Day 2 -- Digging In

Today--Day #2--we dug deeper into our theme of deception. We posed the question: Is the average person today, in 2013, deceived, duped, and manipulated more times per day or fewer times per day, on average, than someone who lived in 1950, 1850, or 1250? After some lively discussion, we turned our attention to hoax websites--websites that deliberately try to dupe visitors by feeding them inaccurate or misleading information. We examined several hoax websites and used them to develop a list of "warning signs" we should look out for when we visit an unfamiliar website and try to judge its trustworthiness.
This examination of hoax websites was just our first step, however, in exploring the ways that digital content on the web can manipulate unsuspecting readers. Our next step was to build a hoax website of our own! (In our next blog posts, look for updates on our progress with this major project.)
Other highlights of Day #2 included the following:

• a visit by an Army Captain who told us about different types of military camouflage and the importance of camouflage to a soldier's suvival.
• an exploration of optical illusions and the ways in which "sight" is something that happens in the brain as much as in the eyes. Looking at an optical illusion, we could almost feel our brains trying to make sense of the "messages" coming in from our eyes--giving us the illusion of wavy lines on the page when we knew the lines were straight, or the illusion of shapes moving or turning when we knew they were stationary.

See you on Friday for Day #3!