# Sam Platzman's Reading Responses (Set 2)

## 11/15 Shaped

Within the collection of electrical impulses, stored data, servered computers, networks, and reactive waves that we refer to as the Internet, there lies an abhorrent amount of sentimental information: people ranting about their daily life, expressing opinions and beliefs, and others who may inflict digital harm or self-harm. With the rise of Q&A came a subsidiary genre, referred to as *drama*, rather than the strictly informational that preceded it. AMAs spanning sites like Reddit, AskFM, Formspring, and Facebook all have one crippling flaw: they leave users open to digital harrassment, cyber bullying, and harm of the sort.
When LGBTQ activists like Jamey Rodemeyer from Buffalo, who "assured his peers that his life had been difficult but improved after he came out publicly about his sexuality", are faced with an insurmountable amount of hate that pushed him to suicide, people must realize that the cauldron of toxicity on the Internet has come to a rolling boil (Reagle, 2015). People reach out into the vast, empty void of the internet expecting a shred of sympathy to reflect back at them, not at all expecting hateful comments to swarm them like wasps.
The way we share our lives and information about ourselves on the internet is "not a simple broadcast", we allow for feedback in comments, both positive and negative. The fact that the negative now outweigh the comments in terms of numerical intensity and in emotional intensity implies a foundational flaw in how we percieve interpersonal relations through the Internet (Reagle, 2015).

## 11/19 Collapsed Context

Twitter, in itself, is an enigma of attention: who are we talking to when we tweet, post, or rant online? Some may treat their online following as fans, eager for another post to add to the repertoire they may call a home page. Others may choose to engage their following as friends, a term used by many social media platforms. As discussed in “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience”, there is a great disparity between some of the definitions of friends when used in the context of social media, whether it be the 'IRL friend' or someone who could have randomly following a user (Marwick, Boyd, 2010). Pragmatically, the way one views their online following must also be influenced by the size of said following: someone with millions of followers will be more inclined to call them a fanbase, while someone with a couple hundred may refer to them as friends. The danger in this differentiation comes in the publicity of one's posts and responses to them. As discussed within the reading, the facets of one's personality that they depict online, on the plethora of platforms that one could use, is different from those portrayed in real life; the duality between contrasting real-world and online personalities may become problematic if a user sees their online following as closely resembling a following of one side of themselves, and another is discussed. Ultimately, no matter the size of the online following, there is still some sort of agenda associated with every tweet sent out.

## 11/22 Gendered Work
Being authentic online is next to impossible, and it is becoming increasingly more apparent that users lack the drive to approach the issue, instead floating along the stream of endless ego-boosting, self-illuminating media people broadcast out to their ‘friends’. The rise of the Instagram Husband, as James Cave reveals in his article “How To Be The Best 'Instagram Husband' You Can Be”, seems to be a much more sentimental bond centered around ensuring that a user captures the best moments for an individual to post, but to cherish as a couple. For influencers, it becomes an increasing push to get the perfect shot, or to fulfill the needs of a financial or contractual agreement laid out before. An Instagram Husband is synonymous to an influencer’s golf caddy, ensuring they are by their side to capture every beautiful moment, but never being a part of it themselves. I find it to be such an egoistic act to ask your partner to consistently take photos of only yourself, it makes for such an imbalance of attention, both within the relationship they have and on social media.
Beyond faking smiles, moments, and emotions for a shot, influencers are also falsifying how massive they are in the webspace by lying about sponsorships (Lorenz, 2018). The inlaid artifice these ‘celebrities’ causes a spiraling descent from controversy to irrelevance if and when their audience finds out about their misdeeds. If people can not be truthful and honest about who they are, how relevant they are in the webspace, or about their life in general, how can anyone differentiate between those actively trying to remain true to themselves and their online audience, and those not?

## 11/26 Bemused
YouTube is a boiling cesspool of media and user responses, where the toxicity of the waters has turned the fish ravenous, waiting for the opportunity to comment “first” with every delicious post dangled above the surface. As a seemingly inane task, someone posting such a comment earns nothing fiscally or emotionally, yet thousands will still idle at their computers waiting for an influencer to post another video. Chapter 7 of “Reading the Comments” opens with a brief explanation of the mentality of such a commenter, treating it akin to preferential attachment (Reagle, 2015). The implication of such a comparison is that there is power or an influential capacity one may have by being early to comment.
That is not to say that being early to comment on a video causes your post to gain a large amount of positive feedback, or any feedback for that matter. Being “first” simply allows a user to have a greater influence and captivity over an influencer’s audience by being the only response available to respond to; instead of being divergent and posting another comment or an opposing view, people are more likely to interact with the few already put up by the time they finish interacting with the media. In other applications, this can be more efficient than any previously conceived notion of advertisement, as that “first” comment can ultimately shape the way a viewing audience much larger than themselves views a specific topic, whether it be political, social, financial, etc. If a user’s online interaction can so easily be herded to the more prominent comments (which are posted earlier on) of media they interact with, how can anyone derive their own, unique opinion about what they just saw?

## 12/3 Pushback
Ubiquity of online comments commonly leads to the deterioration of online communities at a personal level: increasing presence of hateful, nasty comments, disinformation, and lower quality comments have forced the hands of many businesses with online communities backing them to moderate their respective webspaces. Within Joseph Reagle’s *Reading the Comments*, there is a focus on the idea of achieving a “libertarian paradise” that lacks rules but requires little to no guidance to retain its moral uprightness (Reagle, 2015). In an imperfect world it is impossible to achieve such an ideal, people take too many risks and are too easily offended to even dream of viably reaching that state.
In my own experience, at least within the scope of social media, there are multiple conscious and unconscious choices somebody makes beyond liking or not liking a photo, the first being whether or not to comment. A post of any kind becomes devalued in the mind of the publishing party if there is no reaction by the audience; lacking an exorbitant amount of emojis or compliments about someone’s attractiveness on an Instagram post can ultimately have a negative impact on the publisher’s view of the piece or themselves. People also decide what they wish to comment, if they want to be nasty to an individual, or if they will maintain a posts positivity in its comment section. People see the comments they leave online as being weightless whims in an endless surge of media, yet one comment can shift how someone views a post’s comments in general, how people interact with the post and ongoing interpersonal communications made within the webspace.