T###### tags: `CDA`
# Reading Responses (Set 2)

## Reading responses 5 out of 5

### Mar 10 Tue - Collapsed Context

In the article, "I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience," Boyd and Marwick explore the idea of context collapse through their extensive research on Twitter and how users identify or imagine the audience they are tweeting to. The article does a deep dive on how audiences are perceived by users, and how they adhere to multiple audiences at once without the ability to code-switch. Meanwhile, "BeReal and the doomed quest for online authenticity" by Duffy and Gerrard tackles the irony that envelops the viral app claiming to value nothing more than pure authenticity.

Boyd and Marwick define collapsed context as the inability to perform differently to different audiences. This appears most evidently on social media platforms, where you are unable to regulate your audience, posing the question of how to write to an audience whom you do not know. While the question of how users imagine, and ultimately write to their audience is widely discussed throughout the article, I am far more intrigued by the question of authenticity. Identity is a performance regardless of the person or setting. Every person is performing their identity in every action and interaction. How you present yourself is your performance. That presentation of self may change depending on the context. You would not present yourself on a first date the same way you would in a job interview. So, as each user of Twitter has a different view or definition of what the platform is for, who they are writing to, and what is appropriate to write about, how do you decide how to present yourself? More importantly, how do you remain authentic? What is authenticity in the first place?

Unfortunately, there is no clear answer. Because there is no set audience, it is tempting to say that what one posts is not for a specific audience, it is just them. Raw, unfiltered, and authentic. However, even if they believe that, authenticity, according to Boyd and Marwick, "is a localized, temporally situated social construct that varies widely based on community" (131). In a world where the "real you" is entirely dependent on society and the community that you are in, what can possibly be real?

Developers thought they had the answer when they came up with the revolutionary app, BeReal. An app that forces "authenticity" by not allowing time for makeup, filters, or aesthetics. Two minutes to post you, exactly how you are, doing exactly what you are doing right now. Duffy and Gerrard quickly debunk the entire premise of the app, pointing out all the flaws. First of all, people don't necessarily use it the way it's meant to be used. For example, if the prompt comes at an inconvenient time, many will choose not to post or to post a blank screen. It's supposed to be the anti-Instagram. The social media that is real and authentic. The app promotes total and complete authenticity, but it's not the first platform to do so. Snapchat and Instagram both started out with similar platforms. So it's not really revolutionary. Regardless, authenticity is a social construct, and no app can change that.

### Mar 17 Tue - Finding Someone & Living Alone

The world has long looked down on one being alone, yet the articles written by Christian Rudder, Derek Thompson, Robyn Vinter, and Joseph Chamie present findings and statistics that show I am not the only one who disagrees with the idea that being alone is not the same as being lonely.

"The Big Lies People Tell in Online Dating" by Christian Rudder presents some interesting research on the "white lies" most people use on their dating profiles. According to this piece, men tend to lie about their height to make themselves taller, people tend to fudge their salaries, and use dated pictures to make themselves seem more attractive to other users. This, to me, is the biggest problem with online dating.When people have the ability to change who they are, of course they are going to take the opportunity. The chance to fix all the things you are insecure about, who wouldn't take it? This is why I stay away such apps and websites, and I am not the only one.

According to Derek Thompson's "Why Online Dating Can Feel Like Such an Existential Nightmare," people are reverting back to older methods of meeting people. Online dating gives you the ability to seek out people with specific or hard-to-find traits that you wouldn't meet through your own personal network. However, it also gives you the ability to search for the literal perfect person. Any candidate that pops up on your screen needs to check off the boxes on your list of desired attributes and you have the ability to disregard them if they don't even if you never meet them. Endless opportunities to meet the one may sound like the dream, but I would argue it actually narrows your playing field. People are more open minded and personal when they actually speak and interact in person.

Vinter touches on this idea in "'It's quite soul-destroying': How we fell out of love with dating apps." One of the people interviewed in this piece says that she connects "with people strongly in real life [she'd] never have selected on a dating app." People are different in real life. It feels different to assess a connection than it does to assess someone's attributes on a profile page. However, the flaws in the online dating system are not the only reason why people are going away from it. Many people have simply decided that it is not necessary to be with someone romantically. Culturally, we tend to think that the majority of us will meet someone, fall in love, get married, etc. This is not the reality though. Many people are coming to realize there is a certain peace in not putting pressure on yourself to get married before you're 30. In fact, according to Thompson's article, getting married at an older age may be more beneficial.

Independence is spreading. People are becoming less obsessed with finding a partner, and more inclined to spend time on their own. Chamie's article, "Living Alone in America" presents statistics that show more and more people are living alone every year. While it may cost more, it allows for people to lead independent and free lives. Living on your own and being on your own doesn't have to be lonely. It may not be for everyone, but I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who appreciates the freedom of me time.

