Evaluation of General Sources

Unknown. "Facebook." 17/5/2015 via wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution- Sharealike License. 

In my field of study, which I discussed in My Profession, a controversial issue that has been going on recently within the medical world is organ donation and how social media impacts finding donors. I will be analyzing two sources, "Organ Donor Found via Social Media Prompts International Debate" (links to "Should Patients Be Able to Find Donors on Facebook?") and "The Facebook Effect: Social Media Dramatically Boosts Organ Donor Registration", that talk about how social media seeks increasing numbers of donors by looking at their authors, URL's, endgame, as well as content.

The first source, Organ Donor Found via Social Media Prompts International Debate, gives a first hand event that brought into controversy the current laws and protocols put into place to monitor organ donations.

       1) The URL appears to be a .org source. The site is www.ihealthbeat.org. These kinds of sites are usually reserved for non-profit organizations. But this URL is open to the public, so anyone can use it. It shows the readers what kind of information they will be looking at and the goals of the website as to how they want to come across to their viewers.

"Org" stands for organization, so usually a larger system is setting up these websites and may or may not be taken more seriously.

It seems that this is a website that directs you to more information about the actual event that took place. This article, "Should Patients Be Able to Find Donors on Facebook?" is on a site The Atlantic. This is a .com page which is the most widely used URL so these types of sites cannot always be considered trustworthy. This is when you have to find out more about the actual site to determine its reliability.

Since it seems The Atlantic site has more information on the event that took place, this blog will be further analyzing this site. But information will also be mentioned about the original website that linked me to The Atlantic.

      2) Who is the author of this article? What are his/her qualifications to be reporting on this?

Benjamin Duerr is the author of The Atlantic article. He is a writer based out of the Netherlands, according to The Atlantic. Not a lot was said about the author on the site, but searching his name on google, I found that he had his own website. He doesn't speak or write in English so the site had to be translated. He writes a lot of other articles as well as has his own blog. On his site, he has a list of his credentials of the companies he wrote for.

Seeing that he wrote for ABC news, a name I am familiar with and is usually reliable, I am even more impressed with his work experience. But how he wrote as while made me feel more confident in the information he was giving me.

For example, he incorporated information it seemed from an internist at the hospital where the organ transplant was denied. The internist, Steven Vanderschueren said it created an unfair advantage for those who might be more popular or attractive on social media. Those with a touching story should not automatically get a ticket to the front of the line.

Not only that, he used a lot of hyperlinks to take you to other sources to prove that his information was valid. He spoke in a factual manner where the reader feels like they are receiving the information pertaining to the story. His website also has a link to his twitter account which gives more information on the different topics he researches and gives facts about. He gives facts with hyperlinks on his twitter accounts as well as to some particular sources of his information.

All this information on him makes him seem like a very qualified writer.

      3) Does the web page provide information about when it was last updated? Is there any way of determining whether the material is out of date? What are the links like?

This article was published on April 5, 2015, so the article itself is pretty recent. The original event took place in February, but the article talked not only about the initial event, but the different reactions to the event. This event sparked a movement that is still in debate today.

Not only is organ donating between Facebook friends in the same country debatable, but it becomes an entirely new issue when organ donors are coming from another country. This leads to controversies pertaining to trading between countries and events that governments become less able to control.

The links are mostly reliable sources. Some include the Euro Transplant site, the United Network for Organ Sharing, as well as a press release by John Hopkins hospital about the issue. There are many more like that. They even have a link to the original Facebook post that started the controversy.

      4) What is the purpose of this article? What is trying to do, persuade, inform, etc.?

The article does give both sides of the argument. It first tells the reader about a man who has two daughters who needs an organ transplant. Instead of waiting on the list for an organ for a transplant, he posted on his Facebook page seeing if anyone wanted to donate.

Then the author goes on to talk about the controversies involved with the story. There are moral controversies, and political controversies. This article is trying to introduce the reader to different sides of the story and allows them to form their own opinions on the topic. Though, the quote that is bolded emphasizes the fact that finding Facebook friend donors is not the more equal and right system. Those with more friends or have the best story will most likely get the most potential donors.

It also shows that the orders we have in place today serve their purpose, but as societies evolve with technology, so do procedures. This is one case that the political system needs to get updated with the times and create a more efficient system.

This article does seem to tell the reader the advantages of both systems, but ultimately is making the point that either way the system goes, there needs to be some change, and this event and the events that followed are an indication of that.

       5) Are there any graphics on the article?

There are pictures scattered throughout the article. There is the opening picture of an operating room and someone going through surgery. This brings the discussion into the topic of medicine. This really tells the reader that when it comes down to it, the topic of this article is really medical based.

