By doing this project, I want to address the issue of information fragmentation, which is emerged along with the development of the Internet technology and the spreading of new media.
As a critical subset of new media, social media has become a primary information source in our daily life. Because of the emergence of social media, every single person is possible to be a tiny information source for others even far away from them. As we know, “short”, “quick” and “inconsistent” are the main features of social media and they are gradually but significantly changing the way we read and absorb information. Take Twitter as an example, it only allows 140 characters in each tweet.
And “Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter”. These statistics are from Internet Live Stats website.
How about all different social media together? For example, I’m currently using about 10 social media applications. Half of them are in Chinese community and the other half are in American community. I feel it’s getting hard to integrate all those information fragments together to construct or reconstruct meanings. Because the information on the social media usually doesn’t include context, precedents and results. It’s just a statement of an instant moment of fact or even not fact, because of the digital persona, different political views or personal values of the information publisher.
All in Pieces 