Fear and Loathing in Homer and Rockville.

Blog Post #2 January 17, 2018

Ben Tyer is a resident in the town of Homer, Alaska, the city without much immigration, but all of the immigration issues. Ben, unlike many other citizens of the town, doesn’t want to immediately pick a side on the immigration issues. Instead, Ben tries to draw his own conclusion by doing tons and tons of research on the topic. He starts this research by using the internet and finding articles retaining to his topic. However, he wants all of the information he is finding to be reliable and accurate, because this is a really important decision he is making for his own life, his family’s life, and his town’s future. He states to the interviewer that he is not a huge news person, but is aware that many news profiles like The Washington Post are very bias towards one political side. So, he originally just starts off by reading articles from both sides of the arguments. His biggest struggle in finding information is finding unbiased and 100% reliable sources.

Ben takes a lot of steps to pick sources. Like I stated previously, Ben tried to avoid the bias new sites. On top of that, he did a lot of fact checking. If he found information on one website, like the information about the sexual assault issues on New Years Eve in Germany, he would fact check on many different sources to make sure it was accurate. After vividly researching multiple different reliable websites and sources that he thought were undeniably true, he drew a conclusion and decided to aire on the side of caution when it came to the immigrant debate in Homer. I go about my research in similar ways to Ben. I avoid the sources I know aren’t the most reliable, such as Wikipedia. One of my main ways of trusting websites if I am free searching instead of using databases is looking for .org sites. I also look at the dates to make sure they were recently published and check fact check author. I do think that it is possible, but extremely difficult and rare to find unbiased sources. Even in the podcast when Damien came on and talked to Ben he warned Ben about of many of the sources he used to make his decision. Damien said that the media spun or expanded the truth to make immigrants look like really bad people.

The community I am almost sure I will research is the vegetarians and vegans in college communities, specifically at FSU. I am not a vegan or vegetarian, but I did have interest in becoming one so I figured it would be interesting. In my opinion the college eating options, especially as a broke college kid, make it extremely difficult to avoid meat and animal products. I will explore how difficult it actually is to be a vegetarian or vegan in college.