# Reading Responses #1

## Friday, January 20 - How the Web Works

The internet functions in the manner of an exchange. There are two main participants: clients and servers. Clients are the devices through which people access online information - for example, a cell phone or computer. Servers are larger computers that store webpages and other data. A client sends a request to the server for access to the webpage, and the server then sends a response which downloads a copy of the web page onto the client's device. Though this exchange may seem simple, there are several different factors that allow this to happen. The client's internet connection is very important, as it allows for the entire exchange to occur. Other components that facilitate this interaction include TCP/IP, DNS, Component files, and HTTPS.
HTTPS is a crucial component of this exchange, as it secures the connection. In Brody's article, he explains how the client's request often must travel long distances to servers across the globe, through several different routers and switches. This has a lot of potential for risk, especially when confidential information is being transmitted. However, HTTPS provides an additional layer of security, through Transport Layer Security, Public Key Encription, and Certificates.
The internet is such a key part of every single person's life, including my own, so I think that it is valuable to learn about how it works. Having this information can be crucial: for instance, if I am going to make a purchase, I should check that the website is secure with HTTPS so my credit card information is not at a higher risk of being stolen. I also like how MDN web docs simplfies it into the exchange model, and even compares it like walking down the road from your house to a shop. Being able to visualize this process helps me understand it a lot more, and I'm glad I can apply it to my own life.

## Friday, January 27 - Learning

Learning has been the most important skill in my life for the past twenty years. I have been a student for the past seventeen years, and my life has centered around learning. School facilitates the learning of many different skills - logic, reading, math, critical thinking, and social awareness. Learning is a survival necessity, as we need to adapt to different environments and learn safety as well as self sufficiency. As I have gotten older, learning in itself has changed - life lessons have become deeper and more complex, school has become more advanced and skill specialized, and these past six months I have had to learn how to grocery shop, meal plan, and cook. Since learning greatly impacts my life, reading *Make it Stick: the Science of Learning* was very insightful.
As Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel introduce the main concepts behind learning, they make several different claims refuting common beliefs of learning. They say learning is effortful, which did not shock me in the slightest. I feel that I learn the most in classes which I have to put a lot of time and effort in. They also insinuate how people themselves are poor judges of when they are learning, and how rereading text is not effective while recall is a lot more effective. This honestly makes sense when I relate it to my own life - I often don't want to spend an excess of my time studying, so I will choose to reread and rewrite my notes rather than memorize and recall. I can also connect a lot of these concepts to the concepts from the cognition unit of my Foundations of Psychology class - one of the key points that both the authors and my professor made is that learning is more effective when study sessions are spread out over time, and the authors even refer to cognitive psychology as a related field.
After reading this chapter, I still have questions on how intuition relates to learning. Intuition can be one of the strongest feelings; it can get us out of sticky situations and often lead us down the right path in life. I am now led to wonder how much of our intuition is based on learning? How we live our lives are based on our perceptions of the world and our lived experiences, so is intuition, or our gut feeling, really just a product of the world around us? Or is it something built in, something more than just our brains and memories?

## Friday, February 3 - Cooperation

Cooperation has been an integral part of humankind since the days of hunting and gathering. When we lived in tribes, according to Joseph Reagle, the ideal amount of relationships that we could maintain is 150. Therefore, even in modern day society, the ideal community size is 150. In these hunter-gatherer clans, cooperation was key. It was needed for survival - everyone had a role, and followed to save their own and others' lives. Even if someone may have benefitted from harming others, it was not the norm. That is how the community format has survived through today.

We see this concept of trust in cooperation continued in other situations. It continues in the Prisoner's Dilemma, as discussed by Nowak, In that situation, people cooperate as it could potentially benefit them with less jail time, but it involves lots of trust in the other. Additonally, Tragedy of the Commons, also discussed by Nowak, applies as people give the courtesy of only taking their share of shared resources. In both of these scenarios, the most common applications are with those who are close to us - our partner in crime, our household. So online, with people being remote and far away from one another, we may fail to cooperate because we may not feel the emotions and obligation to a random stranger on a screen rather than a loved one or someone in our proximity.

Cooperation online could be more difficult for modern day society because people are so disconnected. For example, I am a member of the Alpha Chi Omega sorority on campus, an organization with about 150 girls. There are certain guidelines that we all follow to preserve the integrity of our organization and respect one another. However, this is a vibrant, active, and face-to-face community. The social consequences if we were to break these rules or disrespect other sisters could be harmful. Online communities may function differently since everyone is on a screen. It is less engaging, less connected, and less fulfilling. Therefore, it would be much easier to break the rules or do something harmful to the community.

## February 7 - Social Networks

The human popluation is really just a wide network of connections. Northeastern has a population of about 18,000, yet it feels like such a small school. It seems like everyone that I know has a mutual connection with someone else I know completely separately. I never knew how closely connected all of us are, how small this world truly is, until coming here.

A lot of this concept can be explained by networks. In Social Has a Shape by Rheingold, he discusses the concept of six degrees of separation: that every person on Earth is only separated by six degrees. I have heard of this concept before, but it is really interesting to read about the scientific interpretation of it. Rheingold references studies done in 1967, 2001, and 2007 that find an average of about six degrees of separation. These studies show that people's networks have a large number of "nodes", different connections, but these links tend to be shorter on average. It is interesting seeing how this translates so smoothly from before the digital age in 1967 to the current digital age, with the 2007 study being done on Microsoft users.

Now that technology and social networks have a far wider scope than they did in 2007, we can only expect that humans are far more connected than before. Both my roommate and I have had the experience of having a conversation in real life with someone that had just recognized us from Instagram. Networking has become a prolific part of society, with Linkedin being a popular website just for that purpose. Networking is important for jobs, and also for making friends and maintaining a healthy social life. Social networks provide social capital, as Rheingold explains, which is how my roommate and I have respectively made friends just from Instagram. It's crazy how far social networks have taken us in life, and I'm excited, and a little nervous, to see where they will take us in the future.

## February 10 - Haters

"We could improve our YouTube channels by 'fucking off and dying'?" Clever Pie and Isabel Fay write in their poem 'Thank You Hater'. In 'Alienated: You Fail It! Your Skill Is Not Enough', Joseph Reagle writes about how the internet has come to be such a place filled with negativity. It does not take much for someone to warrant hate - a simple mistake or failure can lead to public humiliation or hatred on the internet. Hater behavior can even be found in real life, though not as common, as Reagle cites examples of this in the feud between Torvalds and Tanenbaum in creating Linux. Feuds are much more common anonymously online, as seen in the UserNet wars and seen so very often on Twitter. Bullying and harrassment are also prevalent on Instagram and Facebook, as Shannon Bond writes about in her NPR article. Though Meta took down 9.2 million pieces of harrassment content from Facebook and 7.8 million pieces from Instagram in the third quarter of 2021, this is likely an underestimation as it does not count user-reported posts.

Hate can be seen almost anywhere you go on the internet. It can be seen in YouTube channels, Yelp reviews, and especially on Twitter in so many forms: beef, or "bully battles" between users, or group hatred on a concept or a celebrity. Why is this sensation so common? First off, it truly takes very little effort to be a hater. Additionally, it can make people feel better about themselves if they see people doing worse in life than they are. It is easier to be a hater in the digital world than in real life because people can hide behind a screen. If their identity is not being disclosed, people are easier and quicker to say something hurtful as it will not bring them as much guilt or consequences.