Reading Responses (Set Two)

# Reading Responses (Set Two) ## Reading Responses 5 out of 5 ### 20 March - Manipulated So many exchanges nowadays are done in the hopes of ratings and reviews, which are implemented on sites no matter how different their user base is, from Goodreads to Uber. As discussed in Joseph Reagle's chapter of *Reading the Comments* titled "Manipulated: “Which Ice Cube Is the Best?, Reagle delves into the types of people behind reviewing things online, as well as the shape criticism can take online (spam, blackmail, etc.). Reagle discusses that reviewing and rating are so important because they give information as to whether it's logical to spend money on something. However, there is no real way to fact check whether the people behind these reviews are genuine, which can lead to fake reviews to bolster a product or lies under people's products to make people less inclined to purchase something, just as examples. I find reviews and ratings to be very helpful in my everyday life, especially as someone who is always dabbling in something creative, whether that's reading or watching film. When it comes to the former, reviews and ratings are very necessary to my decision-making on whether I want to purchase a 20-30 dollar book from Barnes and Nobles. However, I also know the slippery slope that ratings and reviews can be. As with anything creative, ratings and reviews can always be biased depending on the type of content it has. For example, HBO's *The Last of Us,* based on the videogame of the same name, had episodes centered around queer characters and romance [review-bombed](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3581920/episodes?ref_=tt_eps_sm), and now hold the two lowest ratings for the show as a whole (see ratings for episode three and seven). In regard to Goodreads, I also know that reviews can be fake, as Reagle discusses with *fakers*, *makers* and *takers*. > Researchers estimate that between 10 to 30 percent of online reviews are fake. The cast of manipulators includes fakers (those who deceptively praise their own works or pillory others’), makers (those who will do so for a fee), and the takers (those who avail themselves of such services). A recent example of this in the online book community has been *[Lightlark](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60310757/reviews?reviewFilters={%22workId%22:%22kca://work/amzn1.gr.work.v3.oPsEdv1yAvGQ5mfP%22,%22ratingMin%22:5,%22ratingMax%22:5,%22after%22:%22MjU2MDEsMTY3MDcxNDc2NDEyNA%22})* by Alex Aster. This book first became popular on TikTok in the months before official publication. Aster used her TikTok to promote her book, promising viewers that her book would be similar to their favorite books, specifically *The Hunger Games.* She also described this book as her debut novel and said that the book had also already gotten a movie deal, which made viewers very excited for the book's publication. However, the book was not her debut novel as many found out later, and many plot points and tropes that Aster had described in the tiktoks about the book seemed to be false when the book officially got published. On Goodreads, the book has 23,746 ratings and an average of a 3.7-star rating. 34% of these reviews are five stars, and as one goes through the top reviews, they'll see that the reviews were written by other authors. When the book got published, many accused these authors of getting paid to write favorable reviews, which can be seen in the comments of Adam Silvera's [review](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4913991154#comment_list) of the book. However, the immense amount of backlash also turned into review bombing and harsh critique on TikTok, so in this situation, there were definitely two contrasting sides to the reviews and ratings. ### 27 March - Artifical Intelligence As someone who is creative in both art and writing, artificial intelligence scares me, and not just because of its ability to quickly create scarily accurate art or writing. Not that their ability to quickly generate work isn't scary–because it is–which ["What is generative AI, and why is it suddenly everywhere?"](https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/1/5/23539055/generative-ai-chatgpt-stable-diffusion-lensa-dall-e) explains. This article discusses how this generator is so good at what it does that it can produce quality enough writing for a high school student. It also discusses how this type of AI works: > Usually, this technology is developed with a technique called **machine learning**, which involves teaching an artificial intelligence to perform tasks by exposing it to lots and lots of data, which it “trains” on and eventually learns to mimic. ChatGPT, for example, was trained on an enormous quantity of text available on the internet, along with scripts of dialogue...Stable Diffusion is an image generator...that will produce an image for you based on text instructions, and was designed by feeding the AI images and their associated captions collected from the web. To me, this is what is actually really harmful, especially when talking about AI and art. Usually, when trying to generate art, AI will take from art already produced on the internet. This is really dangerous for those artists, who take so much of their time and money to create something that apparently a generator online can do for free and in less than five minutes. ["The Dangers Of AI Art"](https://studybreaks.com/tvfilm/the-dangers-of-ai-art/) further mentions that as