# Reading response (Set 2)
## Finding someone & living alone

Dating in the 21st century is nothing like before. People still traditionally meet their partner at work or through a mutual friend, but with dating apps like Tinder and Grindr, it is easier to meet their potential partner. However, people are more likely to live alone, with an increase of 80% in the past 15 years (Klinenberg, 2012). Society has this fear of living alone, but in reality, it’s the fear of being alone. Even with the advanced technologies helping the dating scene, people are still hesitant towards the digital aspect. In the OKCupid (2010) article, people lie by adding two inches to their height and rounding up their income to meet $100,000. The magnitude of these lies isn’t serious, but due to these lies' frequency, it causes people to have setbacks on pursuing a relationship from the app. Furthermore, sociologist Michael Rosenfeld from Ferdman’s article (2016) argued that too many choices are not great- in online dating as there are thousands of options for a person to match with, it can get overwhelming.

In Ferdman's (2016) article, he mentioned people have preferences for same-race dating- homophily in digital dating scenes. For example, since I’m Korean-American, it’s more comfortable for me to be with people who are also Korean or at least Asian as they know my culture or are familiar with Asian culture. This gets rid of the possibility of awkward introduction to my culture or not assimilating to Korean culture well. If someone meets their potential partner at work, they know how the other person is like in different social settings with different people, which puts less pressure on the partner's superficial aspects. However, people mainly analyze the other person's looks, what they write in their profile, and how they text on dating apps. Also, dating apps use algorithms to figure out who you like, so they will mostly show people with similarities (Ferdman, 2016). This makes me wonder if dating apps are slowly encouraging people to stay in their comfort zone when meeting people or pushing people to meet people they would have never met in person due to different backgrounds.

## Friday, March 26th- Breakup

Breaking up with someone is challenging itself, but now, it’s even harder to detach your feelings from someone else because of social media. The beauty of social media is you can have many weaker relationships like networked individualism, but when it comes to relationships, digital communication can substitute for going through tough breakups. People purposefully break up via text message or social media because the other person “get[s] sad...and emotional” which leads to that person feeling bad (Lenhart, Anderson, and Smith, 2015) so people take the easier but immature route. The part that made me question the research from Lenhart, Anderson, and Smith (2015) was that teens age 13-14 are more likely to break up with someone via status update than older teens, which made me wonder if this is still relevant today. I know updating your relationship status on Facebook was the popular or trendy thing to do, but now many people are more private online and what they expose, especially with relationships. From the last lecture, we talked about one of the concerns of online dating is privacy, but I think ,in some aspects, our privacy has gotten better with what others know, like our relationship status changes.

Another concept that made me reflect on my young self was an away message- posting status or a message on my profile, so it appears when I’m not online, and people can see it. Gershon (2012) mentioned people post song lyrics depending on what they are going through; for example, if they are sad about a breakup and want the other person to know that they are sad, they will post breakup lyrics. However, if the person is thriving without their significant other, they will post an inspirational quote or message talking about how life is better. It’s updating the other person about your life without actually communicating with them. This concept of digital communication is fascinating since it is simply updating the status of their profile. People voluntarily expose the life updates mysteriously without giving away too much detail which is a different type of exposure of people’s privacy.

## Tuesday, March 30th- Shaped

It’s a tough endless cycle with posting a photo on social media- you post a photo that you think looks great but also get very anxious about what people will think of it. However, it’s ironic because people, including myself, look back at their posts or stories on social media because we think it’s funny or good. This is like the traditional theory, which explains that “seeing one’s Facebook profile would heighten self-awareness and diminish positive feelings and self-esteem” (Reagle, 2019) with people constantly checking out their profile but also get very self-conscious at the same time. Even though I get very anxious posting, the validation of positive comments and more likes from the post reinforces my self-confidence that people think highly of me. We look over the comments and who viewed the stories frequently to see if we have enough views, a lot of positive comments, likes, or any messages. People care a lot about how others think about us because social media portrays the “best” part of our lives. Reagle (2019) stated that people respond to cruel questions because coping with the negative feedback requires “personal introspection, personal honesty, and willingness to acknowledge openly the imperfections in the self,” which can help people grow and learn in life. This is true since I learn to filter out the negative comments or feedback because they are not the people I need in my life and need to only accept the ones from people I care about.

