There are so many changes that have been made to society in comparison to 1990. I chose the launching of the Hubble Telescope as it was a monumental moment of history that led to many discoveries in the scientific community. This was the first time that pictures could be taken in outer space without the need for humans to be physically present to take the photos. In today’s times, there are many ways that the advertisement and excitement of this event could be shared. In 1990, people would be forced to watch this event on television. Today, thousands of people could have watched this moment on their portable phones. This would have created a bigger outreach. While this could have been considered a global event, this was an American telescope, so in 1990, this may not have been known to as many people outside of the United States. With the use of Twitter, thousands of people may have retweeted the “fake posts” and seen the coverage. Another change is the idea of the live stream. People are now able to broadcast their activities in real time, and live television is not limited to broadcasting networks. In today’s time, there would have been many live streams with different perspectives to show how the Hubble Telescope was launched. Due to the increase of personal live streams, the process behind the building of the Hubble Telescope may have been seen first hand by everyone. The down side to the changes of modern technology and social media is that while these experiences are more hands-on, many are prone to not know the real news behind events, and only see headlines as depicted in the fake tweets. Tweets are often too concise and short to convey full length articles or reportage, so the only information that people are getting is that the launch is occurring.
This relates back to the idea that most people only see their news on social media sites, as the article, “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election,” insinuates. According to this article, as many as 14% of people see social media as the most important form of receiving news. The article also states that because of this, news outlets have effectively lost their source of power. People watching this Hubble Scope live stream would most likely not be watching the news at the same time, contributing to the current decrease in specifically paper news.
As I was creating these series of fake tweets to broadcast the event, I realized how easy it was to make these. I was able to create all three tweets in less than 15 minutes, which if frankly quite concerning. I have seen a multitude of posts on a spread of social media networks in which people argue in the comments as to whether the information in the posts has been photoshopped, made up, or in fact real. A lot of these comments are split between people who are outraged at the fake post, but there is a strong percentage of comments that are outraged because they believe the posts are real. This leads me to become concerned for the future of society, especially because the beliefs of these fake posts have contributed to the election of a corrupt president like Donald Trump. I wonder if there is anything that we can do to prevent the ease of such technology and the fast paced movement towards the prevalence of fake news.
