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# System prepended metadata

title: Reading Responses (Set 1)
tags: [CDA]

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###### tags: `CDA`
# Reading Responses (Set 1)


## Reading responses 5 out of 5

### Friday, February 5 - Fake News

Why wear face coverings when your friend went to a social gathering without a mask and was perfectly fine? Your neighbor did the same and was perfectly fine. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government, and other health experts cannot be trusted over personal experience. This is the mindset that millions across the U.S. hold regarding coronavirus - a direct result of the ideals of self-reliance and personal responsibility being indoctrinated into a majority of Americans at a young age according to danah boyd. Experts are shocked when the common public feeds into hoax sites, conspiracy theories, and hyperpartisan blogs and ignores the years of factual research and hard logic presented in front of them. Yet boyd suggest that the root of fake news and misinformation is not that the public is “easily fooled” or “stupid,” but rather the cutural distrust toward the government, medical experts, and journalists that has been in the making since Watergate, for good reason. 

Marginalized groups distrust mainstream media for its historical lack of accurate representation and recognition of their struggles. For example, since coronavirus first spread across the world in March, so have the racist attacks on Asian Americans. But few media sources rarely report on such instances or downplay them in the process. How can minority households, including African Americans and Hispanic and Latino Americans,  be expected to trust news outlets that frequently distort and pervert their experiences? I would assume that the answer is too often they simply don’t. Lower and middle class whites exhibit the same distrust toward institutions, and these groups may look toward friends, family, and Internet strangers as sources of information instead. This is where stage two of the media manipulation life cycle comes into play. The people and organizations who execute manipulation campaigns prey on the fact that people want to do the research themselves, embodying the American idea of “freedom,” or distrust established media sources, trading in expertise for experience. On the other hand, though it can be argued that the government and media giants such as Facebook must play a more active role in the mitigation stage of the media manipulation life cycle, it would be wiser to prevent the seeding of manipulation campaigns in the first place. How can we encourage media literacy when the media does not embrace many marginalized groups? I suspect that the true root of fake news is much deeper than any of us thought and connects to the even larger issues of America that must be addressed first. 

### Tuesday, February 16 - Cooperation

Perhaps “survival of the fittest” is an attitude that humans must retire, as a more accurate and valuable concept may be “survival of those who can cooperate the best.” Martin Nowack proposes that cooperation is crucial to the evolution of all living organisms and not something to be avoided for the sake of competition. Deemed “supercooperators,” humans are assumed to be the most selfless out of all animals, given our rare ability to develop language.

So what is it that causes war, conflict, and destruction across the world? While our languages set us apart from other animals, it would be foolish to suggest that they make us inherently better. The answer to this question is the indoctrination of values of independence, self-reliance, personality responsibility, and the need to be the best. Humans can be “supercooperators,” but only when we are taught to. Social dilemma theorists are divided on how to go about identifying the motivating factors of cooperation and collective action; however, one thing is clear: we cannot continue acting purely in self-interest without destroying ourselves in the process.

The COVID-19 pandemic and varying conditions of individualistic and collectivistic societies clearly support Nowack’s claims. Individualistic countries that prioritize independence and individual interests over those of the group have suffered significantly more in comparison to collectivist societies. Countries with a collectivist framework are more willing to comply with social distancing and hygiene practices. The virus spread faster than it should have because people simply did not believe it was a problem. Many people began wearing masks only because government officials expressed the severity of the problem and the public frowned upon anti-maskers. Of the five mechanisms that govern cooperation emergence, indirect reciprocity and reputation are what primarily motivates humans to be altruistic.

With the growing polarization within the U.S. itself and jarring antagonization across countries, I am afraid for what the future holds regarding climate change, nuclearization, and more. Policymakers cannot solely focus on rational, logical research and instead take time to understand human nature if they want to be leaders that can unite others.

### Tuesday, February 25 - The Dark Web 

The same tool that enables dissidents to safely unite and fight oppressive regimes is the same tool that allows crime enterprises to traffick and conceal illegal drugs, weapons, and even people, proving again that the problem is not technology itself but rather how one uses it. The Tor browser, where the Darknet is located, has ironically served as both a secure government agency network and safehouse for criminals. Despite diligent attempts, law enforcement is clearly no match for those who support the Darknet’s desire for anonymity and privacy, whether that simply be an individual who uses Facebook’s .onion version of its site to hackers willing to spread millions of users’ personal information. 

