# Reading Response Set 1

### Sep 20th Tue - How the Web works
Clients and servers, these might not be the first words that come to mind when you ask your buddy for the Wi-Fi password; but reading through the text How the Web Works, we see that there is much more to just tapping a symbol and typing in a password to connect to the internet. Clients are your common internet-connected device, while servers are computers that store webpages, sites, or apps. When a client device wants to access a webpage, a copy of the webpage is downloaded from the server onto the client machine and displayed. That is a brief summary of the overall objective. There are many more intricate parts of this process. Some of these include your internet connection, TCP/IP, DNS, and HTTP, just to name a few. When one types in a web address, the browser finds the real address of the server, and after that, it sends an HTTP request message sent through your TCP/IP, it is then approved if it is a valid URL, then the browser displays the webpage to you.

Asynchronous communication has benefited many of my classmates as discussed in the last class. Classmates had shared how some of their best friends have been made through social media sites such as Discord and Instagram. These websites operate through the process stated above, which to me is incredible, especially by the fact of how fast and well run the entire process is. This just goes to show how important this process is as it connects us, people, together in a way that we have never been able to connect before. This is the process, of How the Web Works.

### Oct 2nd - Cooperation

Cooperation is a form of communication. We use cooperation almost every second of the day. Through the workday, in the classroom, or in any daily activity that one is doing, cooperation is implemented– whether positively or negatively. Now, digitally, cooperation is a huge influence on how we act.

Take Dunbar’s eponymous number of 150. In a small group, one must almost cooperate; if not, it makes them look like a fool. If I started juggling in front of Professor Regale while in the middle of a lecture, everyone would look at me like I am crazy. But if I was juggling on the grass of Centennial, people would maybe take a second look but not think much about it. The same thing goes for social media. If a post is made by my mother on Facebook, most if not all the comments are going to be relatives or friends commenting supportive comments. But if I am scrolling through Facebook and look at the comment section of a big creator, there are going to be a mix of comments ranging from supportive to hate to promotional comments. This just goes to show Dunbar’s eponymous number of 150 in action in the digital age.

In small groups, we tend to cooperate more than we do in large groups. We fail to cooperate in large groups as “the magic has gone”. This is especially prevalent for YouTubers and streamers with “toxic fanbases” – fanbases that thrive on the belittlement of the creator. In these cases, the fanbase comes together by not cooperating with the streamer but instead, cooperating with each other’s shenanigans, creating a snowball effect. One example of this that I recall is from a streamer named Ice Poseidon, where his fanbase started a false bomb threat while he was streaming live and having him banned from his streaming platform for nothing that he technically did wrong. The reading “Super Cooperators” states that “ ’Cooperation’ means paying a cost for the other person to receive a benefit.” This toxic fanbase example shows how the fanbase is receiving a benefit costing the streamer harm.

### Oct 6th - Social Networks

Social networks are a big part of human interaction. As told in chapter 5 of Social Has a Shape: Why Network Matters, “Human social networks maintained through the medium of speech go back to the origin of our species” (p. 192). Technology that we have today enables us to be able to communicate socially like we never have before. Today, we are connected with people from all corners of the world more than we ever have been before. “As social media have emerged as a widespread platform for human interaction, the invisible ties that link each of us to others have become more visible” (p. 203).

We are all tied together in our “ego networks” – all the people we know and interact with (p. 204), but we are also connected in networks much beyond that. These networks get weaker and weaker the further away it gets from “you”. Within these networks, you are most likely to spend time around your strongest networks – the people you are closest with. This results in what we talked about in the last class about echo chambers and filter bubbles. “Everybody in a highly clustered, homophilous network tends to get the same news, and it is more likely that everybody in a clique (the actual technical term sociologists use) will have the same opinions and access to the same information” (p. 206).