of right now, there is no way to keep this from happening and there is no way to get any payment from these stolen AI art pieces. Even though AI has gotten really popular in the past year, this was actually the first introduction I had to AI when it gained popularity since a lot of my online communities are full of artists and writers. These groups are already struggling to make the necessary amount of money to live, and this only furthers complicates their jobs. ["Stable Diffusion made copying artists and generating porn harder and users are mad"](https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/24/23476622/ai-image-generator-stable-diffusion-version-2-nsfw-artists-data-changes) kind of discusses this issue, but more so focuses on how AI art sometimes copies the style of an artist, whereas the [*Studybreaks* article](https://studybreaks.com/tvfilm/the-dangers-of-ai-art/) I linked discusses how pieces of people's art will be taken to make a whole image, like discussed in this [tweet](https://twitter.com/Personfaces/status/1558626212578299905?lang=en). In the tweet linked, the real art has a logo in the bottom right that can, although blurry, be seen in the AI generated art in the bottom right. The [Vox](https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/1/5/23539055/generative-ai-chatgpt-stable-diffusion-lensa-dall-e) article also mentioned that AI art sometimes tends to create work that contains stereotypical beliefs, which I found compelling because this was a *Tiktok* trend, in which people would attempt a viral AI anime filter. Quickly, people of color realized that these filters didn't work as properly for them as it had been working for white people as seen [here](https://www.tiktok.com/@duckiie_momo/video/7172095856403877146?lang=en) and [here](https://www.tiktok.com/@callmetochi/video/7176649460250938630?lang=en&q=ai%20filter%20anime%20black&t=1679948009688). ### 10 Apr - Collapsed Context Okay, let's be real about BeReal. BeReal is a newer social media platform in which at a random time a day, the app notifies its users to post a picture of what they're doing at the moment, but they only have two minutes. The concept was created in the hopes that users would post at that specific time to combat the performativity and fabricated content people usually post on social media that paints them in a good light. Hopefully, users would post no matter what situation they were in, no matter how boring. However, this two-minute times isn't rigid, so users can wait to post if they so choose to. In "BeReal and the Doomed Quest for Online Authenticity," Ysabel Gerrard discusses this: > Seventeen-year-olds Kiana and Ria explained that their friends shun the two-minute time frame to “wait for their day to be interesting.” “I get a bit annoyed when it comes at a bad time and I’m in bed,” says Kiana, “So I don’t post, or I make a blank screen. That’s the way it is; people use it in a way that it wasn’t made to be used.” (Gerrard, 2022) I think a lot of the performativity that comes from posting on social media comes from trying to pander to an audience of people you might not be super close to. Danah Boyd uses Twitter as an example in "I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience." Boyd says that "authenticity is always manufactured" and that we change how authentic we are depending on who we're around (2013). And yet, even when user's BeReals are shared with only their friends (since BeReals are private by default), users still struggle to be authentic. I have een guilty of this multiple times: I put on makeup to look nicer, I wait to post my BeReal until I am doing something interesting, I refrain from posting at all if I'm not doing anything interesting at all. This makes posting on BeReal an exhausting task, which Gerrard also points out: > Researchers have noted a significant uptick in “social media fatigue,” which they attribute in part to the pandemic. But even the tech-weariest among us find it hard to disregard the mandate to put forward our best (digital) selves. And so, despite the pretense of novelty, BeReal represents the latest iteration in the cycle of social media sites that spring from the push-and-pull tension of authenticity and performance (Gerrard 2022). So therefore, even though BeReal was created to promote our authentic selves, why is it still so hard for users to do that? Is it because these other sites have instilled this habit of being inauthentic? Is it because, as we've already discussed in class, that the internet instills in us to be more narcissistic and be more centered on how we look constantly so users are too centered on living perfect lives even in the eyes of their close friends? Have users lost who their real selves are, especially after COVID-19? ### 13 Apr - Authenticity, work, & influence As someone who has been in fandom spaces since she was thirteen years old, the amount of vitrol spewed towards women on the interest is terrifying. Reading through "Policing “Fake” Femininity: Authenticity, Accountability, and Influencer Antifandom," I kept thinking of specific examples of the harrassment women have faced online, and almost all of them recent. For example, although she didn't her start as an influencer, Brie Larson does have a [Youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@BrieLarson/videos), which she started in quarantine during COVID. I specifically thought about how during her time as an actress in Marvel movies, she has faced an insane amount of backlash with very