###### Meg Ellis
# Reading Responses (Set 1)

### Jan 10 Tues - Are you tech-savvy?
Before reading the articles by Kate Moran, Chris Evans, and Wenqian Robertson, I didn't see the reason why there was a debate necessary for the concept of digital natives. A digital native is defined as someone who grew up "in a media-saturated world" according to Moran, during a time when personal Internet usage began to skyrocket. But as a digital native myself, I never noticed the issue at hand or even defined it as an issue to begin with. When children are exposed to things at such a young age, it hardwires their brains to act a specific way.

What I forgot in my argument, however, was that when the Internet was spread to the public in its early years, there was so much more uncertainty and mystery that came along with it. Watching children grow up with it and watching them change can draw a lot of fear for parents and older adults. From my perspective, though, I'm just unable to understand why they didn't expect this new technology to expect younger people the way it has, since technology has become intentionally designed to maintain your attention. It seems everyone has something to say in the debate revolving around digital natives, and for good reason.

Kate Moran takes a simplistic, introductory approach to the concept of digital natives in her article *Milennials as Digital Natives: Myths and Realities*. Some of the topics she said felt a bit too odd to believe, like the myth that digital natives have *natural instincts* to fix and use computers. I was intrigued at how she brought up the confidence that came with digital natives. I was surprised to learn that millennials have grown confident with how they use the Internet and approach interfaces. It's a very reassuring thing to know that even the most socially awkward can have a sense of confidence with their skills using the World Wide Web, no matter how simple that may feel.

### February 3 Fri - Cooperation
Who knew that evolution, game theory, prisoners, politicians, climate change, and cow grazing would all blend together so well? Martin Nowak’s book *Supercooperators* was actually mediocre at best, in my opinion, but Nowak really knows how to get his point across with backed up evidence and research, which I can admire. At first, I couldn’t really see where Nowak was going with his argument because I ended up confusing myself over the oodles of game theory. However, after the puzzle pieces that spread across chapters came together, I began to slightly understand how everything related. We need to get along to survive, and Nowak wonderfully expresses this through his own research… it just didn’t strike the right chord for me.

Regardless, I can appreciate the massive effort placed into this piece, especially as someone without Nowak’s expertise. Things that stood out to me from Nowak’s Supercooperators also correlated to my interest in disagreements online and our inability to get along. Nowak wrote, “In societies where public cooperation is ingrained and people trust the police and their law enforcement institutions, revenge is generally shunned.” In a nation as divided as the United States where distrust against the police, we may be more prone to accepting acts of punishment and revenge.

Another quote from Nowak that also captured my attention goes like this: “A nation, cult, or a religion can be seen as a group that is bound by the way that an individual makes sacrifices to help his brethren.” When we look at how alt-right communities are formed online, they are formatted the same way as a brotherhood does, in which members of the community can trust and rely upon each other. For a community as hateful and scathing as the alt-right, it’s interesting to me that there is a raw sense of humanity behind their inhuman beliefs, in my opinion.

### Feb 07 Tues - Social Networks
“Sociologists are documenting a shift from group-centric to network-centric societies,” Howard Rheingold writes in Chapter 5 of *Social has a Shape* (Rheingold, 2012). One excellent example of this shift found in the chapter is the shift from using landline telephones to mobile, cellular phones. Back in the day, you didn’t call someone specifically, you called their household, their primary location, which anyone could answer. During the present day, we call others regardless of location to talk to someone specifically, and communication has become more individual-oriented.

One concept that Rheingold introduced to me that fascinates me is the concept of social contagion. With network-centric societies dominating our environment, one’s happiness can not only be affected by your own network, but by the networks of other nodes within your network. Complicated as it is, “part of your happiness might depend on people you never met,” Rheingold explains in regard to this phenomenon (Rheingold, 2012).