Digital communication has completely changed the way we connect. Before digital communication, it was almost impossible to connect with absent ties – ties that you lost touch with (elementary school friends, old neighbors). The text uses the example of Facebook. “Now that Facebook has changed the historical pattern of leaving old social networks behind when moving to a new school or city, online media make it possible to maintain latent ties at a low cost” (p. 206). Today, it is almost encouraged to connect with as many people as possible to gain opportunities that may have not arisen without these connections. Applications such as LinkedIn are designed to help connect with ties that may have gone absent without digital communication. But I wonder if digital communication is beneficial for us. Maybe, this method of connection leads to a lot of superficial relationships and social networks are getting less and less strong. Maybe, digital communication is worse for our social networks and isn’t beneficial for us. Just a penny for your thoughts.

### Oct 12th - Haters

Bullies. Nobody likes them. Rude, obnoxious, criminal people who have no better to do than pick on other people, while their biggest focus should be on themselves. The internet is an outlet for people to express themselves; while most people express themselves in a positive light, some just seem to enjoy the spread of negativity. According to npr.org, Facebook sees bullying or harassment 14 to 15 times out of every 10,000 views of content on the app, through the span of July and September. Facebook has publicly come out and said that they are trying to get rid of this hate. But fix all you want, the real root of the problem stems from the people spreading this hate.

One of the methods that were tried to use was “Don’t feed the trolls”. (Reagle 2015). But this soon became redundant as hate got more generalized on the app. As hate becomes more and more generalized, the culture tends to shift and become more lenient with this hate. This is shown in the example I used in my cooperation reading response where a streamer had a super toxic fanbase and got banned because his fans were out of control. It is also shown in the Danah Boyd article “Did media literacy backfire?” (2017). It was stated that the Internet’s valence lies in how we use it. The internet could be used to spread any message we want, but this also includes hate.

It is easy to spread hate when nobody can see your face and there is no direct contact. A few letters typed in a comment section are all that is required for hate to be spread. Some may say that bullying on the internet is not as bad as in person, but I argue that is false and could even be twisted so that bullying on the internet is worse than in person. People may say that it is not as bad because it is not face-to-face. But I used to watch a YouTuber named Ryan Higa, and in one of his videos, he said that he’s been bullied in person and online and he argues it is worse on the internet because there is nowhere for him to escape when the messages are spread online. There is no room for hate on this internet, and if we use the internet the correct way, this hate will slowly dissipate.

### Oct 21st - Gender, Communication, & Contribution

Gender differences speak to the reality of the world. This was a message that Google engineer James Damore tried to speak up on but ultimately failed as he was fired from his job (Molteni, Adams 2017). Damore posted a document titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, where he pointed out that the way google was trying to include more women into their workforce was hurting the company. When psychologists studied the phenomenon that women might not have as much “innate ability” as men to succeed in academic disciplines, they concluded that a wide range of sociocultural forces contributes to sex differences in STEM achievement and ability. “Differences between sexes depend much more on external factors than sex in and of itself. And those external factors and their results can change over time” (Molteni, Adams 2017).

Correlation does not mean causation. We focused on this major point in class, specifically looking at the marshmallow experiment as a good example. The example above perfectly depicted the marshmallow experiment but instead focused on the cognitive ability between men and women.

But Krasnova et al. point out findings that completely juxtapose this finding above in their report “Why men and women continue to use social networking sites: The role of gender differences”. Their findings suggest that there are differences between men and women and social networking sites. Examples include women being motivated on SNSs because they can maintain ties with close friends, and male users are mainly driven to stay on SNSs to gain general information (Krasnova et al, pg. 273).

And as communities start to bridge together, social norms are being challenged. According to Joseph Reagle, “Women’s interests in a historically geeky topic can seemingly devalue it.” (Molteni, Rogers, 2017). An example includes the Lord of the Rings being ruined as one’s sister started watching it, but what is happening is that women’s participation de-masculinizes the activity. This might be one cause of Damore’s frustration with Google’s hiring of more women. As Google hired more women, it demasculinized his job, seemingly ruining it. But does gender really play a difference in the digital world? I think this concept is still a work in progress.