Research for major project: Covid and Social Media Pandemic

 Using Google's search engine "Chrome" I researched about the Covid19 pandemic and social media to get a wider idea of the two subjects together and how they interact with each other.

Source:Oxford Academic

In this article it is stated that social media had a huge impact on how people from around the world perceive the virus and how it affected values, like unity, by expressing wrong ideas about certain nationalities (e.g. Chinese people or people from Asian countries). Ideologies that were born through stereotypes and racism, spread across the globe like wildfire and with the help of Facebook, Youtube, Twitter etc.

This can have catastrophic effects on our society, and the reason for that is because the world is introduced to restrictions that differentiate from the ones it is used to. One example of that is flight restrictions, that can lead to a very significant loss of money, thus an unrecoverable economic crisis. This is only one of a few problems that arise from such poor handle of the ideas spread by means of communication. We need to act as active civilians to address respond to public rumours, perceptions attitudes and behaviours surrounding the COVID pandemic.

Because of the difference between the participants nationality and field of study we can ask them about their opinion for the effects of the virus in the global economy and the crisis that our ethics ,as humans, are currently experiencing

Afterwards, I researched the topic further and stumbled upon a website discussing the role of social media during the virus outburst.

Source:Role of social media at the pandemic

and this youtube video from CBS News

Video

From this video I heard a brand new word which describes perfectly the role of social media during the pandemic spread through the planet and that is "infodemic". This word is used to express an overabundance of information which some accurate and some are not and that confuses general population because it becomes a challenge to find trustworthy information about the virus. Humans nowadays look for answers to their questions using  the internet which is something that must be avoided in this cases because the web is filled with false and misleading information about topics that there are still unknown aspects of them (e.g. the virus and its cure). Also the information shown from a search on a topic in the web varies from person to person. Their are many aspects of a mans life that affects the information the internet is showing to someone

In addition of that, I used the knowledge gained by watching the Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma" to understand how information is been chosen for each individual, and how it all connects to misinformation. For example the web search would show different results for a human practising homeopathy and different to a doctor. This is also the conclusion from this article from wired.

Wired

Google can guess what the viewer wants to see based on what he searched from the past and what other people searched from all around the globe. That is why the results shown on the screen of the viewer most probably will show websites that agree with his opinion in certain topics.

This research will be used in my documentary, specifically in the creation of the questions. I will be asking my participants about their search results when they search about the virus and social media and record their answers. Furthermore, their opinion about infodemic will play a large role to the final conclusion of the video so the info I collected could benefit me, as the writer, to deliver a more academically appropriate and spherical closure.

Reflection: Researching for my major project proven to be very useful to get an idea on what to include on my video. Getting some inside from specialist on the field assisted in the creation of the questions I asked the participants.