Always On Crowds

     The Internets ability to work together to find something, or crowd sourcing, is a fascinating thing, especially since some people cant even work that well together. The only problem is that the Internet can come together to be helpful, and end up being very wrong. This is shown very well with the peoples beliefs that they had found the Boston Bomber before the police had. The used the images that they found of the bombing to figure out who the bomber was. They even decided that they had figured out exactly what the bomb looked like based off of these images. The only problem: they were completely  wrong. 

     In the picture above it shows what they thought was the backpack that the bombers used and they're even saying that the guy with the blurred face is the bomber, he wasn't. While its great that all of these people came together to help solve a problem it didn't work, an had the FBI actually taken this into consideration they could have gotten the wrong person and that would have just created an even bigger mess than was already there. 

     On the other hand it is possible for people to solve problems. Facebook and Reddit users actually solved the case of a boy that had gone missing twenty years before. They created an image and had it posted all over the Internet, until people began to figure out who the boy, dubbed Grateful Doe, was. The people that helped figure this out helped close a cold case while also helping the boys mother move on. Below is the image that was posted for people to see, the image that actually helped find out what had happened to "Grateful Doe".

     In this instance crowd sourcing actually worked to help solve an important issue, but what about when people use crowed sourcing for something stupid? Does that still make it useful to the world? There is an entire database for Bigfoot sightings in America, this is an example of using crowd sourcing for something stupid. They have all of their sightings organized by state, which you can see below, and then by county within each state. While some states haven't had any updates in recent years, some are very up to date, which shows us where all of the crazies live in our country. 

     Crowd sourcing can be used for very helpful things on the Internet, like finding a missing person, or idiotic things, like finding Bigfoot. It can also be wrong when it thinks it is completely right, like with the Boston Bomber. I think this shows us that crowd sourcing can be great, or it can be a complete disaster, lets all hope that there is some middle ground out there somewhere. 

Always On Response

      In Matt's blog he talks about how the political candidates are always on twitter and goes into detail with Donald Trumps tweets. He explains that the political battlefield is getting even worse since someone handed the candidates a twitter account. Donald Trumps constant attacks on Hillary show this really well, and lead me to believe that Matt is correct in his evaluation. Donald Trump uses his tweets to attack Hillary, like the one below.

     Matt goes on to explain that the use of twitter allows for us to get a glimpse into the candidates lives that we may have not gotten otherwise. I'm not sure If I agree with this because the candidates don't really use their accounts for this. If you followed both of them on twitter you would really only see election related tweets, and not much else. They don't really delve into their own lives on their social media. If they did tweet about their every day lives more then maybe that would make them seem more real to some people. 

     In Tyler's blog he talks about how we as a society are always on our phones and social media. He compares Hillary Clinton to Vitaly Zdorovetskiy, one being the Democratic nominee and the other being a YouTube sensation. In comparing these two Tyler shows us that we as people will follow whats popular, and right now they both are. I agree with Tyler because its true, these are almost like fad follows. Hillary Clinton is popular because she is running for president and we all want to know what she is going to say next on Twitter, and Vitaly is YouTube famous, and we made him that way. So until something better comes along these two will be big on twitter.