###### tags: `Reading Responses Set 2`
# Alex Kouyoumjian Reading Responses (Set 2)

### Mar 25 Fri - Finding someone & living alone

#### With all the new ways to meet people in the digital age, why does it feel like it's tougher than ever to find the right someone?

An integral part in the online dating world is your perceived appearance. "Swipe culture" has taken over dating apps, shifting the primary criteria for a desirable partner towards one's physical attributes. From looks to height to accessories and financial wellbeing, personality has become an after-thought. Before you know anything about someone's personality, you are subjected to swiping based on these physical attributes.

This culture has led both men and women to believing they need to lie on their profiles in order to be "wanted." [OkCupid](https://www.okcupid.com/), a popular dating site, even said in an article titled, [The Big Lies People Tell in Online Dating](https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-online-dating-a9e3990d6ae2), that people "do everything they can in their OkCupid profiles to make it the best representation of themselves. But in the world of online dating, it’s very hard for the casual browser to tell truth from what could be fiction." Telling the difference between real and exaggeration has created a separate issue- catfishing. To help understand how common this issue is, OkCupid provided these graphs visualizing the discrepancy in what user say vs the whats really true.

###### Overall, people are two inches shorter than they claim. They lie to try to fit into society's standards for height.

###### This graph helps me understand why people think lying is the right idea. It makes it clear that height has significant implications on online dating success.

###### People also inflate their income to appear more desirable, as shown by this graph. Interestingly, men tend to inflate by a greater percent, perhaps due to the outdated societal norm of men providing financially for their partner.

#### Relationships are rarely successful when founded on a lie.

Without giving someone a chance based on their personality, it is understandable that people get desperate enough to exaggerate their physical attributes. Promoted by swipe-based dating apps, this glorification of someone's appearance takes away from the reason most people are on dating apps- to form an intimate connection. These lies make the already difficult dating world that much harder. Conforming to society's pressures and norms while on dating apps may make dating online harder than doing it the old fassion way.

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### Apr 08 Fri - Bemused

#### Is it better to be early than thorough?
"First" "Here before it blows up"... We've all seen comments like these. When it comes to writing online reviews, too often the quality of the comment takes a backseat. Joseph Reagle found that "the average age of a comment with a rating of “4 or higher” was just over an hour and that I typically would not see any comments older than eight hours. Early comments often received more attention than they deserved" (Reagle, 2015). This occurs because the earlier posts gain traction and have too many "likes" or upvotes to be overtaken by more merited comments. This is evidenced by a 2013 study with over a hundred thousand comments rated comments up, down, and neutral (nothing / control). They found that "an initial up vote increased the likelihood of a subsequent up vote by 32 percent. In some conditions (such as on political and social topics), this positive “herding” increased final ratings by 25 percent on average" (Reagle, 2015). The problem with this? Constructive and helpful comments are buried by earlier shallow ones. So why does this happen? It all comes down to *preferential attachment*.

#### The Rich Get Richer


Preferential attachment is the prioritization of popular and established entities, often done through recommendation algorithms. You may have noticed how Spotify, Instagram, and Amazon tend to recommend the most popular podcasts, users, and products. This is beneficial for companies as they want users to enjoy their services, and the most interacted with users/products tend to be of the best quality. Preferential attachment enables larger and more established entities to benefit significantly from this recommendation structure. Consequently, it makes being a new or smaller creator/producer so much harder as it is improbable to gain social traction without being recommended. This discourages people from pursuing their passions as starting from scratch with preferential attachment is so intimidating. The "rich" get "richer" while the poor struggle to make a name for themselves without recommendation help from their platform.

#### How Telling Are Reviews and Comments?
Who decides the parameters for how things are rated? **No one.** There are no standardized metrics since writing reviews reflects an individual's own assessment of the product, often containing strong personal biases. If the product jams only one in a hundred-thousand times, there will still be a 1/5 star review claiming that it never works. Additionally, there are biases for how a product should perform as we have the "assumption that others have similar expectations and competencies" (Reagle, 2015). This is exemplified by one review of a carbon monoxide alarm. The perplexing review read, "Saved our son’s life," despite only receiving 4/5-stars. What was the reason behind the imperfect rating? The author had quality and durability concerns. For most, saving a life warrants a five-star review, but in this case the writer's own expectations were different. These discontinuities make rating on a 1-5-star scale flawed. A product being satisfactory may constitute three stars for one rater and five stars for another. All together, reviews remain a useful way of discerning a product's quality before buying it, however you should take them with a grain of salt.

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### Apr 12 Tue - Algorithmic discrimination
A 2013 study by Harvard University professor Latanya Sweeney found that "names associated with black people lead to advertisements that said 'Arrested?' and linked to websites that could perform criminal record checks" (Rutherford, 2016). She concluded that search results appeared to expose a racial bias in society. With all the advancements in the past decades allowing users to search the internet for anything they want in the matter of seconds, search algorithms remain far from perfect. Instances like this have become all too common for minorities. The effects of algorithmic bias and discrimination can be seen not only through search results but also text fill-ins. For instance, racial discrimination is also shown when googling: "white people are..." vs "black people are..." as shown below.



#### Does this mean Google intentionally discriminates?
We may never know the true answer, but Google is adamant that this isn't true. Google's results are "determined by the search engine’s constantly evolving algorithm, which, the company states on its website, uses more than 200 different “clues” (such as) the popularity of the image, how frequently it is shared, context such as text around the image, and meta-tagging all come into play" (Rutherford, 2016). A good example of this is with googling *professional* vs *unprofessional* hairstyles for work, where the unprofessional search yielded significantly more women of color.

