# Reading Responses (Set 1)

## Reading responses 5 out of 5

### Sep 16 Friday - Attention

As a college student who picked up and left California for the East Coast, being “superconnected” has been essential to preserving my relationships with friends and family back home. According to Mary Chayko, technology is whatever you make of it. While I accept that I experience some of the drawbacks of being digitally connected, I experience far more benefits, which is why I continue to use technology.

The advantages of “carrying your social support network in your pocket” (p 177) are unparalleled. I’m able to stay in touch with people that I would otherwise go months without, and I select the social media that allows me to do that best. Instagram intensifies my feelings of FOMO and doesn’t allow for one on one personal connections, so I use the app [BeReal](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/magazine/bereal-app.html) instead, which prompts you to take a picture once a day at a random time. I only have my closest friends on BeReal, so there’s no pressure to present myself a certain way, and I see something about each of their days without having to set aside too much of my time. It makes it a little easier to go about my day without worrying that I’ve neglected an important relationship (p 187).

Social media and digital connectedness also allow for a greater connection to society as a whole. This interconnectedness can be found in small moments, like a TikTok highlighting various parenting tendencies. Opening the comments to see this is a shared experience can highlight our similarities in upbringings and create a community. In the context of bigger events, like the [Queen’s death](https://www.vulture.com/2022/09/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-twitter-memes-brands.html), technology allows people to share their reactions and come together, in live time, over a cultural moment. Being unplugged, like the contestants on the show Big Brother, can leave you in the dark regarding life-changing events.

Certain drawbacks, like the discomfort of being bored and the desperation to fill every moment with something in the background, are really relatable. These are challenges that we each individually need to learn to overcome, but that shouldn’t prevent us from taking advantage of the benefits of digital connectivity.

<iframe width="876" height="493" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5OxZCXgAOCk" title="Big Brother Canada 8 Houseguests Learn About Seriousness Of COVID-19" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

### Sept 20 Friday - How the web works

I have never understood how technology works. As we discussed in class, it’s important to look at each new piece of information critically, accounting for personal bias and oversight. I have never understood how technology works before, and I at least partially credit gender biases for my general unfamiliarity and discomfort with the inner workings of technology. However, by acknowledging these fears before learning more, I feel that I was better able to understand “how the web works” than before.

Here’s what I took away from [MDN’s article](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_started_with_the_web/How_the_Web_works): All communications between a client and a server are a series of requests and responses that rely on an internet connection for contact. Communications use the language of HTTP, or hypertext transfer protocol, and the website content is sent in “data packets.” These smaller data files are sent and assembled to create the website that the user is ultimately able to view. This helps in case the data is corrupted or “dropped.”

[Brody’s explanations](https://blog.hartleybrody.com/https-certificates/) of why and how HTTPS connections are secured made me feel like I already knew more than I had thought I knew. The names of the various encryptions were new to me, but the concept of having private and public keys to allow for only these two parties to access the material makes sense. While the math explanation of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange went over my head, the analogy to mixing paint colors helped the material to click. Additionally, the need for authentication is clear. However, I still do not fully understand how certificates being approved by the Certificate Authority guarantee that the person on the other end of the connection is who you think it is. Couldn’t the user on the other end be on someone else’s account or device to access the sensitive information?

Finally, I still struggle with the abstract nature of this all. Does this exchange and storage of information exist somewhere physical? For example, are these “servers” in some room, or do they all just exist digitally, therefore existing within themselves?

### Sep 27 Tuesday - Learning

What’s more important to deeply learn than learning itself? This response to Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel’s thoughts on “The Science of Successful Learning” is an example of their recommendations for learning being put into practice. One key influence on retention is active engagement with the material. By identifying personal and general connections to the content, the level of learning becomes deeper and longer lasting, and this effortful learning changes the brain. Other emphasized best practices include retrieval that is effortful, delayed, and repeated, as retrieval “interrupts forgetting” (p 3).

To reach a higher level of learning, you always need a strong base of knowledge. While this makes sense, this is worrisome to me because though our long-term memory is “virtually limitless,” our society isn’t set up for people to be learning things at vastly different rates. If someone misses crucial developmental points in childhood, while capable of catching up, it may be too difficult to go back and relearn what was missed. I had learned in my Development Psychology class that there are points where language acquisition becomes no longer possible; the ability to make certain sounds from other languages, or to learn a language in the first place, is on a schedule. If missed, can no higher levels of learning ever occur?

