Fear

Ben Tryer is a Homer native who began his interest of the topic of immigration when his Alaskan town created a resolution which welcomes immigrants. Through reading the resolution after it was voted upon he was left "freaked out" because he had an incident in Cologne, Germany where Arabic looking males sexually assaulted women during a public celebration. By using his computer he researched "global migration" and printed out articles at his parents house because he actually did not have a printer at his house. Trying create an unbiased opinion on the subject he looked up articles and read anecdotes coming from all sorts of different websites ranging from different political affiliations. In the end he struggled with the fact that he was unsure whether or not he was finding reliable sources and also was left paranoid more than anything.

The steps I take to make sure the sources I use are credible are pretty simple. Mainly I try to stray away from the simple Google search, instead looking to use databases provided by FSU so that my sources remain scholarly or are credible articles. If I am not doing that I stray away from ".com' and tend to look for ".org" or ".gov", but mainly look for an author so that that would establish some credibility. It establishes credibility to me because the author can show he/she knows something about the topic or even is qualified to talk about the subject deeply.

I think it is almost impossible to talk about controversial topics without a bias unless trying to come from a devils advocate point of view. I think that because personally I get worked up when I hear something that I feel is ignorant/arrogant. The key words being "I feel" because no matter what someone might say the other person is going to react by how they feel, people tend to think that they are always right if they have some sort of previous knowledge on the subject and overall it is just a human thing to be unable to come from a completely objective stance.

The community I will be researching is the GIVE Volunteers community. I chose this community because that is the community I am going to be joining this summer on my volunteer trip and I chose this out of excitement for going on the trip.