# Esther Yejin's 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
- [ ] Mention specific ideas, details, and examples from the text and earlier classes.
- [ ] Offer something novel that you can offer towards class participation.
- [ ] Begin with a punchy start.
- [ ] Send to professor with "cda-r" in the subject, with URL of this page and markdown of today's response.

## Reading responses 5 out of 5

### Nov 06 Tue - Dating

"Esther Yejin only made *Tinder* just to make friends".

Kevin chuckled and face-palmed as he said that at the dinnertable.

I did not understand why I was being made fun of, so I defended to my friends that I used *Tinder* to not only to find my "true love" but also to make friends. After my attempted defense, I started naming a lot of my good friends whom I met via *Tinder*. My friends, in return, challenged me by asking: "so do you look at a person's look and decide to be friends with that person? Did I make your cut?"

I laughed as my friends kept roasting me, but one question remained in my head: "I know that I have my personal preferences when it comes to finding my ideal partner. However, do dating websites or apps shape my personal preferences?"

After reading the three articles, I believe that dating websites or apps do shape my preferences unintentionally, from factors such as race, education background, age, etc.

After reading the article *How Your Race Affects Messages You Get*, I agree that a person's race does correlate to the amount and the content of the messages, because of racial stereotype. The first visual graph shown in the article compares the reply rate between two individuals who have different races or sexes. I could not say for other races, but as an Asian cis-female, I can agree that the actual reply rate compared to the supposed reply rate when an Asian female messages to a Black male is higher. I beleive so because since Asian females are generally perceived as timid and submissive, when an Asian female make an initiation to message a person, the person would positively react because the Asian female seems to be "easy" to talk to. However, I do not know the criteria for "what reply % should be" nor how it could be quantitively measured, so I would not completely depend on that visual graph to support my thoughts.

Research about dating applications and psychology behind them interest me, more because of the research method, not the results. I want to know things like the criteria to establish definitions, number of the people participating, or the process to reach a conclusion. Because most of the content in all of the articles don't really explain much, I found most of the graphs and data unreliable. I understand how I find them unreliable because such data tend to generalize everyone's thoughts and preferences. I am excited to discuss the research methods to conduct such experiments in class.

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### Nov 09 Fri - Breakup

"Men are trash", I say as we end my gossip session with my girlfriends.

I know that this is a very sexist and unfair statement to make, but my only reason for saying is that they "break hearts". I honestly know that men are not always trash; there are guys who are genuinely good people. Yet I keep saying that bold statement because I believe that most of the guys do not know how to communicate well.

Gershon claimed that "breakup stories are filled with instances in which people are interpreting second-order information". Second-order information, "the background knowledge of information of a situation and an expectation of communication", is a trap that could lead to miscommunication between a couple. We tend to overthink and analyze the intentions of our girlfriends or boyfriends even if some nonverbal, or even verbal, actions don't have significant meaning behind them.

One of the reasons why breakups happen is that a couple can't solve a problem that emerged due to miscommunication. There are other reasons as well, like if one overdepends on other or if one cheats on anoter. There must be a thorough communication done by face-to-face, not via text, to maintain a healthy relationship. Lenhart, Anderson and Smith claimed that "teens consider text message breakup to be socially unacceptable", but they do it anyways. I agree with them; I find it extremely rude if someone were to break up with me via text.

I acknowledge that it is hard to maintain a healthy relationship via thorough communication, because I have experienced a terrible break up myself. Solely judging from my past relationships, I can say that it is a hard process because we expect our partners to know about our feelings and emotions. I think this is where second-order information forms, and we tend to talk to our friends regarding problems we face in our relationship.

I do not know the exact answer regarding how to be in a healthy relationship, because every relationship paints a different life of two people. However, being independent, sparing time for friends, and moreover communicating in an honest manner are what I affirm to be the three main components to be in a fruitful relationship, or even friendship as well.

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### Nov 20 Fri - Haters

"An idea is like a virus. Resillient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you." - Cobb (Thomas & Nolan, 2010)

This is my favorite quote from the movie *Inception*.

I decided to start off my reading response with this quote to emphasize the power of words, and how they can tremendously affect our lives. It's like being swept by the tsunami of thoughts, eventually consuming us.

It is extremely easy for us to brainwash each other with tongues and fingers -- I was also a victim of this.

We often say: "Haters gonna hate" and force ourselves to be unaffected by, or "bounce back" from, hate comments but we can not ignore the fact that such comments hurt us and make us self-conscious. We can either suck it up and live on, but this is only possible for rare number of confident people. Mostly, people get discouraged of themselves and question their worth. It is important for the society as a whole to prevent such negativity. Thus, the government and social media firms are attempting to make policies to reduce hate comments.

In this reading response, I question the effectiveness of such regulations. In the reading, Reagle said: "when non-celebrities are harassed, Twitter rarely acts upon those reports". Does that imply that the regulations are prioritizing, measuring and comparing each person's mental health based on the person's status and wealth? What are other methods to remove the "toxic subculture" other than deleting accounts?

The existence of hate speech does not upset me. Although hate speech is not technically a method of "free speech" because social media platforms in the United States are not government property, I think people do have the right to express their opinions on anything. What matters is their word choice and their conscious regarding the power of words. What particularly upsets me is the method of reducing hate speech. It is still a subject to improve on, and as a social media user for almost 10 years, I do not see any improvements other than "unfriending" or "blocking" the users that give off negative vibes. Maybe improving education about negative effects from hate comments would work.

