# Xinran's Reading Respons 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 out of 5

### Mar 01 Fri - Collapsed Context

People often engage in "impression management" in formal settings such as the workplace, but the popularity of social media has extended this behavior into everyday life. Social media is a platform with multiple audiences, but people tend to present themselves as a single identity. This creates tension between different groups of people on the same social media site. An example of this is given in the article where Stokely Carmicheal, when giving a speech on black power, chose black rhetoric to appeal to the black audience group, but this led to alienation from the white group. People are now faced with this same choice in what they choose to show in social media, where people may choose to avoid discussing certain sensitive topics and choose to go for showing parts of their lives that won't cause controversy. But this raises questions about authenticity and whether showing parts of real life gives viewers the full picture of the person posting. People will choose to show the image they want to create in front of their audience based on the audience they envision. For example, Steady mentioned that a freelancer wants the audience who sees her posted content to think she is intelligent, professional, and diverse. People need to maintain a balance between keeping it real and choosing what to show. But because of the attention-seeking ways in which humans inherently want to belong to a collective but have a unique identity within it, how should people define what they are presenting as coming out of their own desire to share, rather than to get attention from others？

### Mar 15 Fri - Finding someone & living alone

Online dating profiles are not trustworthy, and online dating has led to impolite communication.

Before wired dating apps, people were introduced to potential marriage partners by friends or family, but now the ability to meet people from all over the world via the internet has resulted in the burden and expectation of finding a partner being placed entirely on the individual. A descent into what Søren Kierkegaard calls anxiety "the dizziness of freedom". And due to the nature of the internet where people can shape their own characteristics, there is a tendency to portray themselves as taller and better paid than they are. In reality people's real income is 20% less than what they say. Also when presenting themselves, people keep more perfect old photos to present a false image of youth.

Online dating also diminishes people's ability to make new connections in everyday socializing.Because it is so easy to meet new people on the internet, approaching strangers in public becomes undesirable, and online communication makes it difficult to fulfill the interaction needs that people need such as physical contact. Also communicating with people who are not in contact in reality reduces people's ability to discipline their language and behavior, for example Lucy Webster shares that she receives a lot of very offensive questions due to her use of wheelchair. Because there are no consequences for asking these questions online, it increases discrimination against people with disabilities.

But online dating has been a great help to sexual minorities and homosexuals, who may not know anyone of their own kind in real life, and the internet can help widen their options. Online dating apps are usually associated with sex dates in my mind and it's hard to develop a long term relationship. Is there a way to combine social media with online dating apps to help people find others who share the same interests and have the right personality.

### Mar 19 Tue - Ads & social graph background
Facebook and Google is stealing our privacy.

Google and Facebook, being the two biggest third party cookies, have a lot of records of users' actions on web pages. So many companies use Google and facebook to place their ads in front of potential customers who have visited their shopping sites. This uses the marketing method of alerts. However many shoppers do not want their preferences to be exposed and so turn off the authorization of third party cookies. However Face book and Google, in order to get money from advertisers, have created codes that send what appear to be first party cookies, but actually send the data content to third party cookies.This code also records the user's actions after the user turns off third party cookies. This is not only a violation of the user's privacy, but it is also unethical to use the user's privacy for profit.

Also in "How ads follow you around the internet", Lou argues that this kind of advertising makes the product less good than it could be. Due to the convenience of placing online ads and its ability to accurately reach potential customers and entice them to buy the product, companies are spending more of their budgets on marketing their products rather than improving them or developing new ones. At the same time, in order to attract customers, companies often use different methods to induce them to buy products that they do not need (demand creation and fulfillment in e Marketing).

From the company's point of view, they spend their budget on programs that are more profitable for them, and the customers satisfy themselves by purchasing the products, but the customers unknowingly pay extra marketing money for the actual value of the products they buy. Is this an ethical behavior?

### Mar 25 Tue - Bemused

Reviews in shopping software are hardly a true reference for other customers.

Amazon uses to give select shoppers free new or upcoming items to get reviews. These reviews can have a positive effect on subsequent reviews because they are posted early and are usually favorable. According to Reagle (2019) "an initial up vote increased the likelihood of a subsequent up vote by 32 percent, ... , this positive ‘herding’ increased final ratings by 25 percent on average". This results in reviews being manipulated to favor the merchant's bottom line, even though people believe they are giving reviews based on their own experience with the product. Does this behavior constitute unethical? Merchants want to get more reviews early on in the sale of their products, so they offer free products and customers review them based on their own usage. No one is directing others to post false statements, but it does result in higher ratings than if no reviews had been posted.

At the same time, different reviewers have different rating scales; one mother gave a 4/5 rating to the smoke alarm that saved her child and gave a 5/5 rating on other daily product ratings. This made other reviewers who saw the review think that the mother had no fondness for her son. In reality, she was only considering the smoke alarm regarding quality and durability. This kind of misunderstanding brought about by having different criteria and factors to consider are many more on the internet, such as ratings about pain. Attaching the significance of the different scores to the ratings can reduce misunderstandings.

### Apr 05 Fri - Algorithmic bias
Data calculations can help baseball teams get a higher winning percentage. Models are built by feeding the computer large amounts of data. The model can give the program with the highest success rate by weighing input influences and large amounts of historical data. However, because models are designed by humans, they inevitably carry the bias of the designer. Designers, influenced by their own experience and values, set different influencing factors to the model, which can bias the results. For example, the reading refers to calculating the severity of a sentence after a crime. Black offenders receive longer jail times than white offenders for the same crime, and are three times more likely to receive the death penalty than white offenders. Inputting this kind of data into the model will cause the model to be biased toward harsher punishments for the black population. Also an example of a biased mathematical model is the college ranking scoring system, where one can measure a college's ability to educate people by data such as alumni income, but this criterion does not apply to people who view spiritual well-being as a priority. The ranking of this scoring system is only informative for people who share the same scoring criteria as the system's designers.

There are many other applications of the model, such as the recently popular ChatGPT, which, although it claims to be a neutral system, is biased to the right when it comes to answering political questions. This is because its answers are summarized based on the responses of online users, whose positions are biased towards the right. This reminds me that although I consider myself to be very much in favor of gender equality, I am influenced by a patriarchal society, and without contextual information, I would still default to a doctor's gender being male. So can either humans or machines really remain neutral in the true sense of the word without being influenced by their surroundings?