# Reading Responses (Set 2)

by Ishan Rosha

## Reading Responses 5 out of 5

### Nov 06 Tue - Dating

by Ishan Rosha

While we like to be told that equality exists between races everywhere, it’s clear that through online communication that isn’t the case at all. For example, OkCupid’s algorithms show that there is a significant reply rate difference in a conversation between black males and Asian females. The reply rate was 55% for black males compared to 17% for Asian females.

What’s even more surprising is how evidently different the reply rate percentages are compared to the fairly even matching percentages. This shows that digital communication might have made racial biases increase.

Online dating also shows how digital communication enables people to create a persona that showcases the best of their qualities and even post false information in order to seem more impressive to others. One of the most common ones being height where people normally lie about being 6 feet tall when in reality they are a bit shorter. Another common one is people’s salary. People lie about making 20% more than they say they do in order to seem to have a more stable source of income, therefore more disposable income and therefore become more desirable as a result. This shows that digital communication results in an increase in not only misrepresentation but also self-esteem.

Taking the term “dork” to a whole new level, Chris McKinlay (a very talented mathematician) approached online dating mathematically. By setting up 12 fake accounts and writing Python scripts to manage them, he would find out his target demographic and scrutinize their profiles in order to obtain all their information or as he calls it “all that crap”. The bots he set up gathered countless profiles and data so he trained them to act human. After three weeks had passed, he gained over 20,000 answers and find seven distinct clusters. However, his initial ecstasy turned into sadness from the constant awkward situations and rejections he found himself undergoing with these women. But it all changed when he met Christine Tien Wang who he immediately fell in love with. Digital communication might have made love a data field after all.

### Nov 20 Tue - Haters

For internet trollers, anonymity is their shield. It’s what enables them to have a sense of free-speech and insult whoever they feel like. Joseph Reagle in his book *Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators*, compares this freedom to the story of Gyges and Frodo. The latter to me is a lot more striking because Frodo undertook an entire journey to destroy the ring in order to defeat Sauron. But when he finally had the chance to, he couldn’t because he loved it. It says a lot about how powerful invisibility can be and how much it can corrupt the person who has it. Reagle backs this up with scientific research, recalling psychologist Phil Zimbardo’s 1969 experiment where researchers discovered that those who wore large lab coats and hoods were more likely to shock others than participants who had name tags. Zimbardo stated that this showed deindividuation, a loss of a sense of self and social norms.

However, in his interview with Jason Kornwitz titled *How to Tame the Twitter Haters*, Joseph Reagle also acknowledges that internet trolling happens even with people using their own names and states that it is a “blended phenomenon” where the blame can’t be on one particular individual but “the target of the harassment suffers nonetheless.”

The actual responses from social media platforms towards the trollers are rare unless they are celebrities. While Twitter is trying to enforce its policies of harassment more and more and still gives users the ability to block, there is a “toxic subculture” that’s impossible to get rid of. Especially for those who aren’t celebrities, since they don’t have the option of verifying themselves.

Ultimately, there is no way to instantly put an end to harassment. For example, Breitbart’s technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos encouraged hateful tweets towards Ghostbusters’ Leslie Jones and was booted from Twitter as a result. However, he can still write at Breitbart. Reagle ends chapter five of his book in a similar way by stating that online abusive behavior should be identified but it will go on.

### Nov 27 Tue - Shaped

Digital communication can be a source for needed self-validation and attention. In chapter six of Joseph Reagle’s *Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators*, Reagle gives an example of a video titled “Am I Ugly” released by a young woman. She was urged to take it down because of how it would gain many vile or sympathetic comments when that doesn’t give much meaning. This is a reflection of digital communication in itself, a superficial way of increasing or decreasing self-esteem.

Reagle then further explores the idea of self-esteem by stating how people use the online world to present themselves as they’d like to be because “we are not in perfect control of our presentation.” This can even include people untagging themselves from photos so that they don’t show up on their friends’ feed. Reagle then writes about Siva Vaidhyanathan's myth claim “that all young people are tech-savvy” because of how it connects to the previous point of self-esteem through multi-tasking. He mentions Clifford Nass’ research on media multitasking where it was discovered that a negative social well-being correlated with an increase in media multi-tasking. This shows that digital communication makes individuals less mindful because they are less aware and more easily distracted. Face-to-face communication, unsurprisingly, had the opposite effect.

