1. How is searching in a specific database, such as Ashford’s library, different from searching in Bing, Google, or Yahoo?
Specific databases, such as the one of Ashford’s library, often represent proprietary databases. It implies that only a limited number of users get access to the search engine after having paid a membership fee or by joining a certain institution. Usually they offer limited, yet targeted search options. Thus, accessing JSTOR one always expects to find a number of scholarly articles on the requested topic. On the other hand Bing, Google and Yahoo are public domain databases, where every internet user can search the necessary information. However, the retrieved results consider only the frequency of the key words’ use, thus returning many irrelevant websites. Therefore, although searching public domain databases is free and gives access to a larger pool of information, users have to spend time sorting the results obtained, in order to access only relevant websites.
2. The founder of Wikipedia has a noble mission "to share all the world’s information with everyone everywhere, anytime”. In what ways has this mission been successful? In what ways has it not been successful?
The story of Wikipedia is indeed the story of a great success. It is a unique online encyclopedia, where information is provided not by professional writers, but by all the users, who are willing to make their contribution. The endeavor of the creators was indeed successful, which can be seen by the fact that already in the first year Wikipedia generated more than 20,000 articles with the current number of articles just of the English-language edition approximately equal to 3,677,665. However, sharing “all the world’s information” is associated with a number of problems. Thus, no serious institution would accept a scientific work, which is referenced from Wikipedia. The issue here is both unstable and often incorrect nature of the information. Even despite the fact that moderators keep track of the created articles, it is impossible to control every piece of information shared. Moreover, the collective effort in knowledge creation makes it difficult to identify the author, who should be given credit for the work. This issue not only results into plagiarism, but also creates a collaborative version of the truth, where no extreme viewpoint is accepted (Nunes, 2011). Therefore, Wikipedia failed to become the source of academic, accurate and reliable knowledge, yet being a great source of information for everyday use.
3. Social networks allow people to connect for a variety of reasons in a digital environment. You might join LinkedIn to meet business contacts, MySpace to find a band member, or Facebook to see pictures of old friends and meet new ones. Whatever environment you decide to be a part of, posting information about you has become an issue of concern. What are those concerns? I mean what is the big deal about privacy?
Most of the social networks had transparency rather than privacy as their primary goal in the first years of social media development. Thus, at first any users’ information on Facebook was accessible by everyone. However, it has soon become apparent that a certain degree of privacy should be maintained even online. Negative information in social networks could cost some people their jobs or good relationships with their friends. Therefore, additional privacy settings have been added to social networks in order to avoid unintentional information release online, which could cause problems in real life. However, it is up to the user to decide which information to share and which should be kept private. Discretion and control are the only possible ways to secure one’s privacy even in the environment of social networks.
References
Bowles, M. D. (2010). Introduction to Computer Literacy. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint
Education.
Miller, D. (2011). Tales from facebook. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press
Nunes, M. (2011). Error: glitch, noise, and jam in new media cultures. New York, NY: The
Continuum International Publishing Group.
