On Friday April 19, George Mason University president Ángel Cabrera hosted an open forum on the website Reddit. The forum offered Mason student “Redditors” the opportunity to ask Cabrera questions regarding Mason life.

Courtesy of newsdesk.gmu.edu

Cabrera’s “Ask Me Anything” (often referred to as an “AMA” by “Redditors”) was posted on the GMU Sub-Reddit. Sub-Reddits are sub-sections of the site with content dedicated to a particular genre or subject.

As of writing this, the “I am Ángel Cabrera, President of George Mason University. Ask Me Anything!” has accrued a total of 69 up-votes from Redditors, making it the most popular thread on the GMU sub-Reddit.

I personally thought that the AMA was a successful effort by Cabrera to reach out to Mason students in a bold, innovative fashion. Cabrera has shown himself to be social-media-savy in the past, such as through his twitter account, and this AMA seemed to be a natural progression of his social media presence.

I particularly enjoyed his response to the question of whether or no GMU is trying to distance itself from it’s “commuter school” notoriety.

“The commuter/residential distinction doesn’t capture what we’re about or what a modern university will be about,” Cabrera said. “We serve residential students, and working professionals; career starters and career switchers… some live on campus, some commute, some take classes online.”

We’re a comprehensive research university, committed to finding ways to serve people’s needs whatever those are…can’t fit us in an easy category!”

Courtesy of www.nelson-atkins.org

Last February, Mason librarian Joy Suh educated our class on using the GMU library tools for our stories. Her “Library_Resources_for_Comm_361”  PowerPoint is loaded with such advice, including a reference to using journal databases for supplementary research on our topics.

Suh mentioned several databases and elaborated on their significance. These included LexisNexis Academic, JSTOR.

LexixNexis Academic is a resource for students to locate past newspaper articles and breakdowns of legal cases, according to Suh. This service has a specific focus on topics of legality.

“LexisNexis Academic helps students and faculty members at colleges and universities save valuable research time by offering them quick, easy access to more than 15,000 of the most credible business, legal, and news sources available in a single location,” according to their website proclamation.

The JSTOR  resource, meanwhile, has a much broader focus. This database contains a plethora of  journal articles that cover a wide range of topics. These articles are accessed through a clean, simple interface that makes it even more inviting for students.

These attributes could explain its apparent popularity. According to the site’s about page, there were a 151 million searches conducted last year using the database.

LexisNexis and JSTOR are just two of the useful databases that Suh introduced in her presentation.  Check out the rest of her PowerPoint for more golden nuggets!

Courtesy of www.largefm.com

In retrospect, I felt that Kevin Goldberg’s presentation was a humbling experience. His message was a grave reminder of the dangers of shoddy journalism. The “Seven Deadly Sins” approach was  a simple, evocative means that set the tone for that message.

Goldberg also crafted a dense PowerPoint for his presentation, which can be found in our course shell on Blackboard. One particular nugget of information from that PowerPoint intrigued me: Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act. It reads as follows:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

This legal jargon imbues website operators and other such internet providers with a legal immunity from the liabilities of their users. The protection “covers defamation and privacy claims, as well as negligence and other tort claims associated with publication,” according to the Digital Media Project.

Upon further research, I learned that section 230 is particularly beneficial for bloggers such as ourselves.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, bloggers are considered users in the sense that they edit and post content through a ISP. They are also providers, however, in that they allow third parties to comment on these posts and add content of their own.

“Your readers’ comments, entries written by guest bloggers, tips sent by email, and information provided to you through an RSS feed would all likely be considered information provided by another content provider,” according to the EFF website. “This would mean that you would not be held liable for defamatory statements contained in it”

So there you have it, bloggers. While section 230 of CDA doesn’t create an immunity from all of the legal troubles blogs can be fraught with, it does give us protection from the malice of those pesky trolls commenting on our content.

As evident by the following Goldberg example (which he appropriately categorized under “Lust”), those comments can be truly venomous:

“These sluts from sigma kappa are an absolute joke. They stole first place in bar night from us last night, god knows what they did to bribe the judges because they looked like a bunch of cracked out whores dancing at a rave, that girl who was hypmotized at speaker night danced better than those bar night girls. We all know they cheated last year and rumor is that the two girls from Sigma Kappa on GWLT tried to rig banner so they would get first and got called out, haha what a bunch of jokes. But in the end of the day if I was in a house full of butter faces and a bunch of overweight strippers I would try hard in greek week too, because thats all they have going for them…”