Master’s Project: Mediating the Media Maze
Throughout the duration of her master’s program at Michigan State University, Madelyn completed a professional project that explored how information circulates on social media and the effect this has on journalistic practices. Her research centered on gauging how non-media professionals perceive and respond to misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms.
Through this project, she developed a website from scratch using coding software (HTML and CSS) to create a tool aimed at enhancing media literacy among the general public. The website consists of 17 pages, all of which she personally coded and designed. In total, the website is comprised of over 2,500 lines of code.
The goal of this professional project was to define a problem relating to social issues or developments that can be explored journalistically through the use of more advanced methods of newsgathering and dissemination.
Real-world examples of the impacts of misinformation and disinformation by presenting case studies that explore incidents over the last decade when false information was disseminated to a wide audience, leading to real-world consequences
Explaining how social media algorithms function and how these functionalities can contribute to the spread of misinformation and disinformation by defining complex concepts in simplistic language and providing a road map to outline these topics
Interviews with 7 journalists regarding their experiences using social media from a professional standpoint
Research
5 downloadable one-pagers, created and designed on Adobe InDesign, covering the topics of what is a social media algorithm, how algorithms work, how can algorithms contribute to the spread of false information on social media and how can users prevent the spread of false information
Custom website created using HTML and CSS (via Adobe Dreamweaver) to disseminate work
Design