### Mar 24 Tue - Manipulated

I am constantly getting bombarded by "regular people" giving their opinions on new products on Instagram. I always knew they were fake, but now I know that virtually all review platforms are manipulated and exploited. Joseph Reagle's book, *Reading the Comments*, exposes the review industry for what it really is, a business. Luckily, according to Geoffrey A. Fowler in *The Washington Post*, the FTC has put in place new rules and regulations to help contain the spread of fake reviews online.

Reagle presents in-depth research regarding the positive and negative reviews of products online. In particular, books are often promoted through raving reviews by their own authors. The authors use pseudonyms and fake accounts to write good reviews, boosting their book's performance and sales. Many have admitted to it, others are exposed through glitches and investigations. Many of these reviews, interestingly, are in response to negative ones. According to Nan Hu, a negative review is 72% more likely to be followed by a positive review than to be followed by a negative review. I wonder if this can be used as an indicator of false reviews when looking at whether to buy a product or not. If one notices that a few negative reviews are followed immediately by positive ones, perhaps the negative ones should be weighted more when considering the purchase. Unfortunately, fake reviews do not only come from fake accounts and people trying to promote their own products. In fact, it would seem that most fake reviews are created through offering real, regular people money for writing a review, whether they have experience with the product or not. I have to admit, these scams are advertised well and are quite enticing, having come across quite a few myself. So I really do not blame anyone for trying to make some extra cash. However, I do think that if a company believes that they need to buy good reviews in order for a product to do well, they must know deep down that their product is unworthy of success on its own. In which case, I think they should work harder to make a good product rather than working so hard, and using sketchy and now illegal means, to promote an okay product.

The FTC's new rules say that it is now illegal for reviews to misrepresent a customer's experience with the product, be written by someone within the company without a clear disclosure, and claim to be someone that does not exist. Hopefully this will contain the situation. However, Fowler claims that at the time the article was written, 30-40% of online reviews were manipulated in some way. So, even if they can contain the situation from here on out, how will they repair the damage already done? It's not feasible to think they will find all the manipulated reviews online and delete them or expose them. Even if they could and did, the new rules don't fully protect us against manipulated reviews. As Reagle put it, "if something or someone can be applauded or pilloried in a comment...there will be fakes" (3). People will always search for ways to "hack the system," ways to make things easier, cheat codes, schemes, bribes, anything. I think most people are guilty of searching for workarounds in some sense or another, I certainly have. And, if I'm being honest, when I find one and it works for me, I feel like an absolute genius. There is a reason that "work smarter not harder" is such a popular phrase. Unfortunately that means that regardless of the amount of rules and regulations they put in place, we can never fully trust the reviews of a product, or really anything else on the internet.

### Mar 27 Fri - Bemused

How powerful do you think your online comments are? Why comment at all? Joseph Reagle's *Reading the Comments* explores the various contexts of online commenting, the dangers, the opportunities, and the hilarious things people post on the internet.

Reagle analyzes various sites and the differences in comments on individual sites from Slashdot, to Reddit, to Twitter, to Yelp. On Slashdot, comments are rated from worst to best and people can filter out the lowest rated ones. This seems like a great fix to irrelevant, unhelpful, or random comments and reviews. However, people can simply get all their friends to rate theirs well, or hack the system some other way. Plus, according to this chapter, early comments got far more attention than they possibly deserved, and certainly more attention than later comments, regardless of how they compared.

What is, in my opinion, the most interesting part of this article is how rating differs among people, cultures, and scales. I was pleased to hear that I am not the only one who finds that the pain scale is annoying and hard to navigate. They say that "ten" is the worst pain you can imagine, but I have a very vivid imagination and can pretty much always imagine worse regardless of how much pain I am actually in. One time, I slammed my finger in a car door and had to go to the emergency room because my finger swelled up so much. The pain got so bad on the way to the hospital that I was genuinely considering asking them to just cut it off. I had never experienced so much pain, but when they asked me for my number on the scale, I said 8 because I was sure there was worse pain even though I had never experienced it. How are doctor's supposed to actually gauge the pain level you are at if you don't even know what 10 is? And, what if you've been in some sort of pain your entire life but because you've never experienced a life without that pain, you think that's a zero on the scale? My mother and I have had many in-depth conversations about this topic in particular and both of us have come to the conclusion that the pain scale is an annoying measurement method.

I appreciated the final part of this reading because it ended so positively. Nothing in this world is entirely good or bad, online comments included. While many negative things come from commenting, there is also love, support, and connection. The ASMR community formed through online comments. People thought they were alone, with no way to describe what they were experiencing to others, until someone posted it online. People found an entire group of others to relate to, share new videos, and talk about the weird feeling they experience when they see or listen to an ASMR video. The internet may be dangerous and scary in many ways, and many use it for hateful actions, but there is beauty, connection, and togetherness that comes from it as well.