Visualization of Media in My Life

google trends search engine

    Throughout my life, there have been many examples of data visualization. Unfortunately, I believe that there are more examples than I realize. Especially with constantly being on technology sources, I feel we are always seeing them. Whether it is a social media poll, a graph in an article, or a survey data set for school. Specifically, in my life, there is one application I constantly use for my major right now: google trends. Since I am an advertising major within the journalism school, trends are crucial to understanding. Specifically, when it comes to a class, I am currently in a class called Fact or Fiction, J213. This class demonstrates and teaches students how to differentiate and understand what is true or false in the media. In this class, we are often asked to research a story that has been published and use google trends to see where there is engagement with this story. Google sheets will provide data and a graph of where people have looked up and researched the story. This assignment allows us the opportunity to see who believes what time of the media. 

    In this class and other Journalism school classes, the concept of media ethnicity is highly valued. Therefore this means knowing if your source is trustworthy and believable. Consequently, it is essential to trust your sources and the information one is receiving. Not only are these values practiced in media stories, but as well as in the data we as an audience encounter. This concept was described similarly in D’Ignazio and Klein chapter 3 on page 14 as ” Establishing trust between the designers and their audience in turn increases the likelihood that viewers will believe what they see.” Essentially the authors are alluding to the fact that there needs to be trust in where people are receiving their data. Having false data that is believable to an audience is highly misleading. 

    In general, I think that the use of google trends is a great device that helps with different related needs. It demonstrates where google searches are most searched. Since they are linked as one company, I tend to find it to be believable. Although, there are many other sources of visualizing data throughout my daily life. The most influential places I feel I find visualized data are on social media and pop-up articles. I think these aspects of data are skewed towards my generation. 

    Overall, I think that using common data visualizations in different forms allows people less comfortable with data to become normalized to reading it. I specifically do not enjoy looking at data, but I find it rather fascinating when it is easy to understand and embedded in something else interesting.