little support from her male counterparts. About three years ago, Chris Pratt was labeled as ["the worst Chris" in Hollywood](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/10/marvel-stars-defend-chris-pratt) due to conservative beliefs that at the time, had become an increasingly important topic of conversation on the internet. Very quickly, multiple Marvel actors and other Hollywood stars came to his defense on social media, which was surprising to many since these stars had been silent about the intense misogny Brie had been recieving online for the years before this. Although Brie Larson isn't necessarily the type of influence the article is discussing, I think it is very connected to the concepts being explained in Brooke Erin Duffy, Kate M. Miltner, and Amanda Wahlstedt's work. In their work, they say the following: > A key theme of this work is the expressly gender-coded influencer subjectivity: Not only do reports suggest that close to 80% of influencers are women (Gesenheus, 2019), but cultural assumptions about this subculture—from their devalued status and caricatured frivolity to their championing of consumer culture—are unabashedly feminine (e.g., Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2017; Lawson, 2020). Duffy and Hund (2015), for instance, note how blogger-Instagrammers showcase patterned tropes of entrepreneurial femininity, which express a socially mediated version of “having it all.” (2022) I think the idea of "having it all" is much harder for women and I think it definitely plays into the concepts of authenticity, self-expression, and need for validation online which we've discussed a lot over the past few weeks. For me, especially a white male influencer, making mistakes is okay because their privilege allows them to jump over hurdles and gain sympathy much easier. For women, there are already so many stereotypes and specific rules to follow. Women (especially influences) need to look clean and presentable, but shouldn't wear too much, or too little. Women shouldn't wear too little, or else they'll be called whores online, but they can't wear too much either (Billie Eilish comes to mind). Women need to be fit, otherwise people will wonder whether they're okay mentally (Ariana Grande is an example from the last week) or whether they're working out enough, or eating unhealthily (Lizzo, for example). Obviously, these are women who work in music so there are more eyes on them than a regular influencer, but many of these still apply when a women is posting her whole life, or parts of her life online. ### 16 Apr - Pushback Whenever I get really overwhelmed, usually during finals week or when I have a hundred things to do that can't be sidelined for distractions, I'll turn off my phone completely. My phone is a great distraction, but even better than that, it's a very easy one. My phone is something I can turn on with just the pad of my finger, and once I open it, everything is immediately accessible. But when it's completely shut off and I go to grab my phone after five minutes of doing work just to find out I can't open it unless I hold the power button down, my phone is no longer accessible by just that touch. And more than anything, I am very, very lazy. So usually, because of that laziness, once I find out my phone is no longer as accessible as it usually is, I put it back down and go back to work. This is one of the things Ricardo Gomez and Stacey Morrison in their 2014 work "Pushback: The growth of expressions of resistance to constant online connectivity," discussed when explaining why internet users stop using their devices to be frequently connected to the internet, which they label as *pushback*. There are five main reasons: 1. Emotional Dissatisfaction: They feel like their time online is not meeting their needs of what social media, online entertainment, etc. 2. External Values: Their time online is coming into conflict with their held values whether these are moral, religious, political, etc. 3. Taking Back Control: These users are spending so much time online that their time and energy is being lost on the internet instead of things in real life. (This is what my example would fall under, and something I regularly do). 4. Addiction: They feel like they are constantly online and always feel the urge to get online. (I feel like my example also falls under this; the twitch to turn on my phone and go to whatever social media app is more habit and need to see what my friends are doing every five minutes than actually needing to do something specific or important). 5. Privacy: These users feel like what they do on their phone is shared around too much to other apps. In this work, they also discuss how people behave when pushing back. For example, my habit of turning off my phone would fall under what they describe as adaptation, which is when users turn their phones off for a specific time, delete an app for a week, etc. I also partake in another behavior Gomez and Morrison talk about which is using technology to limit technology. They mention how this sounds a little ironic, but I think it's helpful sometimes. For example, as I do this assignment, I have a shuffled playlist of brown noise playing through noise-cancelling headphones. Other times when I have some work that I know I can do in timed parts and break up with a TV show, I'll use a [pomodoro timer](https://studywithme.io/aesthetic-pomodoro-timer/), which helps me feel like I'm getting through my work while giving me time to relax in between breaks.