# Reading Response (Set 2)
- Checklist for a [good reading response](https://reagle.org/joseph/zwiki/Teaching/Best_Practices/Learning/Writing_Responses.html) of 250-350 words
- [ ] Begin with a punchy start.
- [ ] Mention specific ideas, details, and examples from the text and earlier classes.
- [ ] Offer something novel that you can offer towards class participation.
- [ ] Check for writing for clarity, concision, cohesion, and coherence.
- [ ] Send to professor with “hackmd” in the subject, with URL of this page and markdown of today’s response.
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## Oct 29 Fri - Shaped
Red started, as an application in China, for people to share beauty and makeup stuff, gradually developed into a platform for sharing anything and asking any questions. It is interesting to see girls share their posts about buying "appearance ratings" on Taobao (a Chinese online shopping site like Amazon). The seller will form a team of 5 people, each will give girls a score from 1-10, and finally take an average. In brief, this behavior is also known as quantification which is to grade yourself or others, not limited to appearance, by using constant evaluation criteria (Reagle, 2015).

The above phenomenon is similar to the "am I ugly" video in the reading which related to self-esteem and aimed to know her appearance level. According to Reagle (2015), Self-esteem refers to the self-evaluation of one's worth in relation to self-concept. However, with the development of social media, people are keen to manage their social media accounts, and determine whether they are popular, and construct their self-esteem through the comments of others, the number of followers, and the frequency of likes.

Another phenomenon is, some people, even actors, feel uncomfortable when facing their own photos, so researchers use this "discomfort" to study people's self-esteem by comparing people's self-esteem after viewing themselves in a mirror and after viewing their own Facebook profile. Such an experiment is a powerful metaphor for how people are shaped by their online edits. The research results are:

- Seeing one's own Facebook profile enhanced self-esteem, especially when the participant edited their profile during the experiment.
- People who stay on their profile have more self-esteem than people who browse other things (Reagle, 2015).

The author also mentioned, in a media-saturated environment, it is difficult to avoid comparing yourself to others. However, such comparison will only diminish our sense of well-being. The reason is social media allows people to see more beautiful people from the world, the more frequently people use social media, the more people will feel that others are doing better than them. This phenomenon is also related to FOMO, which is used to “describe this impression that other people are doing more and having greater fun” (Reagle, 2015). Finally, FOMO creates people’s jealousy. Besides, Chayko (2017) also talked about the negative emotion FOMO brings to people due to “people can feel that they need to work and/or be digitally connected day and night, lest they fall behind the curve”. Thus, in the long run, the potential pressure will be generated.

These researchers got some results about the negative impacts social media made, but the correlation is not causation. As the author said, we can learn how to thrive online by learning how to focus our attention and not succumb to digital temptations (Reagle, 2015). But my question is: which method or psychological suggestion should we take to avoid the damage of social media to our self-esteem and well-being?
***
## Nov 05 Fri - Tiktok, fakes, and appropriation
Freedom of speech has always been respected by Western countries, especially on the Internet, where people can raise their objections without face-to-face conflict. However, "Free ethnicities" on social media platforms becomes a new trend.

Influenced by K-pop and Japanese animation, Asian culture has become very intriguing which attracts some Westerners who want to become Asians or have some Asian facial characteristics. This causes the rise of Orientalism. The most common way on social media is to stretch your eyes with your hands and then take photos and post some Korean captions (Leo, 2021). Asians, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic (Wuhan Flu), are defined by Westerners as the source of the virus. That means Asian people are stereotyped and threatened in American media. However, our physical characteristics are constantly imitated, and such tension is contradictory. In addition, six Asian women were killed by a sex addiction killer in Atlanta because there were believed as objects of temptation (Leo, 2021). In the other words, “Non-Asians get to profit off this image of a sexualized little Asian girl, while actual Asian women suffer for it” (Rebecca, 2021).

It is the same as Blackfishing which refers to "the practice of (mostly) white women pretending to be Black by using makeup, hairstyles, and fashion that originate in Black Culture"(Maha, 2021). Such a phenomenon is called cultural appropriation, and it may harm African Americans from the degree of legal rights and cultural identity. For example, Some Africa Americans' ornaments are worn only on certain occasions but blackfish are carried around, thus undermining racial customs. Also, pretend to be African American to get some social benefits, but in essence, it divides what real African Americans deserve. The author also uses "domesticated" to describe the current trend that is black culture is deliberately catered by celebrities to white audiences for profit. The common form is that singers only use the butts and long eyelashes (representative of black women) in the mv and lyrics but ignore their other culture. Moreover, these whites can take off their black costumes and enjoy the treatment of whites without facing any challenges a black woman would (Maha, 2021).

In conclusion, two types of fishing pose potential threats to the indigenous people from the perspective of culture and rights. According to Rebecca（2021）, to achieve users' orientalism, Tech companies such as Instagram and Snapchat create a ton of filters to convincingly change users' identities. My question is if those companies are using Asians to make money? Are they constructing a form of Asian fishing?
***
# Nov 16 Tue - Finding someone & living alone
In my impression, Apps like tinder is used to make friends at first, but gradually it became a digital tool for people to find sexual partners.


What’s totally different from my impression is that the emergence of tinder has accelerated the speed of people getting married. Also, one out of every four pairs of heterosexual couples met on tinder, and this proportion is even higher among same-sex couples. This phenomenon occurs because there is detailed information of participants on tinder, such as height, age, occupation, etc. With this information, people can match their preferred types of partners more quickly and take in-depth communication (Ferdman, 2016). "Swipe Right" in Tinder means you like someone while "Swipe left" means you reject someone. The big data will detect and record your ideal types and recommend more profiles based on them, and the specific rules are the same as filter bubbles. Previously, Pariser's (2015) article indicates the negative effects of filter bubbles that trap people in the same echo chamber, and always receive similar views. However, applying filter bubbles in Tinder could be a good thing because it enhances the efficiency when users are choosing their partners.

