Good morning!
Since my last update, we’ve continued to refine the concept for our final project, and we’ve narrowed down our topic to the concept of trending, whether that be through the Facebook trending bar, trending topics and hashtags on Twitter and Instagram, or websites such as Buzzfeed which are heavily based around the idea of what is currently trending across the world.
We want to explore the concepts behind how what is trending are calculated, how celebrity culture influences this, and what it means for the online media space.
This week, we have been learning about the power of search engines, site rankings, and Google. Search Engine rankings are a form of trending within themselves, as the first results on any given search are the most popular results, and therefore the “trending” sites for those search terms. In this week’s Finkelstein reading, however, the concept of popularity vs. authority was raised. He notes that often results reflect an existing hierarchy rather than the most authoritative results. This is interesting to consider in relation to social media, as quite often trending topics and stories are later proven to be false or to contain incorrect information. It just takes a few popular accounts on Twitter using a hashtag to make it trend, and then any form of information can be spread. We plan on looking further into this concept throughout our project.
Georgie
#GoingViral 