The introduction image engages the reader into the article. The bolded quote, "The idea that the most noticeable people get more attention goes against their sense of justice," brings the reader back into the story if they tend to drift off towards the middle.

       6) What is the author's position on the topic?

It seems the author is more prone to wanting to change the organ donor regulations. He identifies a lot of benefits to making social media a bigger part of the process of identifying donors as well as mentions the success of Facebook putting up the organ donor status on Facebook.

There are faults to any system, but it would be a good start to helping more people. "The first day after the feature was introduced, the number of people who registered as organ donors in the U.S. increased 21-fold. Researchers for Johns Hopkins University, therefore, suggested social media might be an effective tool to search for donors." Then the author goes on to quote Johns Hopkins about why they thought it was a good idea.

Many other comments are references were made like this in the article. Fewer told of the downfalls to social media and organ donors.

      7) What linked information does the author give?

The author sends you to a lot of places that talk about the current policies and restrictions put on organ donations. It also gives you similar articles to his. You can read how other people thought of from which you can form a better opinion on the idea. He also shows a place to look up how it is possible to use social media to find organ donors.

Many of the sources are legal, government websites. These are reliable sources of information and can allow you to see how this event fits in with the issues of the current protocols.


Now, moving on to the second source. This source was one of the website links in the first source. It talks about the same issue but was posted about 2 years earlier.

      1) What is the URL? What does it mean?

This article was posted on the Johns Hopkins Medicine site. It is a .org URL, which I discussed in #1 involving my first source. These are usually bigger corporations or organizations that tend to have a bit more reliability than many .com sources.

The owners can also be non-profit organizations, meaning they are more information driven in their websites than out for financial gain. This can be an advantage for the reader since you are motivated to believe that they would be more prone to write the truth and not just what sells or gets the most views.

This article also is based off of research done by the Johns Hopkins research team who discovered just how big the immediate impact social media has on the availability of organ donors.

       2) Who is the author and what are their qualifications?

It seems in this article, there are two authors, or media contacts, for this piece. They are Stephanie Desmon and Helen Jones. Stephanie Desmon has a twitter page that says she is a health and medicine writer and Helen Jones has an information page on the John Hopkins website saying, "She is responsible for managing the distribution and tracing of all press releases, collecting and disseminating daily headlines and helping the team manage incoming media requests and all JHM media-related events." The page also showed she got a college education from Towson University.

They work at a good hospital and are in tune with what is going on in the medical field. I consider them to be qualified and knowledgable writers.

      3) Does the web page provide information about when it was last updated? Is there any way of determining whether the material is out of date? What are the links like?

It was released on June 18, 2013. That was when social media was really beginning to skyrocket the number of organ donors. This is more of an informational blog telling about the research the group was doing on the topic. They provide a link at the bottom into more of the particular research. It is the site's original story on when Facebook began having the option to put your organ donor status.

The article I am citing tells more about what was happening with issue a bit after the main event. It also goes on to say that since this issue is not the forefront of news,  the motivation to become a organ donor has dropped off a bit and they need a way to pick up the motivation once again.

The article also tells the names of the people that researched the issue as well as contact information to the people that wrote the article. So if there was ever a question about the research or the article itself, you can contact either the researches or the authors.

    4) What is the purpose of this article? What is trying to do, persuade, inform, etc.?

The purpose of this particular article is to get people aware, first of all, of how beneficial and dramatical it was the first time around when so many people become organ donors through Facebook, and secondly, how we can't lose the momentum the movement has built now since so many more organ donors are always needed. Online movement usually last a short period of time, but this has to extend to something beyond a social media movement, to become something that can save thousands of lives.

This article is trying to persuade people to keep the movement going and to keep organ donor levels on the rise.

       5) Are there any graphics on the article?

There are no graphics on the article. This is a hospital website, not necessarily a news source like the New York times or the Huffington Post. It will updates on medical information for those interested viewers.

In theory, the site does not need images to keep its targeted readers engaged.

       6) What is the author's position on the topic?

The author sees the remarkable benefits that social media has brought to finding organ donors. The article strictly talks about how Facebook users can post their organ donor status, but does not really mention other kinds of social media or other ways people are using the internet to find donors. The Atlantic article talked more about a particular case of a person finding a donor on Facebook, but in a slightly different manner than this article describes.

Also having the argument in different countries will lead to very different opinions, since these countries have different laws on how organ donors can be found. They feel that the use of social media for this, overall, brings plenty more benefits than drawbacks.

      7) What linked information does the author give?

The linked information was discussed in question 3. They really only used a link from their own website, but since they were the source of the original research information, it would make sense that they would be referring the reader to the research they obtained and how it led to the conclusion they are discussing in the article.