But while the hacking, trading, money laundering, and other illegal activities are certainly “one of the greatest threats to the integrity of data on computers in the United States and around the world,” as attorney David Hickton has asserted, it would be narrow-sighted to claim that the Tor browser is the sole root cause of the problem. In fact, Darknet surfing accounts only account for 3% of Tor usage. This mindset of technological determinism does not recognize that similar networks, albeit maybe physical instead, would be developed if Tor had not been created by the U.S. Naval Research Lab and Department of Defense; it simply acted as a faster vehicle for the scarier elements. Tor’s potential for good should not be underestimated, especially in the life-or-death situations that many activists face. 

On the other hand, I am curious if the exploitation of Tor as a criminal enterprise could also occur in bitcoin. Bitcoin is open-sourced, as Tor is, and despite bitcoin not being freely available, could the same smart individuals that contribute to, maintain, and improve the network and ledger end up manipulating it? Perhaps that is a question that can be easily answered with understanding of bitcoin’s technical background but it proposes the question of: how long can something be good until people make it bad? 

### Friday, March 5 - Contribution & Gender

Selfishly, I am glad that I am not interested in tech. But am I genuinely not interested in tech or have I been socialized into this? The exhausted idea from computing culture and Silicon Valley that biological characteristics, such as chromosomes, hormonal activities, and brain specialization, account for gender differences has unfortunately pervaded the free culture movement. One would assume that communities with liberal values of openness and freedom would not continue this trend but Joseph Reagle suggests that such disparity and sexism continue for three causes. First, geek identity can be limiting and off-putting. Second, “free” communities allow hostile rhetoric to easily occur. Third, notions of openness and freedom dismiss women’s concerns as their own personal lack of agency. Despite women powering the tech sector beginning World War II, they were quickly edged out when computing was suddenly appealing to men. It is imperative that communities understand “free” for women can often mean the opposite.
	
The free culture movement may be more harmful than the computing culture movement itself. In computing culture, women’s concerns were potentially not even acknowledged. In free culture, they are acknowledged but completely dismissed or made ridiculous with gaslighting. Without understanding the systematic structures and external factors that can stand in the way of women's success, individuals chalk up the lack of female participation to laziness. But how do you move within the strict confines you’re given? Not only is it difficult for women to get ahead in terms of resources, but women are also socialized at a young age to not be competitive. For example, girls are praised for being “helpers” and playing nicely with siblings. Boys are praised for early displays of independence and competitive feats. For the women who dare to compete with men in computing, they face the first point brought up by Reagle. Because women are often expected to have it all, be intelligent and hardworking career-wise, be caring and compassionate family-wise, and be physically attractive and sexual, the geek identity can box them in in a way that is not accepted by society. As someone who grew up in Silicon Valley and personally witnessed women face these barriers in tech, I believe that the free culture movement can almost do more than good. It is clear that “freedom” for women essentially means oppression because the term itself is something that has always been defined from a male perspective. I strongly agree with Reagle’s suggestion that what we need to rectify this is not more freedom, as we have seen this never works, but more community governance and structure.

### March 9 - Manipulated

The owner of a small pizza parlor goes on his business’s Yelp page to find, in horror, that the page has been flooded with poor, hateful reviews. But upon further inspection, the owner discovers that many of the reviews were written by faceless accounts created just a week ago. The only other reviews by the same authors praise the rivaling burger place across the street. This scenario demonstrates the obsession and manipulation that results from the marketplace problem of information asymmetry, the attention economy, and the dynamic nature of competition. User comments, ratings, and reviews were, and can still be, helpful for consumers to determine the trustworthiness and quality of a merchant and their products, but their value has quickly been diminished with fakery and manipulation of online reviews. 

The ideas of “experience over expertise” and “do the research yourself” for questioning media sources applies here as well. Researchers estimate that 10 to 30% of online reviews are fake, with various players and motives. The fakers do the faking, the makers do the faking for financial gain, and the takers hire the makers. Fakery is not limited to the commercial antics of competing restaurants, however; even the U.S. government manipulates social media to suppress violent extremist ideology and enemy propaganda. The question I’m curious about is: companies let “truth loose,” but with filter bubbles continually indoctrinating us with invisible auto propaganda and fake news already encouraging mistrust in supposedly credible sources on top of the distortion of online reviews, how can we sort through what is false and what is true? There is only so much that triangulation and checking your sources can do. As strides in artificial intelligence are made, the same goes for CAPTCHA. How will honest, reliable merchants stand out from the rest? As someone pursuing a career in marketing for retail and merchandising or entertainment, I fear that the statement “nice guys finish last” is increasingly true. 
