Answered Questions

Hello!

If this assignment is for AS111 or 311, the assignment was clarified by the lead professor to ask for a reliable or credible website, not a scholarly one. Scholarly and reliable are two different ideas. 

A source that is scholarly will be reliable. Scholarly sources are (as you know from our video at http://www.screencast.com/t/9F6j6Qv89e !) are evaluated based on the credentials of the author, the intended audience, the level of vocabulary used, the amount of background knowledge needed to understand the content, and the presence of references. Therefore a scholarly web site would be written by PhDs, Masters, or other researchers for PhDs, Masters, or other researchers, using a college level vocabulary. It would require an advanced understanding of the subject to comprehend the information, and it would include references.

A reliable source may not be scholarly. A web source can be evaluated for its reliability using our sources at http://libguides.brenau.edu/webeval or http://www.screencast.com/t/SHVwurpjEnHR .

There are relatively few scholarly web sites that do not use journal articles or book chapters as their content. Given the extreme rarity of true scholarly web sites (scholarly content formatted originally as an informative web site), I suggest you search for scholarly books and journal articles and search for a reliable web site.

To find a reliable web site about the evolution of social media, I suggest you Google "social media" evolution and explore some of the sites listed in the results. When choosing a site, I evaluated each by the criteria listed at at http://libguides.brenau.edu/webeval or http://www.screencast.com/t/SHVwurpjEnHR . On the first page of my Google results I found a great infographic titled The Evolution of Social Media (2004-14). This infographic is reproduced many times on the web, but I chose AdWeek.com as my source because it is a highly reliable advertising trade resource. I also found a blog post, Social Media Evolution Is Inevitable, from InsideHigherEd.com, another highly respected trade source, this time from the field of academia. Last, I found another blog from PewResearch.org, entitled Instagram, Vine, and the Evolution of Social Media. Pew Research is a highly regarded surveyor of American trends. Any site like these will be appropriate for your paper.

If you need to, feel free to have your professor contact me for more information.

Thanks for asking!