##### Was this racial discrimination?

While discrimination could be a factor in this, the algorithm may also be to blame. The search "picked up on captions and tags from around the internet that use the word 'inappropriate”'' – as The Guardian has pointed out, the algorithm has actually taken many of the images of black women from blogs and articles that are 'explicitly discussing and protesting against racist attitudes to hair'" (Rutherford, 2016). It is plausible that the key-word detection in the algorithm failed to exclude results that exposed discrimination, instead making it they supported it. An example of this is the article below from [Naturally Curly](https://www.naturallycurly.com/).


Articles like these that call out discriminative practices were wrongly included by the search algorithm. This is one reason why the search for unprofessional hair returns discriminatory results. However, this does not take away from the very real issue of search algorithm discrimination. Search algorithms, whether intentionally programed to or not, have been shown to discriminate against minorities. Effort needs to be taken to combat this.

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### Apr 22 Fri - Authenticity, work, & influence

The rise of social media in the Digital Age has produced more influencers than ever before. With all this power and influence over loyal and often impressionable supporters, it isn't too hard to find an influencer taking advantage of their fanbase. The above satirical "YouTube Sponsorship Starter Pack" makes fun of common sponsorships YouTubers have. There are common phrases used verbatim by numerous content creators.

#### What are the odds that every influencer holds that exact belief in their sponsored products?

The truth is, they don't! Products pay creators to "try their product" and give a supportive review to their audience. Often this includes a script or other forms of managing how the influencer talks about the product. The harm in this is that a YouTuber might take a lucrative sponsorship with a bad product for the money or "street cred." Yea that's right, “It’s street cred—the more sponsors you have, the more credibility you have" (Lorenz, 2018). Recommending faulty products to millions of impressionable viewers has extreme consequences.

#### Here's a video with over six million views from PewDiePie, the most popular man on YouTube, exposing misleading and deceitful sponsorships.

[Video Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PLgOaVXmGU) 8:34 - 9:51

I recommend watching the entire video as he goes into great length about the strategies companies like Better Health use in their sponsorships to lure in the influencer's supporters. An example of this is in 4:30 - 5:10 of the video where an influencer says they were diagnosed by a therapist despite the company claiming they do not provide proper diagnosis.

The Better Life scandal shows just how far influencers are willing to go for sponsorship money. The company has numerous red flags as pointed out in the video; however, this was not enough for over a hundred creators to accept the sponsorship. Furthermore, it shows that influencers do not care about the impacts of their fraudulent sponsorships as they are even willing to harm their viewers mental health by recommending bad products like Better Life.

### How big is this problem?


The above photo from Twitter user @andrewchen shows how the digital age has impacted western society. Kids in the US and UK are now most likely to want to be social media influencers. With the great increase to both the content creator and viewer population, the issue of misleading sponsorships will only grow larger. Additionally, "companies spent an estimated $5.2 billion on influencer marketing on Instagram alone in 2019, according to social media analytics firm HypeAuditor. That number could reach up to $6.5 billion in 2020" (Lerman, 2020). With the amount of both sponsors and sponsees increasing, the problem of inauthentic advertising on the internet will only grow if influencers and the products are not called out.

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### Apr 26 Tue - Pushback

#### Imagine a world where every action is done through the internet. From the moment we get up our lives are "plugged in." There's no escape...

While not exactly the reality we face today, are we headed towards this with the future's imminent technological advancements. This fear has sparked *connectivity pushback*-- "a reaction against the overload of information and changing relationships brought about by communication technologies such as smart phones, tablets and computers connected to the Internet" (Gomez and Morrison, 2014). A common reason for this is the overarching fear of change. The new wave of technology has brought confusion and distrust to the older and less adaptive generations. However, there are other plausible reasons for a pushback.

Economically, pushbacks question the longevity of each new technology's profitability. Is it really worth buying the new iPhone when it depreciates in value so much over just a few years? Psychologically, "pushback sheds light on the deeper emotional needs and desires that people seek to fulfill through technology. From a humanist and philosophical position, it suggests that the Internet, accessed in so many ways, is not an easy answer to the human desire for connection with others" (Gomez and Morrison, 2014). Another motivation for the pushback is the myriad of problems directly caused by internet interactions. From trolls and haters to black market activities on the dark web (see [this reading response](https://hackmd.io/RM844tHSRiitzlAeoIzekQ) for more), there has been plenty of harm that could have been avoided without the use of the web.

### Fake It and You'll Make It?
The internet's commercial impact has been immeasurable, allowing products to be picked out and delivered in mere days. However, with this has come the promotion of fake and disingenuous reviews. The law has begun to "take notice as well. In September 2013, the New York State attorney general’s office announced that it had compelled nineteen companies to stop writing fake online reviews and to pay more than $350,000 in penalties" (Reagle, 2015). Pushback from this fake online culture is understandable.

Many advocating for stepping back from the internet argue that life went on fine before integration of such technology. While the internet can be used to make activities easier and more accessible, it should not be relied on so heavily like it is today for so many.

#### Finding a Balance


How can we make the best of all the internet innovations in the twenty-first century without becoming completely reliant on it? Society contains a broad spectrum of internet users ranging from total immersion to complete pushback. Finding a balance comes down to individual preferences and trust in the online community. For older generations, the web's foreign and untrustworthy nature makes its benefits not worth the trouble. In younger members of society, the addiction to staying "in the loop" keeps them loyal to their devices. Regardless of where we fall on the pushback spectrum, the internet should be used with caution as it is unhealthy to build a reliance. Some pushback may be necessary.