Constant comments, status, and reviews on everything we do are similar to the topic Manipulated. However, even the reviews we have online on Yelp and Google Reviews are not straightforward, like understanding online star ratings where you need to figure out what review was paid for and how many reviews are posted. Therefore, this made me realize how these two concepts are similar in how we can’t always look at the negative comments and assume that is the whole story. Like Reagle (2019) stated, online comments are short and supposed to cause reactions with others' responses to the posts, so with the reviews, you need to consider the circumstances. This reassures me that not everything you see online is the truth.

## Tuesday, April 13th- Gendered Work

Jobs we have today were unimaginable in the last decade as I remember hearing when I was young that the jobs I might have when I get older are nonexistent previously. Careers in social media are newly innovative jobs that started with the rise of social media and technology. Influencers get sponsorships by promoting companies’ products and talking about the benefits. If you have more sponsored posts, you are considered more legit, like a “verification badge” to move up the hierarchy ladder quicker (Lorenz, 2018). However, a lot more is involved in posting on social media, such as having someone take your photos, so you don’t use your selfie sticks. This term is coined as “Instagram Husband'' (Cave, 2017) since it’s assumed that more wives are likely to be involved with social media than their husbands. However, this goes with the gender stereotype in the digital age as entrepreneurship has this connotation of masculinity (Duffy & Pruchniewska, 2017). However, in recent years, there has been a rise in female entrepreneurship like mommy blogs, beauty blogs, and Etsy, as about 86% of businesses are women-owned (Duffy & Pruchniewska, 2017). It started because the traditional economy hinders women from thriving in the workplace as there are a “lack of paid maternity leave, inadequate time off, little flexibility, and unequal pay that doesn’t always cover the cost of childcare” (Duffy & Pruchniewska, 2017) making it harder for women to succeed compared to men. Relating to the Contribution & Gender lecture, according to Damore (2017), biological differences have an impact on gender discrimination, but this has been an ongoing debate as to how accurate that is. However, according to Reagle (2013), even though women are getting involved in the digital industry jobs, it’s an only specific type of occupation that works in their favor because women who work in computing-professions are considered too feminine in relation to other women outside the industry but aren’t geeky enough in comparison to male IT experts. No matter which industry and how much we try to be equal in the workplace, there still needs to be a lot of work done.

## Friday April 16th- Bemused

Why do people post stupid, unreasonable comments or reviews on the Internet? It seems so straightforward to think twice if what you are posting will haunt you in the future. However, some reviews or comments are a great way to see if that product I’m about to purchase is a good investment and that I won't be wasting my money. Sometimes, some reviews are simply comical, where it’s a clear example of how you can’t please everyone. Reagle (2019) revealed a story of a mom who gave a carbon monoxide detector a 4/5 when it saved her son’s life, which shows not every review you see is logical. This is another example of information asymmetry as the person who posted the review has other reasoning as to why she gave it a 4/5, not a 5/5, when the product saved her son’s life; however, Marti (2017) mentioned, this asymmetry happens due to the difficulty of seeing the quality of the product other than casual inspection.

Furthermore, Reagle (2019) mentioned preferential attachment as people are more likely to subscribe or select something already popular. Just because a product is popular doesn’t mean it’s better than others, which is a misconception many people have, and I’m also guilty of. I know when I go to get my groceries, I’m more likely to buy a product from a popular brand than an unknown or new brand because I think if the brand is already popular, it must be good. Also, if I see a product online from a popular brand with a long history of good reviews, I consider the brand trustworthy. However, I’ve learned from my own mistakes and this class to always triangulate anything I read online. If I see a review on Google Review, I will go to Yelp and Reddit or even Amazon Review to cross reference. Therefore, an already more popular brand is likely to be more successful than a company that just started struggling to gain people’s trust. This leaves me wondering if the concept of popular brand over new brand is just in our head and why this happens.