air their content, while discontent people take it upon themselves to criticize the system openly, making sure their voices are heard by many. This has led to the terms “silent majority” and “vocal minority” being coined.

A lack of regulation results in a free for all online landscape, where almost anything can be put up leaving the reader to be well discerning of whatever they are reading. However, it is often difficult to cross reference information presented online, resulting in people often believing what they read or watch at face value. The spread of the most ridiculous articles on social media proves that many are often unable to easily discern from false information.

The lack of regulations online as well as a significant number of the public being unable to be well discerning of what they are reading results in the rise of purposefully spread disinformation originating from individuals or groups with vested interests. A well written argument based on false information complemented with professional charts can easily sway many, stirring up their emotions and convincing them to act. This is worrying especially since our political leaders are democratically elected and such disinformation can sway the minds of many impressionable voters resulting in politicians becoming dismissed. One clear example would be the Roy Ngerng saga. Ngerng made baseless accusations against the prime minister accusing him of misappropriation of money in an article. This article was shared by many among social media, which garnered him many supporters. Due to the high profile involvement in this case, Ngerng was taken to court and found guilty of defaming the prime minister.

However, this is not all. The nature of the online landscape combined with the vocal minority and silent majority mean that a small number of loud individuals can dominate the online scene, giving the ordinary folk a mistaken impression of the actual reality. Such behaviour is apparent on online forums, news website comments, and all over social media. Online, there are scores of people insulting the government on everything from government policies to politician’s salaries. If one solely looked at the online landscape, they would come to the conclusion that Singaporeans are very unhappy with their government. However popularity surveys and election polls show a much different reality.

The current solution put forward by the Singapore government is the regulation of news websites. News websites have additional perceived reliability due to the term “news” being used, and thus clamping down on websites that claim to be news but are indeed satire or actually merely personal opinion is a right step forward. In this approach, the government takes the role of deciding if the news reported is newsworthy, and if necessary, take action to remove misleading websites. This is however a reactive approach which does not tackle the root problem, since disinformation and hatred can still be spread in the forms of social media such as facebook posts and tweets which are practically impossible to regulate.

An active solution would be to educate the masses to equip them with skills to be able to evaluate arguments and spot people who are trying to deceive others. Once people are able to appropriately discern for themselves what is true and what may be trying to mislead, disinformation would not get much attention as it does today, and such information be immediately frowned upon. It is only because so many believe false information that these articles and posts are able to gain such popularity. One way to equip the public with critical thinking skills would be to introduce critical thinking classes in secondary school by the Ministry of Education. Critical thinking helps people think and accurately choose from themselves what to believe, through the consideration of a wide array of sources. By incorporating such lessons in secondary school, the public as a whole whom have all been through secondary school would have acquired such skills in the eventual future.

The problem of misleading information of the internet in the form of misleading arguments as well as overcrowding of negativity towards the government should ultimately be solved at its roots, by teaching individuals how to discern what information they come across. However, using this solution may not be so straightforward. In reality, there might be reasons for why even the government might not want to correct the problem with education. By equipping the masses with such skills, it would become harder to run the government as citizens will become more critical towards their actions, and hold them to a higher standard. In the latest World Press Freedom Index, Singapore ranked a measly 153 out of 180, and thus giving citizens critical thinking skills might perhaps not in reality help the government agenda.

1.Minlee. (2014, November 7). Blogger Roy Ngerng found guilty of defaming PM Lee. Asiaone news. Retrieved from http://news.asiaone.com/news/singapore/blogger-roy-ngerng-found-guilty-defaming-pm-lee

2.Peace, Chiu. (2013, May 28). 10 online news sites must follow traditional media regulations: MDA. Yahoo newsroom. Retrieved from https://sg.news.yahoo.com/10-online-news-sites-must-follow-traditional-media-regulations--mda-103906167.html

3.2015 World Press Freedom Index. (2015). Retrieved from https://index.rsf.org/#!/