# Reading Responses 2

## Nov 07 Fri - Ads & social graph background
Since the invention of internet cookies in 1994, they have become more widespread across every digital platform than Montulli could ever anticipate. Cookies make it possible for advertisements to follow you around to other websites or social media, and are curated specifically to you. While we already learned about cookies in previous classes and readings, what I didn't know was that Facebook and Google are the biggest controllers of who sees what ads, and can place them on other large websites such as Fox News. While some advertisements may show you the jeans you have in your cart on the GAP Website, or the the cruise you have been putting off booking, how these ads are sent to you is up to the companies advertising.

Cookies don't just show you advertisements because they know that you want to buy what they are advertising, companies pay for their advertisements to be displayed to you. There are many different ways that advertisements can be displayed when they pop up on other websites. **Banner adverts** sound exactly like their name, and are images or animations that displayed like a banner. **Popups and pop-unders** as the nae suggests, are advertisements that pop up when the web page is opened or being viewed. While these were popular when advertisements first came about, users often find them annoying and shut them down without even looking, so they have become less popular. **Wallpaper adverts** change the background of the website being used, but I have not found these to be very common from my own experience. The last common type of advertisement technique used across the internet today are **Map adverts**. map adverts are advertisements that are placed on an online map and is often used to advertise businesses that may be trying to branch out and each new customers.

While there are many types of advertisements that can be spread across the internet to quickly spark the interest of its users, at what point can these advertisements become too much?

## Nov 18 Tue - Artificial intelligence
While in recent years, AI has become a tool that is often carelessly used by people to get information quickly and efficiently, AI has been around for many years, but has become more complex and more useful in our day to day lives. While I myself have used ChatGPT, a form of AI, to answer stupid questions my friends have asked me, or homework I didn't feel like doing, there are many other aspects that play into the behind the scenes of artificial intelligence and how it has gotten to the level it is at now.

Artificial intelligence started as early as the 1970s with Hidden Markov Models, arising from building blocks called tokenizers. Tokenizers are tools used in AI that breaks down raw text into smaller units called tokens, such as words, subwords, or characters. In the 1990s, tokens were used for N-blocks, the 2000s brought Recurrent Neural Networks, and in 2017 the development of OpenAI and GPT began. With artificial inteligences ability to develop and improve with such ease, the question becomes, what consequences may arise?

While Artificial Intelligence used to generate the next word in your sentence, it is now able to generate a lot more. In recent month it has even become hard to tell the difference between images generated by AI, and photos taken in real life. Even in our Communications in the Digital age class, we often played guessing games on "real vs. Ai", where we tried to spot the difference and many of us got it wrong. The question I often ask myself when seeing the usage of AI, or using it for my own benefit, is how is this effecting the morality of humans as a whole? After reading the article *Stable Diffusion made copying artists and generating porn harder and users are mad* I am tempted to believe that with the rising usage of AI to try and mimic other people or create porn, that human morality may be taking a turn for the worse. While **Stable Diffusion** limiting users from copying famous artists and generating porn caused a riot, humans are known to push the limits, and I believe more consequences are bound to arise.

## Nov 21 Fri - Algorithmic bias
Imagine waking up to find that the world has already made your decisions for you. What you'll read, buy, your potential to pay back a loan, handle a job, or even who you will become. This is the quiet power of *algorithmic bias*, a system that predicts our choices before we ever make them, nudging us down a path we never chose for ourselves in the first place. Algorithms have been used before they were created on the internet. In the reading *Weapons of Math destruction* the use of algorithms is seen in the example of Baseball. While athleticism plays a big role in baseball, being able to think like a "data scientist" and be able to read a player before they even step up to bat it also important. Because algorithms on the internet are ran by groups or companies of certain beliefs and backgrounds, they often exhibit biases that can sway their users to believe certain things.

Filter Bubbles are when users are only shown certain content from the internet that reinforce their own beliefs. While this is a topic we learned about earlier in class, they play a huge role in how algorithms become bias. Many companies and websites online reinforce certain beliefs, whether it is religious or political. While recent findings have shown that ChatGPT is 'woke', when a person who is not woke searches something up on the internet, they most likely will not get ChatGPT as one of their top findings. This is because of algorithmic bias.

The system of algorithmic biases deeply shapes the lives of every individual who uses s the internet, long before we notice their influence. Whether its predicting how a ball will be hit, or controlling the information we see online that shape our own beliefs and values, algorithms quietly push us towards certain behaviors and away from others. The danger isn't only the mistakes hat algorithmic biases may make, but how invisible those mistakes become as people become more and more prone to using the internet.

## Dec 02 Tue - Digital language and generations
"To type is not to be human, to be in cyberspace is not to be real" (McCulloch). Communication through the internet makes it extremely more difficult to interpret the tone that the sender is trying to get across, and therefore looses a huge sense of human like interaction. While humans have the ability to maintain and form new relationships online, McCullochs readings examine the difficulties in how messages can be interpreted in many different ways depending on the users generation, prior conversational context and how the internet language use has come to evolve.

One finding discussed in the readings that I found interesting was the variety of usage behind the acronym *LOL*. While I often add this acronym to the end of my sentence to have the message come across as very down to earth, or as a response when my friend says something funny, there are so many different ways to interpret the 3 letters. While people my age may have an easier time understanding the different usage behind each *LOL*, older generations who only know is. to mean *Laugh out Loud* may have a more difficult time understanding that it has different meanings. That being said, I think that the younger generations have a better understanding of what the older generations know about texting slang. I know to only use *LOL* with my grandparents if I want it to mean *Laughing Out Loud*, but even then I don't really find myself using slang when communication with them digitally.

While the misinterpretation of the acronym *LOL* may not seem harmful, there are many ways that texts can be misunderstood and cause issues within relationships. If there is anything I have learned from the readings throughout this course so far, it has been that the internet causes more harm than it does good.

## Dec 05 Fri - Pushback
We live in a day and age where we are constantly connected to everyone. Whether it is being friends on Instagram or a phone call across the country, we have the ability to see how people are doing through our screens, but when does this become too much?

A new phenomenon called *pushback* has arose in recent years, a tactic that can be used by internet users "seeking to regain control, establish boundaries, resist information overload, and establish greater personal life balance". This can be utilized not only by individuals, but large groups, or even states as well. The state of New York has a statewide ban on the usage of personal devices during the entirety of the school day. While some may think that this is over-doing it and that in the case of an emergency that it is important to have access to devices, but I think this ban is smart in the long run. Many students in high school and middle school have already formed addictive tendencies to screens at such a young age. In a school environment devices constantly distract students from paying attention to curriculum and learning. There have been countless times where I have found myself mindlessly scrolling on social media and just like that 2 hours of time that could have been spent productively have been wasted. So while the internet has become more and more prominent in day to day life, I think that pushback towards excessive usage should become more normalized. Ultimately, constant connection should not come at the cost of our well being. If we don't push back now, we risk letting the internet shape our lives more than we shape it.