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# 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
### November 6-Tue-Dating
How many times have you heard someone say “we’re so in love, we met on tinder?” We’ve been hearing this frequently as technology is evolving. Technology has been drastically changing the perception of finding love and being in a relationship. Online dating sites have been flooding the web, but is online dating as reliable as it sounds? Online dating is making the process of finding a partner quick and efficient by sorting people that might fit your personality and preferences. Everyone’s information is stored in the system and it’s easy to access. This is shown by Chris McKinlay’s hacking project done on OkCupid. He was able to create a page for himself, by doing research on people he was interested in, and succeeded by having a lot of matches. But Christian Rudder explains how online dating is a pool of deception, people lie about their height by usually adding two inches to their regular height, their income by saying they earn 20% more than what they actually earn, and their pictures by usually posting old pictures that are not a reliable version of themselves.
Something interesting to look into would be to see how people who belong to different cultures see online dating. Cultural differences are at the base of many diverging beliefs between societies. These differences may pertain to religious values, or general different cultural beliefs, such as seeing online activity as untrustworthy and unsafe. Some people see online dating as having numerous problems with bias. People are choosing if they like someone based on appearance and a brief description of themselves, so how are people making the decision of liking someone? Christian Rudder conducted a study about the correlation between replying to messages on OkCupid and race. The results, as Rudder presumed, showed a significant relationship between the two. So is this racism or is it cultural beliefs and differences that are getting in the way?
### November 20-Tue-Haters
Trollplex, as Reagle defines it, is “an attack by a spectrum of people, from identified to anonymous, exhibiting varied behavior—from jokes to insults to threats—but who share a target, culture, and venue for attack.” This shows how much hate navigates the web. Why do we experience much more hate on the web than in real life? First of all, anonymity plays a big role in this, people feel powerful behind a protected screen with an anonymous username. Second of all, not seeing what your words do to others will make it more likely for people who want to be hateful to engage in that behavior. Such behavior is seen everywhere on the Internet, from online gaming to social networks. This hateful behavior sometimes spreads into what is known as”bully battle.” Online, most of the times, everyone can access the discussion, creating a conversation between thousands of people who all have something different to say.
My question is why does it feel like over the past decade cyberbullying has become worse? With the rise of many social media platforms, hate has invaded the web. Today, if we look through comments of a celebrity’s picture on Instagram we will find numerous hateful comments and we wouldn’t even question it anymore, almost as if it were the norm. I believe that there are many steps that need to be taken regarding the connection between privacy and bullying. Should online anonymity be banned in favor of stopping bullying? This would go against our society's privacy norms, but would less people engage in hateful behavior if they had to show who they were?
### November 27-Tue-Shaped
“If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.” This is was seventeenth century thinker Charles Montesquieu wrote. This applies to today’s correlation between online comment and self-esteem. Many people, while looking at people’s social media, think their lives are better and happier than theirs, while in reality everyone puts the best version of themselves on the internet.
Furthermore in a study done in 2008 it was shown that there was a correlation between high Narcissistic Personality Inventory scores and higher quantities of Facebook interactions. Reagle defines narcissists as people that “demand and reward attention and admiration but respond to threats to their self-esteem with rage and defiance.”
Is social media that making us have narcissistic tendencies? People use social media differently, but many people have trouble with their privacy, add numerous people that they don’t necessarily know, and don’t use the comment section correctly. Many people fall into a spiral once they see their numbers of followers on social media and are willing to go above and beyond to meet their social media goals, people are eager to create a perfect profile on their favorite social media so that they can portray the perfect life. Is this going to keep getting worse as social media grows even more? Social media today has so many ways of updating your followers on everything you do at any time. Is this affecting our daily actions because we want to show everyone how happy we are?
### November 30-Fri-Collapsed Context
Have you ever heard of a “finsta?” It’s a fake Instagram page that one creates in order to post freely for a selected audience who the owner of the page feels comfortable being themselves with. This phenomenon has become increasingly popular in the last decade. With the development of many social networks, people have become more and more strict about their appearance on the web. Personal homepages tend to showcase the most strict version of the individual because they can’t select a specific audience that is viewing their page. Let’s take Twitter as an example, this popular social media is used to network among different people but it’s hard to focalize your potential audience, so people tailor their tweets to be acceptable for all of their potential audiences.
Does this mean that authenticity is hard to achieve? Unfortunately, the Internet is becoming a place where it’s hard to trust what people say and do. But is it so wrong to showcase the best side of yourself to the world? This is exactly what we do when we first meet someone, we try and show the best version of ourselves in order to make it more likely for people to like us. We, as humans, all seek human contact, it’s a natural instinct to want people to like you. As Boyd says: “self-presentation is collaborative,” meaning that during interactions, both parties tend to want to make themselves look better. This is also known as “saving face” because people literally want to save how they appear to others.
### December 4-Tue-Pushback
“Pushback is an expression of those who have access and use communication technologies, but who decide to resist, drop off, manage or reduce their use of these technologies.” This is how Gomez and Morrison explain what pushback is. As we live in a technology-driven society many people are realizing what this entails: addiction, emotional dissatisfaction, such as feelings of depression and loneliness. A great number of people are actively seeking ways of controlling their technological usage by directly changing their behavior towards it. For example, some people restrict their technological usage to some exact times, downgrade their technology, or go completely offline. This behavioral tailoring in order to pushback is also seen on online comments. Comments are a great way for online communities connect, but sometimes this privilege is abused and people use the comments section to hate and troll. Because of this, some people prefer to deactivate and pushback on the comments section.
My question is how can we improve our technological experience without feeling like we have to pushback? Nowadays, technology is at the center of our life, it has a heavy weight on our everyday life and it dominates most of our activities. Technology is supposed to make our life easier, why does is seem like it’s making it more difficult? I think it would be interesting to understand why something that should be beneficial and helpful like technology is getting in the way of our everyday life. I believe technology has developed so much over the past few decades that we sometimes are no longer able to control it. For example, people hating in the comments section has been a relevant problem for a long time, but since the comments section brings such a big thing as the online world together is hard to manage it.