Using Online Dating Apps also has potential drawbacks including the online profile does not match the real situation. According to Rudder (2010), people are two inches shorter than the real themselves; "People make 20% less than they say they do", and the pictures on the profile may be out-of-date (30-year-olds use their young photos when they were 20). In this fast-paced society, using online dating apps helps to quickly and accurately find the ideal partners, but revising one's true information often wastes both parties' time.

The interesting thing is some people use online dating apps to find partners while others enjoy loneliness. According to Klinenberg (2012), most of the reasons why people choose living alone are that they do not need to be restricted by others and they can do what they want to do. Meanwhile, people like Esther are trying to combat isolation and loneliness because her family members all have their own things to do. I also live alone because my friend (roommate) goes to live with her boyfriend, so she only comes back occasionally. For me, I think I am getting into a paradox. I do enjoy my time alone because my friend will make inevitable noise in the living room or kitchen. However, after she left, no one called me to have food on time, which caused my messy biological clock. In general, We will go out to eat together, but now I just order some takeaway food since I am too lazy to get out. Therefore, for me, I can’t tell if living alone is good or bad. So my further question is whether enjoying freedom is an excuse for people who live alone, but they actually don't like living alone?
***
# Nov 23 Tue - Algorithmic discrimination
I believe in the impact of algorithms of users on these applications and websites. C.trip is the biggest website to book hotels and flights, and it shows the effects of the algorithm directly and based on my click history. If I choose a hotel and arrive at the payment page, but I choose to terminate the transaction on the payment page. When I browsed other hotels, but finally returned to the hotel where I just terminated the transaction, I can see the price increase. However, if I switch to another account, the price is the same as the first time I saw it. I think this is using the algorithm to imply to the user that the price of this hotel has already risen when you leave. If you don’t book now, it will become higher in a while. It might be effective to facilitate the transaction but not ethic.

Researchers did two different experiments on the effects algorithms take. The first one is to utilize Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) to “find out the prices and order of products for real people” (Hannak et al., 2014). The Turk is instructed to configure researchers' browsers to load all of the pages they wanted and then go to a website that loads those pages from a specially designed URL. Another experiment is to explore why personalization is happening by “writing phantomjs scripts to make requests to the sites” (Hannak et al., 2014). Experimental subjects include Expedia, Travelocity, Cheaptickets and Orbitz, Priceline, and Home Depot. The result shows these sites have more or less price discrimination. To be specific, the algorithms of these websites will provide you with different prices based on your previous booking records, the mobile phone system you use, and users' history of clicks. For example, people who are Android users will see about 6% of prices differences (Hannak et al., 2014).

Besides the price discrimination, algorithms may also reflect racial discrimination since when people search for pictures of hands, men, and women, most of what Google shows are pictures of white people. Google’s response is biases exist both in the media and on the web, which is reflected in the search engines’ algorithms (Rutherford & White, 2016). According to Kernighan (2017), the Internet, including social media platforms, will know users’ personal information based on the users’ likes on posts, IP addresses, and other contents. So my doubt is whether the algorithm may know that you are a white person, when you search for pictures, it will show you a lot of pictures of the same race as you.
***
# Nov 30 Tue - Collapsed context
Since entering university, the first assignments of all writing courses I have taken are about the audience. The common question in the project rubrics is： Who are you writing for; which genre you are going to use based on your audience, so I can hardly hate the word audience anymore. But what I didn’t expect is that the word audience has actually been integrated into social media.

This concept of ‘authenticity' refers to "the ‘real me’ and authentic experiences, artifacts, and people" (Marwick & Boyd, 2010). People usually maintain authenticity by considering their target audience. In the other words, people maintain the authenticity that their audience believes on Twitter, but everyone’s definition of their Twitter audience is different. In general, people’s audience is what they imagined, and the concept is imagined audience (Marwick & Boyd, 2010). Such kinds of audience are constructed by users to present themselves appropriately. For example, some users have fewer followers, usually, their friends and they tweet to their friends or tweet to themselves. It’s like showing one’s life to friends (no matter whether they are friends in real life or friends online) around you to maintain a social life. some users may emphasize self-consciousness which means they consider Twitter as a channel to record their own life, and other people's reaction is not important (Marwick & Boyd, 2010). I am in this category, although I do not use Twitter, I use Weibo (the same as Twitter but used in China). I will not consider my followers, and I post not to show to my followers but to record the happiness and sadness that happened in my life.

Another approach of the imagined audience is people may consider their audience is a community, and people will tweet based on this particular community. Micro-celebrity is a strategy to understand this approach, and the meaning is people present themselves as public figures and establish connections with the audience. Micro-celebrity is suitable for people with a large number of followers with different tastes, so posting all kinds of different tweets is needed. However, Micro-celebrity can be seen as inauthentic since it is a kind of self-promotion (Marwick & Boyd, 2010).

From my perspective, I think there is no absolute authenticity because you have to have to consider your audience and the social media platform you are using. I don’t know if the people who only tweet for themselves are the same as me, but I share all my stuff on Weibo just because I don't have too many followers, and my other social media platforms do not allow me to do that. For example, I have my family members in my Wechat, so I won't share photos in the club because my parents will be angry with me. In the other words, I am playing different roles. I am myself where few people know me; I am playing a positive role where lots of people know me. Thus, I feel like it is possible and common to have more than one persona online. My further question is what can one do to show the authenticity online to the utmost extent since there are restrictions of audience?