###### tags: `Communications in a Digital Age` # Reading Responses: 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. ## Reading Responses 5-10 ### March 14 Friday - #### Sources - Christian Rudder, 2010, [The big lies people tell in online dating](https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-online-dating-a9e3990d6ae2) Derek Thompson, 2019, [Why online dating can feel like such an existential nightmare](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/online-dating-taking-over-everything/594337/) Robyn Vinter, 2023, [“It’s quite soul-destroying”: How we fell out of love with dating apps dating](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/oct/28/its-quite-soul-destroying-how-we-fell-out-of-love-with-dating-apps) Joseph Chamie, 2021, [Living alone in America](https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/563786-living-alone-in-america) #### Response People are isolated and alone. They create lives of fantasy to fill the holes that have forced their way into their realities. Loneliness and isolation have become more prevalent now with the emergence of new technology, with high-speed internet. It is possible to reach someone in seconds and have a full conversation with immediate responses even when on opposite sides of the world. If we are so connected by the devices in our pockets, then why are we simultaneously so alone and why do we choose to fabricate parts of our lives? People have become so increasingly desperate to escape their loneliness that they have resorted to creating an online persona in attempts to seem more desirable on online dating platforms. In most cases an online persona who is slightly different from the real-world person that it represents is no big deal, but in a way, this has conditioned us to believe it is the same for online dating platforms. We get so caught up in the fact that it is online and that everyone exaggerates online that we forget that the goal is for it to move offline where those exaggerations or actual lies can matter. Part of the desire to lie on a dating app comes from sheer facts. Facts like shorter women and taller men are generally more desirable and who wouldn't want to be desirable. The second fact about online dating is that the only thing people get to know about you are the words you tell them. In an article by Robin Vinter titled “‘It’s quite soul-destroying’: how we fell out of love with dating apps” she quotes a young man who said, “The spam, bots and fake accounts are tough enough to contend with, he says, and that’s before all the issues with being assessed for attractiveness based on six pictures and a few lines of text”(Vinter 2023). It is not the sound of your voice, your personality, or really any of the little things that make you you so you have to exaggerate just to be given a chance. Even if you hit three boxes it might not be enough for not making that fourth box. People do what they think they should to keep themselves from drowning in the online dating pool and in a way haven't we accepted that as a society? Do we not go on online dating sights knowing that men exaggerate their height and women photoshop their tans? If we have all subconsciously accepted this to be the way it is, does that not mean that it is okay to do? ### March 18 Tuesday - Ads and Social Graph Background #### Sources Robe Stokes, 2014, Online Advertising, ch=11 Cleo Abrams, 2020, Vox, [How ads follow you around the internet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFyaW50GFOs) #### Response Be careful who you meet on the internet. That is rule number one that anyone on the planet who uses the internet knows. Anyone can get their hands on a computer, phone, or tablet which means you could be interacting with anyone even if they say they are someone else. This is fairly common knowledge, but what often slips through the cracks is that it is not just people who follow you. Companies and their advertisements can track your every move. Companies want their businesses to succeed and to do that they need their advertisements to stick and get you to click. They could send out the same advertisement to everyone, but the percentage of people who actually click “buy” would be very low. To combat this, companies track your search history and websites visited by using cookies. A tracking code is used to identify each user and their preferences. A tracking code is “A piece of code that tracks a user’s interaction and movement through a website” (Stokes 2013). They also rely on third partying tracking. Social media platforms will track users interests and browsed items and then push advertisements that they believe the user is most likely to click on. They do this because they earn a small commission when you click on a product through their site. The data collected from each user gives companies the integral information they need. “Not only can an advertiser tell how many times an advert has been seen (impressions), but also how many times the advert has been successful in sending visitors to the advertised website (clicks)” (Stokes 2013). Companies are able to follow which products are selling to many, which sell well within a niche group, and which are not selling at all. While the idea of every move and every click being tracked seems daunting, it may not really be all bad. Not many people love being tracked by companies whose sites they have visited once or even companies they do not even realize are tracking them. The general idea of being tracked seems malicious, but companies rely on this process to ensure they keep customers and stay in business. ### March 25 Tuesday - Bemused #### Sources Joseph Reagle, 2015, “Bemused: WTF!,” [Reading the Comments](https://readingthecomments.mitpress.mit.edu/), ch=7 #### Response Most reviews are bad reviews. Unless someone just feels so strongly about how their cutting board is exactly what you would expect from a cutting board. Most good reviews come from people who are basically paid to and the last small percent is someone's grandmother who genuinely loves her new knitting needles.. Leaving a bad review, for some, seems like an act of revenge. People get so upset by a product not working right that they want everyone to hear their frustration and justify it. Since people are so much more likely to post a bad review than a good review, it would seem odd that there are seemingly plenty of good reviews and at the top. Companies tend to expect bad reviews justified or not and they compensate by sending gleaming reviews to cover them up. Many good reviews come from people like the influencers who got the product for free, people being paid for a review, and employees and people they know. This is not to say that all good reviews are not trustworthy or that all the bad reviews are the real ones. People will bash a product just because they are using it wrong which was what happened for one man using a banana slicer. Amazon customer, J. Anderson, left a bad review saying, “I tried the banana slicer and found it unacceptable. As shown in the picture, the slicer is curved from left to right. All of my bananas are bent the other way.”