The group assignment for this week was
to find one trustworthy and one less trustworthy website related to
our theme, which is technology. After that we were supposed to
discuss and analyse further the websites we had chosen. I guess
everyone else is currently visiting Lapland, since the conversation was not flowing.
 |
| MIT Technology Review's logo. |
The website that I chose to be the
trustworthy one is MIT Technology Review
(
http://www.technologyreview.com/).
The purpose of the website is to give information of the newest
technology to the audience in six languages and 13 regions worldwide.
This is how the website itself defines its purpose: ”The mission of
MIT Technology Review is to equip its audiences with the intelligence
to understand a world shaped by technology.” The website looks
professional: it is founded at Massachusettes Institute of Technology
and it has an ethics statement that can be found in the bottom of the
site. The argumentation is done with numbers of the statistics and by
interviewing experts if the issue. The most used mean of persuation
is
logos (reason). Since MIT Technology Review is all about
reliable technological news, there is no need to appeal to the
reader's emotions or the moral character of the rethor in the
articles.
 |
| Gizmodo's logo. |
Then there had to be another website,
untrustworthy compared to the first one. I chose ”Gizmodo –
Everything is Technology” (
http://gizmodo.com/).
It is a technology website based on blog texts and promoted posts.
The trustworthiness varies a lot through the articles, depending on
the author and the topic. The referenced researches have been overly
popularised, causing a lack of scientific argumentation on the
website. Gizmodo does not give that much information after all. The
most commonly used persuative means are
ethos and
pathos.
Since Gizmodo is supposed to be a web media about technology, it
would appear more trustworthy with the persuative means of
logos.
Too often the author only tells the facts based on his or her own
experiences or thoughts and tries to reach the audience with some
jokes.
 |
| MIT Technology Review is also published as a magazine. |
MIT Technology Review is trustworthy,
because the website has professional appearance. Also, the
organisation behind the website is academic. In the bottom of the
page can be found links to the website's different social media
accounts. Users can join the conversation by logging in with their
social media profile and writing sidenotes to the articles. There are
always scientific references mentioned as links in the text, which
makes the website seem trustworthy to me.
 |
| One of the ads on Gizmodo's website. |
Gizmodo is untrustworthy, because there
is too much stuff on the website, and therefore it is difficult to
navigate. The organisation behind the website is non-academic and
there is no link to the website's social media profiles. The
commercial posts and obvious ads (some even non-technology related)
between regular articles are making the website seem even more
untrustworthy to me. The website seems to make big promises without
relevant argumentation.
 |
| Google knew exactly what I was looking for. |
That was the discussion for this week. Feel free to comment below if you have any aspects on this.
Have a nice weekend!
J.W.
