WI: Syria and Immagration

For this Well Informed post I decided to do a search on Facebook instead of google to see what I would find on a social media platform about Syria and immigration. Before I started the search I guessed that I would find a lot of posts about ISIS and terrorism, however when I typed "Syria immigration" in the Facebook search box I mostly found reports about politicians' and political comentators' reaction to mass immigration from Syria. 

Seriously though I shouldn't be all that surprised about the search results. Given that we are in the middle of election season here in the US if you search for anything controversial, be it on google or social media, you will probably find that the majority of links, like this one, are about something a politician said on the topic or some kind of political commentary. Honestly, I don't think that is the best thing for Americans that are trying to be well informed. We would be much better served if when we searched these topics, more links were dedicated to investigative journalism pieces or feature stories like this. For example Americans would be much more well informed about Syria and immigration if the stories we searched for tell us more facts about the refugees and their reasons for immigrating, instead of political rhetoric about why we should or shouldn't accept Syrian refugees into our country. This is simply another example the politics of a situation taking precedence over the substance of it in social media.

OTM 3: Collapse of ISIS propaganda machine

Bob Garfield interviewed Charlie Winter a researcher at the International Center for the study of radicalization and political violence about the recent decline of ISIS propaganda. Winter claims that ISIS propaganda is declining and that the decline can be contributed to a couple of things. First social media sites are being more vigilant at identifying accounts that may be linked to terrorists and/or ISIS and shutting them down. Second the US military has successfully killed or captured much of ISIS' leadership in the past year this has caused disarray in ISIS.
My thoughts as I listened to this is if ISIS is weakening, then why is there still so much debate on how to defeat them? It seems to me like our strategy of cutting them off on social media and targeted drone attacks is working. The memory of 9/11 and the psychological context of the entire "war on terror" might be what is driving that feeling that we aren't doing enough to defeat ISIS and/or that what we are doing isn't working. It could just be Trump constantly talking about ISIS that is causing the misperception. In my opinion both the memory of 9/11 and the recent ISIS attacks as well as Trump's nonstop rhetoric evoke a psychological response within us that makes us feel like whatever we do to combat terrorist organizations is not enough. The fear of the next attack makes us disregard whatever real progress we are making in this fight against terrorism.

OTM 2: The Poverty Tour

Brooke Gladstone went on a poverty tour in Ohio and interviewed welfare advocate Jack Frech. Frech suggests that the poverty crisis in America has less to do with liberal or conservative politics and more to do with the American popluation that does not want to change their mind about poor people. For so long many people including myself have been indoctrinated in the idea that poor people are poor because they are lazy or stupid. If they only were willing to work hard or if only they were capable of making smarter decisions they wouldn't be poor. Frech says this those are the misperceptions that Americans deal in all the time when it comes to poor people.
I am taking a sociology class this semester and in that class we talk about what things in our society are contributing influences to human behavior. This OTM illuminated the social context in which Frech and Gladstone were speaking about America's poverty problem. If we're seeing the poor as products of their own poor choices or as products of their unintelligence than we're not seeing a bigger problem which is the lack of support these the poor receives in our country. The true solution to this problem will be found after we as an American society understand that it may not be the poor that need to change as much as the wealthier middle and upper class does.