UMSS19 Olivia Reese

Project: Tweets, Trust & Pixie Dust: understanding credibility in the age of social media

Transcript
Throughout, my media studies major, I learned that there were so many different things that were kind of influencing us on a daily basis. So I began to wonder, well how is it influencing me and my generation specifically?

So the idea of the research project is basically just to find out as much as we can about what influences credibility in a social media setting. Specifically in this case, Twitter. A majority of people are moving in the direction of using social media. So it’s important for us to know how is this affecting us, how is this going to influence me day to day?

It’s the same idea as how we did studies going to television and radio when it first was developed. So I think we could take those same principles and apply it to something modern like social media.

I’ve learned a ton just about even the research process, the things that go into it. I never really thought I’d be able to actually carry out my own experiment and kind of go through this process. But I’ve been lucky enough to have met some really great professors who helped me along the way. And have the university that’s so willing to give me this opportunity to be able to kind of put to work these ideas that I’ve come up with.