# Reading Responses (Set 2)

### Bemused

“Saved Our Son’s Life? 4/5 Stars” (Reagle, 6). With the rise of technology, people now have access to an array of different possibilities. Some can wreak havoc as they please and others can spread positive messages. Nevertheless, we must also remember that all the individuals using technology are humans, and we are not perfect. Humans have duality in us, and even though we can create marvelous things, we are also stupid and funny.

In my Intro to Communications class, we learned that communication is transactional and ongoing, and ideas are created as people communicate. The picture below shows the process of communication as a whole. In it, each participant is a sender and receiver at the same time, who make sense of the message using their own field experience. The channel in which people communicate can be varied: synchronous or asynchronous. In the digital world, the channel becomes the internet, and because it is asynchronous communication, messages can become distorted, leaving the receptor of the message confused if the message is interpreted incorrectly as it was intended.

Some examples of channeling errors are the ones in the reading. Commenting is a prevalent characteristic of the internet. Early comments receive more attention than later comments sometimes as they pose interesting ideas first that others can feed off of, which follows the phenomenon of “preferential attachment” or that the “rich get richer” (Reagle, 7). When someone posts “first!” to look trendy when a story gets published, people see it as a power move as it establishes dominance as an early player. Another example is the system of rating and reviewing online since a lot of assumptions can be made. The context of the quote at the beginning is about a woman who positively rated 5/5 stars beauty and utility products did not do the same thing with the device that saved her son’s life because appearance and quality were slightly deficient. This highlights how people have different expectations and competencies, yet we assume that they do not (Reagle, 10). Online, people do not know what system they are rating out of, if they all agree on what they are rating, or if they agree on the importance of rating and the meaning it has since symbols mean different things to different people. Communication channels online bring about new issues we face, but it also brings the funny and confusing side of people when they attempt to make do with technology.

It is fascinating to see communication work on the internet and how it can get distorted, bringing about incoherences that can be funny. However, people must realize that they all still have an impact on digital spaces. People can get their feelings hurt when reading a comment or a funny comment resulting from a channel distortion. I wonder where the line lies between a funny comment and hurting someone's feelings. Because of this, people should remember that their words have weight.


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### Weapons of Mass Destruction

Sometimes, danger is right below our noses, and we don’t even know it. In the book Weapons of Mass Destruction by Cathy O’Neill, the author explained what models are and the danger they can bring. She went over how models come in different ways, being as big as the government implemented as well as a thinking process. Put simply, models are processes that allow their users to use past knowledge to predict future outcomes. They bring direction and can be refined with new knowledge to make it better. Nevertheless, although models can be computer-generated, they can hold the judgments and prejudice of their creators as well as reflect their goals and ideology in the system (O’Neill, 21).

The author described three examples of models: a baseball model, a dynamic family meal model, and a recidivism model, the last one being characterized as a weapon of mass destruction. The baseball model uses statistics from a game, being updated and transparent with its goals to bring predictions of players’ movements and winning rates. The hypothetical family example helps O’Neill what dinner to make for her family. She uses convenience, economy, health, and good taste as factors for this internal decision-making process. **The recidivism model checks out the three elements of a WMD: opacity, scale, and damage (O’Neill, 31).** The LSI-R questionnaire asks circumstantial questions regarding the criminal’s background and is used to convict them from low to high risk based on the points collected. This questionnaire is not transparent, as prisoners are not kept updated about their scores nor asked any follow-up questions. It is also scaling since the LSI-R is the most common tool used in prison systems. Lastly, the questionnaire is damaging to prisoners as it is built under racist ideologies as black and Latino men are far more likely to be categorized as high risk than white men.

O’Neill explains how the college ranking system is another complex example of a WMD because of the scale factor. College ranking systems evaluate many factors such as reputation, graduation rates, comparison, and other factors that can be unmeasurable. Because of this, US News (the creator magazine of college rankings) employs proxies to correlate with success such as SAT scores and acceptance rates; nevertheless, a system built on proxies can easily be hoaxed. *“The U.S. News college ranking has a great scale, inflicts widespread damage, and generates an almost endless spiral of destructive feedback loops”* (O’Neill, 53). A solution employed by the Education Department was to create individual models for each college applicant that reflected the factors that they valued most, ranking universities according to their needs and wants.

This has been one of my favorite readings of this class, and it is because of the author’s way of explaining how models, big and small, are present in our everyday life, molding our society right under our perception. My question now is what other systems in place that go unnoticed can be characterized as WMD? How can we change them for the better?

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### Collapsed Contexts - Missed

When we present ourselves differently to different people we’re with, we’re engaging in impression management. Our sense of self and self-presentation are influenced by the audiences we have, and in cases when we don’t have an audience in front of us, we often imagine it by tacking pieces of our social environment. When adding social media to the mic, per se Twitter, a problem arises when we don’t know what type of audience we’re going to have. In an attempt to simplify our work, we often group multiple audiences into one, also known as context collapse (Boyd & Marwick, 9).

The authors of this article analyzed the imagined audiences and strategies people use on Twitter by asking them directly through the platform and gathering 226 responses from users with different ratios. There are different types of audiences on Twitter based on who we imagine our audiences to be. People who tweet to themselves and use Twitter as a personal space are more likely to reject the idea of filtering oneself for the sake of personal branding and creating digital intimacy. They engage in the core value of authenticity. Authenticity is socially constructed, and it is highly valued and perfected for social media engagement. Differently, there are people that prefer multiplicity, or targeting different content (tweets) to different audiences, addressing them all through a singular account. Moreover, some people have ideal audiences that they refer to when they tweet, often mirroring themselves.

