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## Reading responses 5 out of 5

### Nov 2 - Manipulated
In todays world everything we see and do online is collated and quantified, this goes both ways for us as users of the platform and us as reviewers of a particular individual or service.  Regale’s article “Manipulated: Which Ice Cube Is the Best?” highlights some of the issues and critiques behind online ratings and reviews. The article discusses how the review made by customers has a drastic effect on the merchants bottom line. For instance, a study for a site called nexTag demonstrated that lower ratings were correlated with a larger discount on the manufactures suggested retail price. Furthermore, it was also mentioned that bout a third of all consumer reviews on the internet are fakes which can have a significant manipulation on the reputation of a product or a service.  This leads me to the question; how reliable are the reviews that we read on the internet and how does this guide the decisions we make in our everyday lives as well as how this effects the overall economy in the grand scheme of things?

Furthermore, Instagram has become an increasingly popular social media platform which people use to connect and interact with one another by commenting and liking on other peoples post. Here Caroline Forsey  demonstrates that companies and influencers are indeed “gaming” the algorithm for their advantage. This has something to do with how the rate and quantity of likes has an effect on how the posts are ranked on the users feed. This said, there does seem to be some likes for likes tactics employed by influencers of products that are ultimately manipulating the ranking of a post which is indeed a violation of Instagram’s metrics. Thus, when it comes to influencing a product on Instagram it is clear there is some manipulation of what shows up on a users feed. This said, after reading both articles it is clear how our daily lives are being manipulated by the reviews and likes that are apparent on different platforms which ultimately influences our consumer purchasing decisions in this capitalist economy.

### Nov 9- Ads and Social graph background
As the internet becomes an increasingly important element of our daily lives, every move that us users make are being tracked for advertisers to optimize their ad deployments and sell products to us. It is now becoming even easier for ad companies to use cookies to be able to track our preferences to display the best possible ads that would get them sale. And with every click that we make this algorithm only gets smarter. Stokes chapter on online advertising highlights the development of the core components that make online ads function. As discussed, the main objectives behind online advertising is to increase sales, improve brand awareness, and raise share of voice within the market place. With this, the chapter went in to great details about how advertisers are able to leverage social media, networks, and search engines in order to optimize advertisement deployment. In addition, it also talked about the different mediums behind online advertising which included banners, YouTube advertising, pop ups, and even map adverts. One of the main benefits of online advertising seems to be  the level of interactivity that is available for both the user to interact with the advertisement, which thus allows the advertiser to extract further data. However, one of the detriments would be the over flow of advertisement that had lead to consumer fatigue, and to top this off individuals begin to use ad blockers which may hinder the ability for ad companies to both deploy their ads and extract relevant information.

Perhaps the core operating technologies that allow all of this to be possible was highlighted in Vox’s “How ads follow you around the internet”, would be cookies. Which are a series of numbers and letters which help websites track user data. This is ultimately what has allowed advertisement companies to track user habits in order to specifically target and develop ads that they think they might like. The big players such as Facebook and Google are able to best utilize this data and convert it in to relevant information for advertisers to deploy their message to its target audience. However, without the proper tracking of users cookies platforms may not be able to collate the full scope of a users internet behavior which may make it even tougher to allow advertisers to promote their content. Moving forward, as our world starts to become even more digitalized it would be interesting to see how the internet of things and artificial intelligence would be capable of extracting external data about us for advertisers to use and promote their products to us.

### Nov 23- Algorithmic Discrimination
As our use of software and computers become more prevelant in our daily lives, algorithms start to play an increasing role in the decisions that we make and our perspectives on our world. BuzzFeed’s article “Here’s why some people think Google’s results are racist” scrutinizes how the search engines results display incredibly racist results, thus contributing further to cultural and racial biases.  For instance, the article gives an example  of how searching for just “women” provides generic stock images of just regular women. However, searching for “Asian Women” provides a more sexualized , almost pornographic depiction of asian women.  This only goes to show how algorithms that are incorporated in our search engines which are a crucial part of our web usage experience are only further propagating us to view the world through a certain bias.

Algorithms also seem to have commercial implications, as highlighted in the next article “Measuring Price discrimination and steering on ecommerce websites”. Which demonstrates how online web platforms personalize their content in order to  get the most sales from the consumer.  For instance,  Hotels.com and Expedia utilize the A/B testing method in tandem with cookies to track characteristics of cookies and organize the users preferences accordingly. As a result, these algorithms do seem to produce price inconsistences and discrimination in order to produce a personalized and optimized user experience. This demonstrates how powerful these algorithms are influencing our buying decisions and thus our experiences.

Taking all of this into account, algorithms are being used to determine the social media post we interact with which influences our friendships, the movies that show up on our Netflix page which influences our leisure time, and even our credit scoring which may determine our purchasing power. This brings me to the question, how long is it before algorithm becomes so powerful that it conflicts with the ethical stance of free will?

### Nov 30- Collapsed Context
These days it seems like a large portion of our identity can be found and recognized through the online social media platforms that we keep. In the article, “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience”, the central points of discussion would be how contentment producers navigate “ Imagined audiences”. This said, when presenting ourselves online we tend to present ourselves differently depending on our audience. With every communicative act there is an imagined audience where we may leverage certain knowledge about the audience to react situationally. Thus, twitter which is essentially a microblogging site for 140 character text updates or tweets to a network of others. Most users have 1000 to 15000 followers depending on the popularity. Thus, communicating within the platform is generally for a broader demographic, which means that our style and personality communicated within certain tweets would need to suit the situation of a broader audience while still making it coherent to communicating in a style that is authentic to ones personality. Furthermore, it is not always certain who exactly will view your post specifically thus the requirement to present one single identity might seem unfeasible due to the diverse set of people utilizing these social media sites. Some alternative, solutions to be able to present your self in a certain manner to a select manner would be to utilize the privacy settings, which may help differentiate between friends, family, and even acquaintances etc. After, reading this it brings up the question of how integral social media is in construction our identity and persona in the modern age.

### Dec 07 - Pushback
Today online communication seems to infest our daily lives and there is almost no escape from what some might consider this a nightmare. Reagle’s article “Conclusion:Commenterrible” discusses the implications of comments in online communications. Furthermore, the general themes is that comments can often be used for malicious intent and can be used for harassment in certain communities. It argues that there are often no rules when providing these comments. On the flip side however, comments do have its benefits as it is likely to create greater engagement particular contents and make consuming internet content more interactive. This brings in to question if it is even a good idea for certain sites to disable comments as it does seem to way some benefits when consuming digital media online?

Next, in Gomez and Morrison’s article “Pushback: The growth of expressions of resistance to constant online activity.” It directs our attention to how our digital communications do not necessarily produce a positive emotional satisfaction with its audience. Furthermore, it also seems to produce some kind of a pushback behavior where individuals are attempting to escape the realm of digital communication. One of the potential ways that people did this was to ditch their internet connective smartphones which is considered a hub to the digital world in this modern world for a dumb phone. After reading both these articles it is clear that so much of our interactions today happen through digital means, wether we are connected through our smartphones or physical computers, thus I find it hard to believe that there will ever be an escape from online communications.







