In my Gender and Communications class we went around the room discussing what were elements that comprised the "culture" of Northeastern. I mentioned loneliness as a contributor towards Northeastern's culture, which received several nods and affirmations from others around the room. Loneliness at Northeastern may be heightened due to the co-op program splitting up friendships and distancing individuals, but loneliness is not unique to Northeastern. Many college students are said to feel lonely, and although leaving friends every semester to go on a new co-op certainly exacerbates it, it is a feeling that is echoed throughout many traditional universities as well as the general population. As Chayko references Fox, potential loneliness surrounds us. It's as if loneliness is the darkness and our devices are the light that ward off that inevitable darkness. Being glued to our devices (phones, laptops, smartwatches etc.) allows us to constantly curate our community; who we interact with as well as the types of content we consume. If this is the case why do so many still feel lonely? We can argue with strangers on Reddit halfway across the world or see what all of your "friends" posted on Facebook but being superconnected on a global scale disenfranchises the self in relation to the self's direct real world surroundings and community. Your Instagram followers from highschool aren't going to be able to throw a football with you or get dinner on Tuesday with you. In the vainglorious attempt at achieving macro communication with the entire globalized world, many have forgotten how to communicate interpersonally with each other. In addition to lacking interpersonal communication skills, humans are now constantly overstimulated by the never-ending input of their digital world. Because the sun never sets on the Twitter-verse or really any part of the internet, the conversation always continues and an individual may feel left out by abandoning the conversation and instead become overwhelmed by the vastness and difficulty of maintaining digital life. Social media allows individuals to connect with each other but the content posted is selective in nature. One might post highly edited pictures of their latest vacation to their Instagram which might further isolate their followers by making them believe that their lives are awful in comparison to this global traveler but what the follower sees is a highly curated slice of life and not the big picture. Being connected is incredibly important in a globalized world but being superconnected is cause for issue. Individuals should maintain a balance between their digital and personal lives and understand that what they see online isn't always the entire picture and having real-life personal relationships is needed in addition to digital ones.
Regarding the "online intention" excercise from attention probes, I found it helpful. I set a timer for 30 minutes which allowed me to read the article and write most of my response before the alarm rung. I am currently listening to music which personally helps me focus my attention on the subject at hand. The excercise is particularly helpful because it assigns responsibility to myself to complete the project that I assigned. I have to finish the assignment so it helps to hold accountability for it.
In previous co-ops I have worked for Akamai Technologies and Amazon Web Services so I am familiar with how certain intricate parts of the web works. Akamai primarily is a CDN or Cloud Delivery Network which allows companies to cache their data on Akamai's edge servers to drastically speed up the transfer of packets. More rececently, Akamai has been releasing security products, primarily through aquisitions of companies like Prolexic and Janrain which respectively mitigate and prevent DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks and create a secure IAM (Incident & Access Management) solution for enterprises. Those aquisitions bolster Akamai's own security portfolio, including BotManager, a system that identifies prolific botting and stops it.
At AWS I helped market containers and serverless offerings. Containers allow developers to package their application to enable it to run in different environments and serverless follows the new trend of not having dedicated servers run your application, instead allowing you to scale your application to any demand with rented servers from AWS.
Working at these companies have allowed me to have first hand experience on how the internet works from the enterprise level but there still is so much more that I can learn, especially in regard to digital communication. I'm interested in VR for live events, like sports games but previous attempts have not been successful enough to warrant more widespread adoption. To watch a basketball game and feel like you're there what bandwidth do you think would be required to stream the game Over-The-Top in real time at a frame rate and resolution that are sufficient for the viewer? People can see at frame-rates well over the amount delivered by broadcast television and when I tried watching those games with a Google Cardboard and my phone I would tend to get nauseous after the novelty wore off. I believe that VR will eventually be the next big aspect of digital communication but I believe it would first have to follow higher consumer bandwidths and cameras with a higher framerate to broadcast the games. At AWS I also helped market Sumerian, their AR/VR app builder but it has not yet been put to the test of a high-quality, high-framerate stream of live distributed content. It would be awesome in the future to be able to watch sports, or any live events from the sideline in virtual reality.
In his first page, Nowak challenges the well-established aphorism primary credited to Charles Darwin, "survival of the fittest" by arguing that cooperation has been found to be far more relevant to an individual's primary goals of survival and reproduction rather than relying on mere "fitness" alone. Nowak writes that "Life is therefore not a struggle for survival – it is also, one might say, a snuggle for survival" (36). Most of the time while thinking about evolution I think of pure competition. For example, a wild gazelle with longer legs might be more able to survive than a gazelle with shorter legs. This assumes that there has to be a winner and a loser in each scenario. Nowak notably refutes both that condition (the winner/loser binary) as well as the individual's goal to pursue that binary. Through his vast amount of research, Nowak has determined that individuals are more prone to cooperate towards an outcome that is mutually beneficial for both parties. In the game theory paradox, The Prisoner's Dilemma, there are four possible outcomes. If prisoner 1 (P1) decides to confess than they would recieve a one year sentence while prisoner 2 (P2) would recieve a 4 year sentence, and vice versa. If P1 and P2 both confess they would each recieve 3 years and if neither confesses they would recieve 2 years. Statisically, this paradox leans towards a principle called "Natural Defection" where the prisoners would try and protect themselves by mutually defecting. Nowak ran a myriad of simulations to try and see if the results would change towards the more benefical 2 year sentence of not confessing. The results returned positive towards mutual cooperation, indicating that there is a predisposition to mutually beneficial behavior over mutually destructive behavior.
