For class on Wednesday, we were assigned to read “The Role of Expertise in Navigating Links of Influence” by Eszter Hargaittai. In this essay, the author focuses on the importance of links and search engines and how they can allocate user attention. However, they also have negative consequences. Hargaittai talks about how too much links can overwhelm a system, making information inaccessible. Other consequences include “Google bombing”, which is “the practice of manipulating search engine results by aggressively targeting links to a specific site with the same anchor text where the anchor text refers to the text that links to another page” (Hargaittai, pg 92). Although most of them aren’t harmful, they still can be quite bothersome. According to the author, their main purpose is to come up high or first on search engine results and get money by getting people to click on the link, which I have fell victim to many of times by clicking the first result on a page.
One of the main points the author talks about is how people’s socioeconomic status exhibit a statistically significant relationship with online savvy. Hargittai finds a correlation between people who scored higher on their college entrance exams and whose parents have high level of education to have more familiarity with both main-stream and more advanced Internet-related terms. I do not know how much I agree with these findings because I had a high score for my college entrance exam, my father has a very high level of education, but I knew none of the terms being brought up. I do not feel this has anything to do with my college entrance exam or my father’s education level, it’s just I have never taken an Internet course in my life, and didn’t even have a computer class in high school. The author concludes with that fact user’s levels of expertise are mediated by links. Also in the reading, the author claims that since it appears that people with a higher socioeconomic status have higher Internet savvy, the Internet very may well be contributing to social inequalities.
It was interesting to find out that Blogspot, the very website I am posting this on, appears to be one of the most spam-infested sites. It was also interesting to read that many people do not know how to filter e-mails, websites, and links or know if any of these are secure. After reading this I realized I was on of those people and how careless I am when I do engage in Internet activity. I also believe I have gained a lot of knowledge about computer terms and also securing myself and my computer.
Hargittai, Eszter. (2008). The role of expertise in navigating links of influence. In Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui (Eds.), The hyperlinked society: Questioning connections in the digital age (pp. 85-103). Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.
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Thank you for reading my paper. I thought I'd mention that the findings I report on are based on statistical analyses and suggest tendencies. That is, certainly there will be exceptions to the findings as you think you are one such exception. Nonetheless, overall, the trend seems to be what I report on in the paper. You make a good point that having had courses about the Internet may make a difference. Interestingly, however, that is a variable I checked and it doesn't look like it matters among the group of students I studied.
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