“Twitter users maintain impressions by balancing personal/public information, avoiding certain topics, and maintaining authenticity” (Boyd & Marwick, 11). The sociological concept of symbolic interactionalism describes how identity and the self are established through constant interaction with others, meaning that self-presentation is a collaboration between individuals and audiences. Nevertheless, with the increase in social media advertising and celebrities online, people are interested in creating value in their content by using relationships and authenticity as a point of differentiation. Because of this, some micro-celebrities engage in fake authenticity through self-censorship as an attempt to build popularity.

Authenticity is a core value of mine, and this reading helped me want to refine what authenticity means to me, what am I basing it upon, and how that related to my social media use. For a long time, I only used Twitter when I thought I was funny, and now I see that was a form of engaging in impression management of my perception. Now, I practice authenticity and use Twitter when I want to without thinking about my audience.

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### Authenticity

“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build the door” -Milton Berle. There is research that validates the shifting nature of the work environment in a post-industrial economy to a more entrepreneurial environment for one pursuing their passions in the digital age. The ideal figure of entrepreneurship has developed into one of an “independent self-made man” (Duffy & Pruchniewska, 5). Having mentioned this, entrepreneurship is not only a male-dominated field, but it is also a male-coded field. Feminist entrepreneurship deals with capitalizing on traditional feminine skills and qualities. Creative activities such as lifestyle blogging and Etsy shops allow for the seamless integration of professional life into personal life. This means women have the opportunity to “work from home” and fulfill both their societal duties of providing and taking care of the house – not because they chose to, but as a major assumption – giving rise to the digital housewife phenomenon.

This study deeply interviews 12 female entrepreneurs and small business owners that mainly work in creative fields with the purpose of understanding how social media played a part in their careers. Researchers discussed sources of mentorship/support, their professional background as well as social media usage, finally finding that they experienced what’s called the digital double bind, which “requires women to assume additional labor and risk in an attempt to ensure success in their online ventures” (Duffy & Pruchniewska, 7). The women felt compelled to adopt traditional feminine values when dealing with social media values. The results found that women engaged in soft self-promotion, interactive intimacy, and compulsory visibility for their ventures to prosper. Soft-self promotion is women branding themselves modestly; interactive intimacy deals with building relationships to keep customers; compulsive visibility is sharing their private lives in an attempt to look human and successful as a woman. Female entrepreneurs challenge the notion of the ideal entrepreneur by just being women, but elements of post-feminism such as meritocracy make the impression that feminism has already reached its goal of the equal playground when there are still power structures in place.

This all reminds me of the entrepreneurship class I took last semester, Innovations! Although I had a relatively amazing experience, I experienced the differentiation that comes from being a woman in business. My professor called on me and my women peers less than my male counterparts, and I saw how half-baked ideas delivered by men saw more hype and support than developed concepts from my female peers. I wonder if it would be possible for the business department to officially address and have resources to support women in entrepreneurship other than just school clubs. Maybe with the universal implementation of these resources and research in schools, the next generation of businesspeople get equal results for equal efforts, regardless of gender.

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### Pushback

There are two outcomes of having plenty of readily available information at any moment: it can be “thrilling” or it can “become a glute” that makes people double guess themselves (Reagle, 2). This last reading discusses the toxicity comments in online forums contain, and how their impact affects the user. For the most part, online comment sections reveal the not-so-good sides of humanity when left unsupervised. To deal with this problem, “moderation is now a central tenant of successful blogs” (Reagle, 7). The mentality that less is more on forums such as Stack Exchange is positive since they use the minimum amount of tools to carry a conversation to avoid spam and other problematic comments. Nevertheless, big players that foster online conversation want more tools available for users to comment on and keep their sites with traffic to generate a profit, but when negativity happens on those sites, the attempts these companies make to decrease the negative impact only help them make more profit and not tackle the problem itself. An example of this was discussed when Google integrated Google+ with YouTube when commenting to give haters an identifiable face. The results backfired when loyal users showed their discontent with this solution, as it “outed people” out of anonymity even on safety issues and they treated Youtube as a social networking site rather than a video site.

There is a problem with online commenting platforms. Small platforms don’t have the funds and hacks to sustain themselves and large platforms are in the business prioritizing profit. They sell users' information to advertisers disregarding privacy, advertising groups like-minded people together and echo chambers can be created. What people want out of online commenting is the opportunity to foster “intimate serendipity” (Reagle 11). However, when people reach communities that embody these desires, this perfection often doesn't last long, as was explained by the Twitter example. When people put themselves out there and express vulnerability online and then that’s met with negativity and unsolicited feedback, this brings a long-lasting impact on its users.

Some of the insights that the reading leaves me with is how people ultimately want to cultivate intimacy and create lasting relationships. Two new sites that can fulfill these wants are BeReal and LockIt. Both sites ask the user to post what they are doing at the moment and share it with their friends. These apps have the option to comment, but it’s not the priority. Ultimately, creating a community where commenting has a positive impact more so than a negative one is very difficult, but some alternate options such as the apps mentioned above are an attempt to do so through pictures.