I also noticed a correlation to our recent lectures related to crap detection, filter bubbles, and media literacy, as described by Rheingold. He writes, “Everybody in a highly clustered, homophilous network tends to get the same news, and it is more likely that everybody in a clique will have the same opinions and access to the same information” (Rheingold, 2012). Birds of a feather flock together, and that means they get the same information, ultimately leading to echo chambers online with algorithms that only show you what you want to see. I wonder if this can be connected in any way to social contagion, through which the news and information you take in get recommended to others within and beyond your own network.

### Feb 10 Fri - Haters
Haters gonna hate, but should we censor them from hating? According to Shannon Bond’s 2021 NPR article, “Meta announced new policies to protect users from harassment, including a ban on content that degrades or sexualizes public figures” (Bond 2021). First and foremost, this is not protecting all users from harassment, which I think is what should be held most important, but rather this shows that Meta is looking solely to protect public figures, those with higher social privilege and higher esteem. Second of all, does banning degradation – or, more simply, hating – do anything to stop the hating in the first place? We’ve learned throughout American history that when someone is silenced, it makes them want to shout back even louder. By placing restrictions on who can hate on whom, not only is this unfair towards non-public figures (in other words, everyone else), but it’s unfair to our democracy.

Of course, there’s a fine line between democracy and free speech and hate speech, and I’m not saying that we should necessarily keep hate speech on the Internet. As seen by the Sierra incident on Dr. Joseph Reagle’s 5th chapter of *Reading the Comments*, people can say some really hurtful, terrible things online. This is very understandable after learning about the online disinhibition effect that affects the soldiers of a flame war behind the screens. In response to trolls, haters, and bullies, it has become impossible to ignore the situation, so what do we do about it? We can’t force victims to move on but we also can’t silence the haters because it just feeds the beast. “Social cues are filtered out, social presence is attenuated, and people do not appreciate their effects on others. If people could see that they upset someone, then most would be less likely to do so,” Reagle writes (Reagle 2015). If there’s anything we can do, we need to figure out a way to humanize the Internet and humanize ourselves and our identities online. And when it comes to epic fails, we need to denounce anonymity online and utilize the Internet to hold others accountable without the desire to dox.

### Feb 24 Fri - Gender, communication, and contribution
Recently, a friend of mine said that when asked as a child what her favorite color was, she would always say blue, “because fuck the patriarchy, right?” She’s currently studying criminal justice, which I’d define as a fairly masculinized industry; just like Naomi Slater describes the masculinization of the software industry from a soft to hard skill (Slater 2014), criminal justice in my eyes has become a very people-oriented field overpowered by macho detectives and big, strong men. As Slater describes, “doing so allows men to safely perform their masculinity, whilst simultaneously forming a hierarchy-enhancing legitimizing narrative that keeps women out.”

This potent difference between women and men and their respective interest in people versus things also parallels Megan Molteni’s analysis of evolutionary psychology (Molteni 2017). Molteni’s article utilizes this to argue against Google's ex-engineer, James Damore, who argued that prenatal testosterone exposure affects one’s personality traits. By using “shaky scientism” (Molteni 2017) to back up his argument, Damore finds himself in an echo chamber of his own, as Molteni identifies Damore’s arguments as overselling.

Alas, the argument continues to this day: in the age of feminazis, top G’s and hypermasculinity, it’s been pretty difficult as a woman to pretend like everything’s normal. To feel like everything from your personality to your use of social media (Krasnova, Veltri, Eling, and Buxmann 2017) must be backed up by science to justify something can be exhausting. Slater ends her article with hopeful intentions; as she points out more gender diversity in open source, she cries out, “Now is a time for iconoclasm” (Slater 2014). Slater is looking to inspire and fight back, just like my blue-loving friend is, but I can’t help but turn away from the flames. I’m not looking to start a revolution, nor do I want things to stay the same, but starting conversations isn’t going to get the patriarchy to listen; the louder we get, the cheaper earplugs will become.