It’s important for the learner to “be the one in charge” (p 159) and to direct their learning. This begs the question of student intent. I fear that not enough students care about learning, but prioritize grades instead, as the marker for societal success is not how much we have learned, but our GPA. I would presume that this is why so many students are willing to use massed practice and cramming because that gives “momentary strength” (p 63), which is all that many students want. They would prefer learning to feel easy than to be difficult and effortful.

Finally, I’m curious about how to get proper feedback that your learning is successful. Is testing and corrective feedback enough to judge whether you deeply learned a concept? I’ve received high grades on tests that I crammed for and couldn’t remember the content a day later, so I fear that tests aren’t always clear indicators. How do we really know what we know?

### Oct 4 Tuesday - Cooperation

The principles of microeconomics make up the principles of cooperation, or at least according to “Supercooperators” by Nowak. The concepts of game theory, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the Tragedy of the Commons as I learned in my microeconomics class this summer come back into play when analyzing the struggle between conflict and cooperation, and the individual and collective good. The ramifications of these experiments and theories reach important social issues regarding public goods and give guidance regarding how to best react as a society, be it through harnessing reputation, punishment, or reward.

In contrast to my microeconomics textbook, Nowak focuses on the individual benefits of cooperating within the example of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, seemingly arguing that the cooperative outcome is always what is the most desirable. I appreciated the nuanced view of my economics class, where we explored that in the example of two criminals hoping for lesser sentences, society benefits from the dominant strategy and outcome of both defecting, as both criminals are caught and punished for their crimes. Another practical example is monopolies attempting to fix prices through collusion. Both parties have an incentive to decrease their prices and increase their sales, but if they agreed to keep their prices at a higher price, then they would make a greater profit. So while the monopolies take a hit by choosing to defect over cooperate, this is to the benefit of society as a whole. This makes me question whether it’s fair to make cooperation out to be the better choice, always. We should always question for whom it is best, applying critical thinking as we have discussed in class.

In terms of societal reactions to Prisoner’s Dilemma and Tragedy of the Commons, I love the idea of harnessing reputation to convince people to choose to cooperate. I had never realized the ways that companies already have attempted to use this to their advantage, as a Prius driver myself (pg 29), and I feel that this is the easiest solution with the greatest potential for change, as no one has to “pay” as they do in punishments and rewards (pg 38). More examples of where we have harnessed reputation are bringing your own bags to the grocery store and restaurants using alternatives to plastic straws, both of which have become societal pressures. This feels like the right direction for slowing climate change.

### Oct 7 Friday - Social networks

The digital age is moving fast, as illustrated by Rheingold’s examples of prevalent social media and available internet communities being almost outdated today. As a member of Gen Z, a network society that is network-centric as opposed to group-centric is all I have ever known, and there are many benefits and drawbacks to the formation and strengthening of these communities when compared to historical societies. The internet offers increased availability of linking and bridging while making true bonding harder. This gives more opportunities to connect with people and greater access to diversity of information but makes most connections feel more surface level.

When looking at Social Networking Analysis techniques and counting the number of ties one has (pg 204), I have further questions about what counts as a tie or connection. Including Facebook friends means to me that you don’t need an active or close relationship with someone to count them as a connection. By this criteria, do the creators of the content that you regularly consume count, or does communication have to be bidirectional? What about people you know virtually nothing about, but are in communication with, such as commenters on a random TikTok video or matches on a dating app? The difference between Rheingold’s perspective in 2012 and the contexts I just proposed is that the expectation of closeness and reciprocity are significantly lower. However, I would imagine the number of people in our network would change drastically depending on if these forms of connections are counted.

Finally, in the section on social capital, Rheingold presents the idea of social capital in a rather unsavory way. By suggesting to grant people in your network favors for reputational benefits (pg 221) it feels too much like using others as a means to an end. However, Rheingold did mention that by applying concepts, such as critical thinking, crap detection, and collaboration, which we already explored in class, we can avoid this mental pitfall and see people as more than just capital (pg 225).