After reading more regarding the scientfic basis of cooperation I can list a few reasons for why individuals would cooperate. It can lead to mutual benefit (help one and recieve help in return, either from that individual or a larger community) or it could just be individuals wanting to be helpful, even if nothing else is gained besides the positive feeling of helping another. I think one primary reason one might fail to cooperate is if it puts them at risk. Competition and cooperation can coexist as illustrated by Nowak's argument, but if two individuals are in competition for the same job or fighting over the same romantic partner, cooperation may fail to persist in those situations. As a member of r/underwaterphotography on Reddit, a user asked the subreddit if he could have access to some RAW files so he could practice editing underwater files. I sent some over, not because I would recieve any gain from it, but because I like the feeling of helping others, especially helping them get better at something that I'm really interested in. I'd imagine that is the same feeling that Wikipedia writers have. Some people just want to watch the world learn, even without any credit because it is the right thing to do. I think the online world results in the most true cooperation because it often doesn't require anything in return. People, in the likes of Reddit and Wikipedia, operate under anonymity but provide so much value to so many people, without any expectation of awards, prizes or even recognition.
There are over 7.5 billion humans living on the planet today. Nearly all of them can be connected through the concept of six degrees of separation. Six degrees of separation is a theory that is build on Logarithmic growth. It starts at the individual level –you, and hypothesizes that it could connect you to, say a random villager in a small town in China. If you know 2,000 people, than each of those people you know will then know 2,000 people and so on. Most people can fit into this social network model, save for certain indigenous tribes that are isolated from the world. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a popular party game using this method where players would try and chart the path of any actor's relationship to Kevin Bacon. If they've been in a movie directly with Bacon, then that actor's Bacon number is 1. As more actors are in more movies, the overall potential for high Bacon numbers shrink, which adheres to its basis in the six degrees of separation.
Because of how interconnected we are today, it is hard to ever leave anything behind. Rheingold references Granovetter as they discuss the existence of absent ties (206). Absent ties are essentially connections from parts of your life, like highschool or an old job to where you are no longer connected to. However, with the social connectedness of today, those ties don't dissapear. Even if you don't hang out with the friends of your youth, everytime you like or interact with one of their posts on social media you are giving life to that would-be absent tie – something that would be much harder to do before social media.
In addition to being used to connect all of humanity and preserve would-be-lost relationships, today's social networks also fosters the create of discourse communities on a global level that may not be locally available. If a 50 year old man is obsessed with a fandom like My Little Pony, it would be especially hard to find others to share that fandom with, especially if that individual lived in a small town or suburb. On that internet, this My Little Pony's fan's age doesn't matter and he can connect with thousands of other individuals online on forums and social media networks like Reddit instantly. This can be good as it can help people feel like they belong in the global social network of finding others who can help give them a sense of community. However, it can also be harmful when individuals turn to these social networks to use them as an echo chamber for their dangerous thoughts. The incel movement, which occurs largely on fringe internet sites like 9gag and 8chan exist primarily as these echo chambers that incels (involuntary celibates) seek as a way to justify their beliefs. Interconnectivity can be good or bad but more often is used for good or ambivalent purposes, to placate an individual's need for community.
Out of the following, which scenario would be the most emblematic of the "Tragedy of the Commons" phenomena as described by Garrett Hardin
A. Using the light from a lighthouse while sailing
B. Overfishing of already vulnerable species
C. Strolling through a park
D. Sitting on the boardwalk
Mark Granovetter's theory of weak ties most closely refers to
A. 56% of study participants found new jobs through personal contacts
B. 80% of a business is dependent on 20% of its clients
C. 90% of everything is crap
What does Paretto's principle teach and what is something that would exemplify his principle? Go into detail on why your example is relevant.
What happens behind the scenes when an internet user attempts to visit a website?
B - Overfishing of already vulnerable species. This most exemplifies Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons because fishing vulernable species is both non-exclusive, even if it tries to be, but it importantly is rivalrous, and is the only rivalrous example on the list. Using a lighthouse, strolling through a park and sitting on the boardwalk are all activities that are generally seen as non-rivalrous and non-exlcusive and would thus be considered a public good.
A - 56% of study participants found new jobs through personal contacts. Granovetter's "weak ties" theory focuses primarily on how one's weaker ties (i.e aquaintences) are much more helpful when finding new opprotunities, like new jobs.
Paretto's principle originally taught that 80% of the land in Italy during the mid 20th century was owned by 20% of the population. This same model is applicable to many bussinesses, like Amazon.com. Amazon in its early days began solely as a book seller. As with today, 80% (roughly) of sales are from the best-sellers, the true money makers. Brick and mortar book stores would be able to have all these bestsellers in stock, and they would make a lot of money from selling them.However, since Amazon's business was online they were able to offer these "deep track" books that account for 20% of the business, which in turn may cause people to buy more from them, including their 80% books in the future.
When a user types in, for example, www.apple.com in their browser's navigation bar, that series of characters "www.apple.com" routes back to an IP address. Apple.com is a DNS (Domain Name Server) that allows users to only have to memorize the website name and not complicated IP addresses. Once routed to the site's IP, the site's servers will begin transferring packets to the user over a series of protocols. These protocols ensure that the content gets to the users and that it gets there correctly.
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