Blog #9 EOTO Illusory Truth Effect

 It is false but you believe it is true. It is the Illusory truth effect. The effect was found during a study at the universities of Villanova and Temple in 1977.  More specifically, studying The Illusory Truth Effect has found that, "Repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information. This finding is known as the illusory truth effect, and it is typically thought to occur because repetition increases processing fluency. Because fluency and truth are frequently correlated in the real world, people learn to use processing fluency as a marker for truthfulness.”. In simple terms, the more we hear something, the more likely we are to believe that it is true. The more we hear the words "Russia, Russia, Russia", "Russia did this", "Russia, did that", we are much more likely to believe that Russia Russia Russia actually did do something, even if there is little strong evidence that they did. 

The more we hear a claim, the more likely we are to buy into whatever is being sold, even if it seems outrageous. More exactly, people are almost always more likely than not to rate statements that they have viewed before as being true, no matter whether it is or is not. Even more than this though, studying a subject does not even safeguard against The Illusory Truth Effect. Even those who took 3rd-grade science class and learned that spiders have eight legs could be fooled into (or have a higher likelihood of) believing that spiders have nine legs if they are given multiple sources claiming that spiders do in fact have nine legs.

For example, during the 2016 presidential campaign, there was online posting about how Hillary Clinton was running a child abuse sex trafficking ring with her at the time campaign chief John Podesta out of a pizza restaurant named Comet Ping Pong. There was never any real merit and no real reason to believe such outlandish claims. On December 4th, 2016 a man from North Carolina went into the pizza restaurant with a rifle and revolver, and attempted to free the children he believed were being held, and in the process fired a shot inside the building.

The Illusory Truth Effect can be described simply as "Fake News". "Fake News" is sometimes a word that turns others off, but it is very real, and can also be very convincing. Fake news is incredibly prevalent in the United States, with many Americans believing, protesting, and voting based on things that never even happened. Where there is fake news there is the Illusory Truth Effect. No matter how prepared someone believes they are, the illusory truth effect can get to them. Simply seeing something that is false, even if someone knows it is false, will raise the likelihood that they believe it may be true, even if just by five percent! Fake news and the Illusory Truth Effect can become a thing of the past, but only if we step up as a society and stop publishing hyper-reactionary, clickbait, sometimes entirely false claims, only in the intent of profiting both politically and financially. Fake news and subsequently the Illusory Truth Effect can become history if we as a society put our values in truth, and not political or financial gain.

Blog #8 Big Brother

According to the TED Talk by Catherine Crump, the government as a whole is gathering information on us. This is not just at the Federal level but at the local level. At the very local level the police are monitoring and recording where we go and even sometimes who we're with. They use Stingray technology, allowing them to see whose phones are in a house, and even cell tower dumps where cell phone providers give law enforcement all the cell phone action that occurred in a certain area. The Federal level uses this information gathered by the local level to develop databases and track where and what Americans do all over the country.

Not only that, but our governments want to be able to listen to our phone calls, they want to be able to read our texts. Even though the governments may be able to more easily catch criminals, they would at the same time be listening to people who have never before committed a crime. It isn't just the government gathering information on us, however. 

We give the government and many others plenty of information about us; who we are, where we go, who we're with, our thoughts and opinions, how we decide to vote, how active we are in politics, the list goes on. The government and anyone else that wants to profit off of our information does not have to even wiretap us to find all of this out. all they have to do is look at any of our social media pages. It's all right there for them to gather. The digital footprints we leave are us voluntarily giving away many identifiable markers to big companies, governments, or anyone that is simply just curious.

Some may not care about any of this. Sometimes there's this mindset of, "I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care.". The issues listed above should spook anyone as these issues affect all of us. With just cell tower dumps, Stingray technology, and licence plate photography we're being monitored and tracked by our government without even doing anything wrong. The government should refrain from gathering such information on its own citizens. We live in a society where the law gives us the presumption of innocence. The government should not be bulldozing our privacy, especially without any reason or cause, and they certainly should not be storing it in any database.

What can we do in order to retain and protect ourselves from an overreach into our privacy? An easy start would be to make sure what we post on social media is not something we would want governments and other actors to be interested in. Another way to safeguard against breaches in privacy, specifically wiretapping, is to make calls over facetime audio, as they have default encryption features installed. Finally as suggested by Catherine Crump in her TED Talk, we can lobby our local city councils to have their local police departments erase the databases they've developed on innocent citizens.

Blog #7 Diffusion of innovation- Vinyl Records

Vinyl records are perhaps the greatest, if not one of the greatest innovations to ever come to music. In 1930 the first long-playing vinyl record was launched as plastic discs. Then in 1948 Columbia Records began releasing Polyvinyl chloride records; which could play more music than their predecessors. They then eventually moved from 78 rpm (rotations per minute) to 33 rpm. The record was so innovative because it was the first piece of technology that allowed people to listen to the music they wanted, whenever they wanted, from anywhere they lived. Of course there was the radio, but someone would have to sit on a specific station and wait for the station to decide to play the song. With the record, anyone could listen to an entire album by an artist as many times as they chose to, and from any place in the album. 

   By looking at the Diffusion of Innovation Theory, we can see what the innovation was. The early adopters would have to be the DJs who played the records.  The early majority would probably be everyone else who followed along and bought record to listen to at home while vinyl records exploded in popularity through the 1950s-1980s.  The introduction of the cassette tape and CD player did lead to a decline in the sale of vinyl, very heavily in the 1990s.

So many people likely became early adopters because it was new, it was revolutionary, it was the brand new and only way to listen to what you want where you want. For the most part there are no real downsides to the technology, and no real reason why someone would choose to not own vinyl, unless they did not like music or choice (at least in the 1950s). Today it would be expected that vinyl would be dead, as we now have on-demand music to stream whenever-absolutely-anywhere. However, vinyl has made a comeback, as earlier this year it outsold CDs for the first time since 1987. This may relate less to the diffusion theory in relation to vinyl records, however it could relate to those who have started to reject on-demand streaming and look for a more "pure" sound.