Reference:

Thomas, Emma. (Producer), & Nolan, Christopher. (Director). (2010). *Inception* [Format Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Pictures.

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### Nov 30th - Collapsed Context

I would like the start off my reading response with a meme:

<iframe src="http://esmemes.com/embed/i/2371590" width="100%" height="394" frameBorder="0" class="meme-embed" style="max-width:100%;" allowFullScreen></iframe><p><a href="http://esmemes.com/i/me-on-facebook-vs-me-on-twitter-2371590"></a></p>

If we were questioned about a hypothetical situation in our lives, most of us would reply: "it depends on the situation". This applies to our actions in virtual world; our actions and word choices really depend on the situation. However, because the overall situation context, cultural background and audience is limited and available for open interpretation, we target a very specific group of audience. As Marwick and Boyd quoted: "In the absence of certain knowledge about audience, participants take cues from the social media environment to imagine the community", us, as content creators and audiences, can shape the online situation contexts and follow along with them.

Because of such ambiguity of constructing contexts online, there are some disputes or questions I would like to address:
1. **Do we use a specific social media platform for a unified reason or purpose?**
-- No. "Some thought of Twitter as a diary or record of their lives. Others saw the service as a space where they expressed opinions for themselves rather than others" (Marwick & Boyd).
2. **Then, how can the content producers and absorbers come to a consensus to use the specific social media platform for same purposes?**
-- I think this is where a thorough knowledge of the purpose of a specific online community is needed. The content audiences and produceres must have a thorough communication regarding the "situational" usage of social media and be able to know who they are talking with and what they are talking about. However, this is hard as I have said above that the overall situation context is up for open interpretation. I think in order for content producers and absorbers (or audiences) to reach a consensus to use the specific social media platform for same purposes, there must be a lot of trial and error of participating different social media platforms and online groups.
3. **Are there dangers of being active on a particular social media platform with strategic audiences?**
-- One can say that if a person uses social media for all same purposes with same attitudes, social media won't cause a threat. I disagree. Even if one uses all social media platforms with same attitude, there are differences in our attitudes online. Some factors that could affect our participation could be but not limited to: our social media followers and time. Marwick and Boyd mentioned that "knowledge of the audience functions more as a continuum". Realizing growth trend, types and common characteristics of our audiences affect our method of communication because we want to communicate and reach to every one of them. Also, as time goes by, our perception or mindset becomes mature, which ultimately affects how we talk online as well.
-- There are many cases when one uses different social media accounts for different purposes. For example, one can have multiple Instagram accounts. One account could be personal or friends only, while another account can be dedicated for studying and bullet point journalling account. Other accounts could include puppy content. If one audience realizes that one content creator has multiple accounts, the audience can mention the creator's content in another context. For example, if I were to have a Twitter account for political activism, my audience who follows that Twitter account can bring my political views at my another Twitter account which could be solely dedicated for cute dog content. I would not want to bring a contreversy especially to my audiences who follow my puppy account, because I could lose my audience for different political views. Such knowledge of my audiences could pose a threat for me to lose my followers intended for other group of audiences.

I personally struggled with managing a lot of social medias and navigating multiple audiences. I have created both public and private accounts, but as people have the power to screenshoot content from my private account and expose me to public accounts, I was extremely stressed. I do not know how people with huge audiences, such as celebrities, manage their various social media accounts. However, I can only suggest that limiting our usage of social media accounts and reducing our "juggling" between accounts did help me ease the stress and focus on the audiences I have for one or two specific accounts.

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### Dec 4th - Pushback

I like to challenge myself to do weird achievements or accomplishments, like how many seconds I can stay underwater or how many grapes I can fit in my mouth. One day, I wanted to test how many minutes I could go without using any form of technology. I thoroughly planned how I would spend my day without technology; I wanted to go for a swim outside at the pool. I thought spending some time outside to draw my surroundings would kill a lot of time. I wanted to walk around the streets of São Paulo and appreciate the sun.

30 minutes in the challenge, I realized that I had to submit an assignment via Turnitin. As I walk back into my room and turn on my computer, I sighed. I felt that I was defeated by technology.

Using technology and being online became a part of my life and it is inevitable. It slithered into my life so naturally it became part of my academia life as well. Web research, web discussions, web assignments, web everything. Even if I wanted to take a break, I could not stop.

Because of the fact that internet preocupies the majority part of my life, I think I have given up trying to stop it. Instead, I have thought of using it in a healthy manner. I started thinking that since internet does take up most of my life, I should make a positive use out of it instead of complaining.

Internet did give me insight about other people's thoughts and values, which helped me construct my distinct perception and articulate them in a respectful manner. I totally agree with Professor Reagle's statement: "Insight and wisdom might not always be found at the bottom half of the Web, but it does have a sample of what some people are thinking". Honestly, being active online does help me get an insight of people's personalities -- the personalities I would have never thought they would do in person.

I also took control of the amount of time I spend on technology. Although I don't put any limits on my usage of technology for education because amount of work depends day-to-day, I made sure that I did not get distracted. However, I did restrict my time on social media, especially on YouTube. The reason exactly matched with one of the five reasons of Pushbacks suggested by Gomez and Morrison: "Pushing back as a result of technology addiction". I also wanted to "regain control of my time and energy" so that I can physically appreciate what I have and surrounded with at the moment.

While I am still working on self-improvement and balancing between usage of technology and leisure time, I have developed some questions that I strive to answer by myself: Is staying out of contact with technology the only way to practice pushback? How can one pushback while still using technology? Can pushbacks to avoid comments and reactions in return cause psychological effects, like anxiety?