For the digital polarization assignment, our group did research on whether or not the claim of “People absorb energy from others” was true or false. These claims were posted to a wikipage where anyone can make edits. Our claim specifically had no comments prior to working on it unlike some of the other groups in the class. This means that all of the information posted was found by each of us rather than someone else in a different class, or setting posting to the page.
While conducting our research, we used digipo and hypothesis. We used hypothesis to annotate pages and the digipo was used to tag the annotated sites to our specific claims. The claim was based around research done by a team in Bielefeld University studying a specific strand of algae. This algae was able to absorb energy via photosynthesis as well as from other plants. People then began comparing this plant to a human’s capabilities. Energy healer Olivia Bader-Lee said that people absorb energy from others in the same fashion and that this was an explanation for why people feel comfortable or uncomfortable in certain social situations.
One of the possible reasons that we think that this claim was made was due to a miscommunication. While the research behind the algae is valid, the corresponding claim in regards to humans is not so much. I think that Bader-Lee was probably saying that maybe this could serve as an explanation but there was never any proof of it relating to humans and word of mouth spread the rest. The first instance that we could find of this claim came out in 2012, but we also found more articles related to the topic from 2016. After having done our research, we have come to the conclusion that this claim of people absorbing energy from others is highly unlikely. Each article was using the same claims and the same quotes which means that they likely did not do any further research from the articles before them which contributes to our belief that this claim is unlikely.