Talk:Issues in Interdisciplinarity 2018-19/Truth, History and Society: How good is Twitter at telling the Truth?

Here is our summary of our contributions to this essay, Please bear in mind that we all felt that this essay was done through real teamwork, the reflexion of this chapter is made after a lot of group discussion and we've met over five times in the societies room to brainstorm, edit the text at the same time in order to stay on the same page.

Ines:

At first, we were a bit loss regarding the topic we would work on, I had suggested several ideas such as "decrease in meat production" and "sustainability in economics based on ecological studies" on which I was quite hyped but since there were very broad and already interdisciplinar, I dropped the ideas. I then suggested an approach which was to link the availability of information and the understanding of truth, by comparing the past where few institutions held information because education was a luxury at the time, and people believed in them because they were not aware of other information, and hence were in a way forced to follow a certain truth whereas in present, information freely circulates on twitter which creates two effects: the first is that people have different notions of truth and the second that people fiercely believe in them because they chose their "followings". While sharing this idea with the group, we realised that it was a new approach of studying the case of twitter and that our focus was pointed on purpesefully misinformation rather than unintended misinformation. So we disagreed this idea but still used the notion of "followings" and "followers" to compare the followers of church and state back then and the followers on twitter. what i found interesting was that our understanding of the subject developped as we worked and thought upon it. I also wrote the first part with Lotte, even though everything that we all "personally" wrote was later edited by other members of the group (of course not before asking if we all agreed). I also gave the example of Berlin during the cold war but changed my approach on it. First I explained how information circulated from the east to the west and vice versa which led to a circulation of information and "truths", a proof that truth can mean two very different things for people. but i then changed it by explaining how both sides misinformed its people regarding the other side in order to keep them contained and "endoctrined". I also suggested the idea of writing the title as a hashtag

Lotte: for the topic: we took a while to decide what our project should be on, I felt that the brainstorm was very equal, everyone came up with very different and interesting ideas that we all liked, but then we quickly realised that a lot of the ideas were hard to actually work on. I came up with ideas such as post-truth and history, male suicide, etc... the topic we settled on in the end was not one persons idea, but all of ours together. 1. For the Introduction: Kenza wrote one introduction, I wrote another and then we sort of ‘mushed’ them together and took the best parts of both to create our final introduction. 2. For “Why is Twitter so popular?” Kenza came up with the structure for this part, and Ines and I wrote it together. I thought a lot about what made twitter such an ideal platform in our age, and noticed the character limit is a big part of it. Then Kenza and I bought more about it and came up about the cookies together. Kenza worked on the ‘free speech’ part. 3. For “Misinformation in History” I proposed and researched the church, Kenza came up with the national governments. We all came up with different examples, Kenza came up with the John Calvin and France during WW1 example, Ines with the Cold War example, and me with Australian example (there was also another example I thought of with Palestine-Isreal, but we decided to drop it since it might have caused controversy). 4. For “the agency…” I read a study of how fake news spreads faster than truth, Kenza found the relevant MIT study and more facts from this study that we used for our essay. I read the part on Brazil and how people mistrust social media. 5.For the conclusion Ines and Kenza wrote it, I edited it. 6.For the references Kenza did a lot of work researching the references, Ines and I aided her. In general, while we all worked on the text together, Kenza and Ines were mostly writing the first drafts and I was very involved in editing it: rephrasing arguments, condensing the parts that were too long, etc. Please note that we did most of the work together, we met at university over 5 times and did all the work in a google drive, since we couldn't edit things at the same time using wikipedia.

Kenza: The subject of our Wikibook is born after a lot of discussion and equal contribution but none of us can now remember who had the idea for the final subject. We all knew that we wanted to write on the issue of truth and from there we all suggested a lot of ideas and our reflection lead us to this final subject. I proposed some topics such as the effect of drugs on mental illness, how climate change impact global health or to write on the issue of GMOs. For the introduction, Lotte wrote an introduction and I wrote another one and proposed it to the group. During a group meeting, we all wrote the final introduction that is made of the best of both introductions. For the first part, Lotte and Ines wrote it and came up with the arguments and I proposed the structure of this part. I found the Twitter’s quote and also wrote the transition for each part but all the group reviewed it. We were all working on a drive document and meet multiple times so it made it easy for us to look at each other contribution and add our ideas if everyone agreed. I have written the initial second part but we all edited the final version together. Because it focuses on historical events that illustrate situations of misinformation it required a lot of research. Initially, I focused my research on examples around Church’s and especially on the French government during specific period such as the WWI, French Indochina and Colonial Algeria and their link to misinformation. Ines and Lotte had other examples and I agreed that it will be more relevant to use their ideas because then we could expend this part to boarder examples. For the third part, I have done the research and a big part of the redaction and Ines and Lotte added some points and rephrased it. Our third part now seem as a logical end for this Wikibook but we didn’t think of it that way, even if it is such a major global current discussion. After some research I realised that it was the point were we wanted to end and that it made our chapter more relevant and interesting and the group agreed with it. During the seminar with Ines we wrote the conclusion and Lotte contribute to it later. We were all together to do the referencing so we all helped each other but I have done a big part of it on the Wikipedia page.