In Which I (finally!) Had Reliable Internet, Actually Showed Up in Person to my Internship, and Learned About Echo Chambers

Hello, hello! It's been a rough two weeks- not only has my internet failed me at crucial times, but my computer decided it was going to freeze every other second, rendering it rather difficult to actually get any of my work done. But fear not! I have returned safely and with a rebooted laptop, so hopefully I will no longer have any hiccups on the way.

In what internet time I did have in India, I managed to work on a few things: one, I continued to update my elections spreadsheet; two, I began evaluating different social media in order to determine which sites were reliable sources of information; and three, I wrote an article for the NOW newsletter based upon my findings.

Finding information on elections has continued to be horribly confusing and rather frustrating. Although several city and county clerks have been eager to help us on our quest to catalog all of the upcoming elections in the state, it seems that several members of local government have contradicting information, which only complicates the process further. In fact, as of now, we have 4 different spreadsheets: (1) Cities/ Counties with Confirmed Elections in 2017, (2) Cities/Counties With Confirmed Elections in 2018, (3) Inconclusive Data, and (4) Cities/Counties With Possible Elections in 2017.

However, my other endeavors have been slightly more successful. I began digging through several feminist (and anti-feminist) sites in the past two weeks, evaluating for overall reliability about information on violence against women. I spent hours on the NOW website, the World Health Organization website, and even an anti-feminist website called (super-originally) The Anti-Feminist (warning: this site has several explicit mentions of non-consensual sexual activity, misogyny, and pedophilia). I also spent a lot of time looking through Twitter handles of popular feminist magazines and activist groups; I attempted to find anti-feminist Twitter handles for balance, but it seems that even the most popular of anti-feminists only has around 10,000 followers, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands that organizations like Ms., Bitch Media, and the Feminist Majority have- it would not be a fair comparison to put such different handles in the same pool.

(Side Fun Fact: As of February 20, Kellyanne Conway, advisor to Donald Trump, follows a Women Against Feminism Twitter account. The ironic thing is that said account is a parody created by Australian comedian Rebecca Shaw).

Anyways, I wrote an article for the upcoming NOW Newsletter based upon my findings. The most crucial thing which I learned- which is also helpful for my SP- is that social media has the tendency to create echo chambers. That is, because of the selective nature of the algorithms which most social media sites use, people often only see and connect with like-minded individuals, which leads to a polarization of thought. In other words, people's thoughts "echo" back to them in echo chambers.
I'll see if I can link the article to this blog after the newsletter is published.

For this week, I'm hoping to finalize my survey questions and start distributing them as well. Wish me luck, and see you next time!