(as cited in Reagle, 2015) after struggling to use his new banana slicer. Clearly he was very upset by this and he wanted others to know. What he didn't know was that he just needed to flip the banana. On the other side, some people just love to leave a review and tell the world that their banana slicer works like a banana slicer so it is possible to find genuine good reviews. Online shopping has created a whole new world of accessibility and convenience. With it comes a competitive and cut throat market where many companies work around these new issues to ensure they can prosper. It is on the online consumer to remain aware of online scams and warning signs of a cheap product. It is also important to have a sense of understanding that while the delivery is a convenience, products can get slightly banged up or wrinkled and that is not always grounds for flaming the company. All online shopping requires a balance with all of the benefits and the drawbacks. ### April 11 Fri - Digital Language and Generations #### Sources Gretchen McCulloch, 2019, “Internet People” in Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, ch. 3. Gretchen McCulloch and Audie Cornish, 2019, [‘Because Internet,’ a guide to our changing language, LOL](https://www.npr.org/2019/07/31/747020219/our-language-is-evolving-because-internet) #### Response Each language and form of communication, spoken or otherwise, has evolved over the millions of years humans have been on earth. The new variable influencing language today is technology and the new ways to communicate that comes along with it. Tone, inflection, and intention begins to disappear in certain online settings. Arguments, breakups, and meet-cutes used to require face to face interaction, but now it can all be done online. While the convenience is amazing, the communication isn't always quite so. Just like how spoken language has evolved over time we have also seen online language begin to evolve. Audie Cornish (2019) used the example of the acronym "LOL" in her article saying, "LOL may have meant laughter for a very short period of time, but that laughter quickly became aspirational". I have seen "LOL" used more times in an attempt to diffuse an awkward conversation or an argument than in the actual context of laughing out loud. The internet is beginning to be just old enough that its effect on language and word is fully being noticed. It has become less and less surprising to see younger kids using internet slang in conversations with their peers. Often times the slang is so niche to a group that not even teenagers a few years older use the slang and adults don’t even know the slang at all. English has come a long way from the days when it was Anglo-Saxon. Fluent English speakers wouldn't be able to read a paragraph in Old English. Knowing how languages evolve, it can be presumed that online language will also see a lot of change over the next couple of centuries. Technology has already made its impact on real life English in the last few decades, and its changes more than likely will continue to seep into both real and online communication. ### April 15 Tuesday - Pushback #### Sources Stacey L. Morrison, Ricardo Gomez, 2014, [Pushback: Expressions of resistance to the ‘evertime’ of constant online connectivity](http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i8.4902) Alex Vadukul, 2023, [Now in College, Luddite Teens Still Don’t Want Your Likes](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/style/luddite-teens-reunion.html) #### Response We are not born craving technology. We are raised to crave it. While Generation Z is considered the digital native generation, Generation Beta was born into a fully digital world rather than growing into it. The children of the new generation are being handed mobile devices before they can even form a full sentence, and we are starting to see the effects. Children of Generation Beta are becoming more impatient and having a harder time regulating their emotions. Many parents have reported seeing a happier and healthier child once constant screen exposure is removed. Maybe the solution is for everyone to limit exposure, but our dependency to technology is an addiction as much as it is a dependency. Watling , a student and founder of the Luddite Club originally from Brooklyn, (2023, as cited in Vadukul, 2023) said, “but I have to look out for my well-being as a young woman. It’s too risky for me to put my life in the hands of a flip phone.” The unfortunate reality is that we have created a world in which we cannot live without technology. College campuses are reliant upon its students having a mobile device. The world is not a safe enough place for many people to be out without a phone. No matter how much a person might want to pull away from the dependency, it is entirely impossible to pull away completely. While we may never reach a point of reviving our desktops and Sidekicks and out casting the IPhone, people can make better choices for their children. The one solution would be to give children the choice of playing outside or playing pretend instead of the choice of phone or tablet. The issue ends up being that parents are exhausted and handing a crying child a tablet is much easier than dealing with the root of an issue or teaching your child to express their emotions in better ways. It is not so simple as simply not handing a child a tablet, but it would require an active desire to give the child a better way to grow up.