When it came to social media, I was initially like the guy in the second video. I avoided it, didn’t want to be one of the ‘sheep.’ Then, I went through a divorce. I was bored and wanted to resume and rekindle old friendships. I joined MySpace and Facebook, and I’ve been addicted to social media ever since.

It has gotten me into trouble at work. Not REAL trouble, but once Facebook got its hooks in me, people at work noticed the amount of time I was spending on site – replying to posts, taking quizzes about what kind of potato I am – that kind of thing. Occasionally, I’d notice another friend in the TV news business post something newsworthy, and that would let me justify my time on Facebook as a news-gathering endeavor.

I am fascinated with the efforts to monetize social media in this new digital landscape. In my most recent role as the Assistant News Director at ABC7 in Sarasota, Florida I oversaw a newsroom staff of 53 people – three of them were solely dedicated to the digital product. I believe that once Content/TV stations figure out how to adequately monetize the digital side, that newsroom staff ratio will tilt heavily in favor of digital content producers. So, the research from the Internet Trends that shows digital revenue on the rise will eventually make me look like a genius, although I was stepping out on a pretty steady limb.

Moving forward with this class, I’m recognizing that I have a very surface level knowledge of social media and how it works. As I transition into my role as Communications Director for a major metropolitan hospital, I need to know more about creating content for social media, quantifying it and applying a metric that lets me gauge its performance.

My first, and really only, experience with WordPress began last semester for ICC 602: Intro to Digital Communication.

I’ve never been a blogger, or even a purveyor of blogs. For me, blogs were kind of like podcasts – an avenue for hipster doofuses (doofii?) who thought they were the smartest person in the room to convince everyone that they were the smartest person in the room.

So thanks to Syracuse, and through no fault of my own, I was suddenly a blogger. Not a good one, by any stretch of the imagination. I could always write, and made a pretty good living doing so, but I wrote for TV news. Lots of short sentences, comprehensible to any 6th grader reading at a 3rd grade level.

More quickly than I’d like to admit, WordPress became my friend. I’d never made a website or coded anything, but mikewortham.com was a thing now. With a modicum of angst and hand-wringing, I made it through a semester of blogging and got an A in the course. WordPress walked me through everything to create a functional blog. I can see how it would be great for the serious blogger.

But, I was not/am not/never will be a serious blogger. So that made WordPress a little overwhelming at times with all of its capabilities. Maybe I was built more for 2009 WordPress instead of the 2019 version.

Having said all that, WordPress has clearly evolved into a platform for more than even the most serious of bloggers. You could probably use it to build real websites and everything! Just don’t ask me how.

Some of a company’s most embarrassing moments can be traced back to a social media faux pas. Whether it was an errant tweet sent from the wrong account or an honest, yet thoughtless mistake, social media can be the vehicle for wrecking a company’s image. Social media can also be the tool by which that image is restored.

In 2017, athletic shoe company Adidas tried to send a heartfelt congratulations to everyone who finished the Boston Marathon. But instead of calling them ‘finishers,’ Adidas called them ‘survivors,’ which came off as tone-deaf after the 2013 marathon bombing that killed five people, and injured more than 260 others. Adidas immediately took to Twitter to apologize, and its customers were quick to forgive.

Another instance in which social media was used to put out a corporate fire also came in 2017. Shea Moisture, a hair care company catering mostly to women of color, decided to expand its clientele with a new ad campaign featuring different types of hair. Except that Shea failed to acknowledge its initial customer base by leaving out images of black women, or women of color. The backlash was immediate, and Shea Moisture issued this blunt apology via Twitter, admitting that it, “f-ed up.”

This is incredibly dangerous territory, this Deep Fake stuff. I don’t think I can overstate how, as a journalist, this disturbs me. As a gatekeeper for information, Deep Fakes take my ability, or inability, to trust video and soundbites to a whole new level.

So, what should be done? As a staunch offender of the First Amendment, I can’t endorse a ban on Deep Fakes. It’s a means of expression, and handled responsibly, a creative and entertaining one. But we live in an age when people and groups inspired by fervor and maliciousness will stoop to any means to add to their ranks. This is when Deep Fakes are at their most dangerous.

I think the creators of Deep Fakes should at least be required to identify their work as such. The manipulation of video and audio is tantamount to forgery through multimedia. If you create Deep Fakes in secret, you should be punished as a forger.

The next big, global showdown is happening right now, and it’s taking place on the internet. The CNBC article from February 3, 2019 outlines how the U.S.A. and China have become the online superpowers and are dividing the world wide web into the ‘splinternet.’ In fact, the two sides often mirror each other. The U.S. has Amazon, China has Alibaba. The U.S. has Google, China has Baidu.

The article is written from an interview with Kaifu Lee, the CEO of a China-based venture capital firm. Lee has particular insight because of his previous role as head of Google in China. Lee says both countries can claim victory in various aspects of the internet, but that looking ahead in five years the split in influence will be fifty-fifty. This particular article addressed a possible division of access and innovation, but later focused on the development of Artificial Intelligence, or AI. Lee says that the U.S. and China are the undisputed leaders in AI development, but that China will eventually take the lead. “It’s (China) arguably ahead of U.S. in some areas behind in others, maybe neck and neck. But at the current trajectory, China will probably be ahead of U.S. in five years,” Lee said.

Considering the main source of this article is a Chinese business leader, you have to ask if an interview with an American tech giant would read the same. While Lee credits the U.S. with being a leader in the past, his conclusion that China will leap forward with innovation has to be viewed through the lens of someone who has a vested interest in China winning the war of the splinternet. We also know that free speech is not a guarantee in China as it is in the U.S., so there may be some pressure to propagandize his conclusions regarding the strides his country is making online.

So what does this mean? It means the World Wide Web may be a misnomer, in that the internet won’t be so global anymore. In the twitter video, Lee says websites and apps produced by the Chinese won’t be able to talk to U.S. technology or users, and vice versa. It means the possible weaponization of information, as advances in technology become the new warheads of destruction. It means a lessening chance for global solutions to global problems if the two superpowers turn the internet into a competition.

This article paints a grim picture of the internet’s future, and while we’ve looked at the potential bias of the source, Lee is backed by facts. A Wall Street Journal article published on February 9, 2019 interviewed Tom Pellman, a director for an international risk advisory firm who spent a decade in Beijing. While Pellman is quoted as saying he hated the censorship behind the so-called Great Firewall in China, “When I came back to the U.S. it was like coming back to the Stone Age,” he said. “Not being able to use WeChat (an app that can do multiple tasks), everything felt just old fashioned.”