blog post #1
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This week, we are presented with the task to show the world what our media diets look like. Today is Friday, 28 August 2026. I am off of work today, so I have plenty of time to consume some media.
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8:40 a.m. This morning, like every morning, I get up and take my dog outside to use the bathroom, and I feed her. Just in case you’re wondering what she looks like…
continuing on… I always scroll through social media/news whenever I wake up. Facebook this morning featured my friend’s military re-enlistment, my nephew losing his first tooth, and … LIONS LOOSE IN INDIANA?! Yes, lions loose in Indiana, my home state. I usually scroll through the News app presented by Apple just to see what’s all wrong in the world, and I come across this Iran piece, it was very interesting. Being in intel, it’s sort of my job.
10:52 a.m. I was scrolling through Instagram, and I see a video come up from a page I followed last year. The page is called notinregz. A lot of people in the military, especially enlisted, follow this page. Scrolling, I see the below photo. This goes to show how easy this is! Being able to verify AI videos is so important. They now have AI detector applications, or sometimes you can tell just based off of the quality of the video. While I could not find the actual video on youtube or anywhere else online for you all to view, here is another “soldier” selling his wooden flags while obviously being AI.
12:00 p.m. Not a lot was happening around this time. I went to Target to get some house necessities, and I listened to one of my favorite artists as of late – Don Toliver. I was shopping for a while, and I waited in line while looking on facebook’s busted newspaper to see who’s been arrested in my hometown.
1:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Today has been a long day. After getting home from Target, I cleaned my whole entire house and rearranged EVERYTHING! This took forever! During my cleaning session, I listened to my absolute favorite podcast ever – Murder With My Husband. It’s a podcast based on true crime, and the main host does it with, you guessed it, her husband. The craziest episode that stuck out to me was the case of two twins. It goes on to say that the boy twin, Ben, killed his twin sister while he was sleepwalking!
7:35 p.m. Around this time, I was really bored and really full after making dinner. I was watching my favorite show that I’ve watched at least 3 other times – The Vampire Diaries. I was scrolling through my phone browsing around different applications like Instagram, Facebook, and the news. I see different military memes – those come across A TON. I love dogs, so I see animals pop up quite a bit, too. There’s also posts from my hometown about corn mazes and fall stuff happening already! Nothing too interesting.
8:44 p.m. Here is where it gets interesting. The News application on my phone shows me an article posted from today about how a certain sweetener used in gum could cause health related problems. Usually, I’m not one to click on something like that. I always find health related articles/research a little disturbing I guess, because they can usually find something wrong with all of the good food I love to eat. The main reason this article stuck out to me was its verbiage. Media has a very daunting way to make readers hooked onto what they are laying their eyes on. This specific article uses numbers and percentages, as research often does, to prove a point and make the story sound more alarming. The higher the xylitol, the higher risk of major health problems. Which does sound scary at a glance. However; it takes a turn when the article admits that the long-term effects haven’t been widely studied. It makes you question how sure we can be based off of a headline. Why not conduct more research instead of publishing an article making it seem immediate?
9:11 p.m. After a tad more Vampire Diaries, I found myself getting super tired. I was on FaceTime for a while until I felt myself dozing off.
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Looking back at the media I had consumed during the whole day, it feels as if I have come across more questionable material than not. I don’t really know what I expected out of this assignment. Maybe no news at all or even just simple stories that really don’t catch your eye. The main two stories that I did fact check were the lions loose in Indiana and the AI military video. I compared multiple news stories about the lions because even other STATES were posting articles about it. One person actually had seen the mother and cub and took a photo of them. For the AI video, while the Instagram page did not have one source of origination, I did find the exact same thing on youtube! Sure enough, 99% generated AI.
The article about xylitol really made me think about how reliable it actually is. You can sort of compare this to the article we read in class about election rumors. The number one factor in the article that can relate to this xylitol article is uncertainty. Will I have a heart attack if I keep chewing gum? Will I have a stroke if I continue chewing gum? There’s uncertainty here due to the fact that they use statistics while also stating that the long-term effects are unknown. So why publish an article and possibly scare people without proper research?
Overall, I think I noticed more questionable content on social media involving claims that could be shocking or worrisome. For me, I think I would fact check posts that I come across on Facebook or Instagram or other social media platforms than news sources because social media is so easy to manipulate and spread rapidly.