Reagle then moves on to narcissism and defines it people who are “self-obsessed” and “pre-occupied with success, power, and beauty.” He backs the link between narcissism and digital communication with research from a 2008 study where NPI points had a positive correlation with a higher amount of Facebook friends, Facebook posts and general attractiveness. Reagle then mentions quantification, which he states is something that strengthens intended efforts to promote self-esteem in an increasingly media-saturated society. Essentially, algorithms are used to show people their social standing via ratings. An appropriate comparison was made to This Is Spinal Tap’s iconic 11 amplifier where 11 is regarded as even better than the usual maximum of 10 because it sums up modern society's consensus: the higher the rating the better.

### Nov 30 Fri - Collapsed context

Authenticity is blurred during online interactions because of how these communicative acts are perceived to be with imagined audiences. Imagined audiences occur because of the way technology results in our usual notions of space and place being analyzed further and how we feel limited despite the boundlessness of social media. Dating sites are one of the most prominent examples of this considering that people are highly conscious of the audience that they are showing their profile to.

This affects how people interact in social media, especially Twitter. Twitter is formed from the social context created from tweets of followers. As the followers try to share more information and engage more in pathic communication, there is still a certain barrier stopping too much information from being shared. As stated in Alice E. Marwick’s and Danah Boyd’s *I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience*, “tension between revealing and concealing usually errs on the side of concealing on Twitter” and that consciousness created from the structure of Twitter “implies an ongoing front-stage identity performance that balances the desire to maintain positive impressions with the need to seem true or authentic to others.” Authenticity, ultimately, is judged by the audience and it varies depending on the participants.

In order to maintain good impressions with their potential readers, participants have a public persona and this results in content that won’t even offend the most sensitive of individuals being posted. Sometimes the context collapse is so difficult that there are people known as a “nightmare reader” and this limits the amount of personality in tweets so that they are safe for everyone. Twitter still has its fair share of controversial subjects being discussed but there is a link between avoidance of personal topics where intimacy is implied and the interaction between followers. Therefore, it is very difficult to have more than one persona online. This identity performance is linked Erving Goffman’s study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life where people navigate between 'frontstage' and 'backstage' areas in order to maintain collaborative self-presentation.

### Dec 04 Tue - Pushback

Newton’s Third Law states: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction “every action has an equal or opposite reaction. In the case of the world of social media today, pushback is more or less the reaction. People are having an increased resistance to constant online connectivity in order to have a greater sense of balance in life and not allow information overload to get to them. This is done in order to overcome the addiction to social media, the emotional dissatisfaction that it brings and the external values. Black Mirror once examined this in an episode called “Nosedive” where high ratings were the goal and it became an obsession to achieve these in order to gain high social status when in reality it didn’t result in any real meaning.

Ricardo Gomez’s and Stacey Morrison’s *Pushback* mentions a controversial 2011 column published by the New Yorker titled *The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us *where the author, Gopnik, categorized the cultural impact of the information age into three groups: the Never-Betters (people who praise technological development) the Ever-Wasers (claim nothing has really changed) and the Better-Less (dislike technology and yearn for the nostalgia of the good old days). However, now it is the Better-Less who are emerging as euphoric with the way they are looking to “manage or reduce their use and perceived dependence on technology.”

The consequences of pushback are surprising. From the viewpoint of Human-Computer Interaction, there are more questions raised about the design of technology and how it can be improved to win users over. There’s also the question of how long innovation will last a reliable source of profit.

In chapter eight of his book *Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web*, Joseph Reagle looks at pushback by comparing it more to online restriction rather than giving up social media. He states that “we sometimes prefer not to look into the online reflecting glass of humanity.” This “reflecting glass’ is what people with pushback avoid in order to make themselves feel better.