# Reading Responses (Set 2)
## Reading Response 5 out of 5
### Nov 01 Tue - Finding Someone & Living Alone
Is it possible to find your soulmate through a social media algorithm rather than meeting them in person first? With the introduction of online dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and many more, people have found confidence in finding their true love solely based on a dating app profile and online conversations. As Derek Thompson states in his article “Why Online Dating Can Feel Like Such an Existential Nightmare,” the number of couples who have met online has skyrocketed from zero percent in the mid-90s, to twenty percent in 2009. This percentage is even more drastic for the LGBTQ community as seventy percent of couples have met online. Now society has shifted from relying on family and friends to set them up with someone and is confiding in online websites that use complex algorithms to set them up with the right person. But are there any negative implications to this large shift in finding a partner online? As Thompson explains, this process can be very isolating as you are reliant on an app where interactions are solely online rather than in-person conversation and family connections. Dating apps are also lonesome since you are alone in the nerve-racking process of finding a partner. You are also constantly being judged by others online as Thompson illustrates, “one’s worth—is submitted for 24/7 evaluation before an audience of distracted or cruel strangers.” The number of people on dating apps can also be overwhelming as the article states that people are “paralyzed” by an abundance of choices.

Although dating apps have seemed to be a large success in becoming the new form of finding love, there is also a dark side to this form of social media. After hearing experiences that my friends have had with dating apps like Tinder, I have come to understand that the majority of interactions on the platform are surface level and mainly people looking to hook up. This overall adds to the feeling of isolation as my friends often feel like they can’t find anyone willing to have a meaningful conversation. So is there a solution to mediate intentions on dating apps for those who are serious about finding a partner?

### Nov 04 Fri - Ads & social graph background
Do you ever feel like your devices are watching your every move? It’s because they are. After the creation of cookies and online advertisements, companies can track your interests, sites you view, and things you like on social media, building a unique personal profile. This allows sites to target and feed ads that appeal to your interests. As Rob Stokes describes in the Online Advertising chapter of his textbook, “eMarketing, The Essential Guide to Marketing in a Digital World,” the goal of online marketing is to follow users' behavior to place their adverts where their specific audience will see them. The ability to track data on the internet has made online advertising very appealing to companies. Stokes explains that advertisers gather data on the ads they post online like “the number of impressions served, how many clicks it received, post-click-and- view data, and how many unique users were reached” (294). This information is valuable for advertisers as they can adapt to their audience's interests and see which ads have the most success. Another critical feature of advertising online is cookies. As the Vox Youtube video “How Ads Follow You Around the Internet” explains, companies such as Facebook and Google collaborate to gather information on you and your online behaviors through third-party cookies. The third-party domain accesses data from all the sites you have visited and saves it onto your browser. This is how companies target and continue to show ads to their intended viewers.

Third-party cookies have changed the game for online advertising, but should there be a limit to how much information they can track? As the vice video illustrates, once the information is collected there is no way of getting it back, and will forever be saved by the third-party domain. To some, this can seem like an invasion of privacy as the cookies can save any data they want, continuing to build a more detailed profile on you. Luckily, sites like Google Chrome have implemented options to turn off third-party trackers, but this is not the case for most websites. So should it be up to the user to determine if they want to be tracked, or should we get used to this new personalized form of advertising?

### Nov 29 Tue - Collapsed context
Engagement is the backbone of social media. We post photos, share thoughts, and start conversations on social media all to entertain an intended audience. But how do we predict who this audience is and form posts based on what we think they would engage in? As Alice Marwick and Danah Boyd illustrate in their article “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience,” social media users have many different perspectives and approaches to posting content on their pages. The article specifically narrows into how users on the social media platform Twitter, a “microblogging” site, identify who they are posting to. Although it is virtually impossible to understand the true potential audience you have on Twitter, as people can repost and spread tweets to other larger audiences, smaller users on the platform gear their posts towards their “friends” or simply to themselves. Many Twitter users cited in the article explained that they often talk to themselves on Twitter and post things that they enjoy seeing. Other users used their platform as a “diary or record of their lives” where they can express their feelings to their close friends. On the contrary, Twitter users with 100,000 and up “carefully construct a ‘meta-narrative and meta image of self’(Hearn, 2008)” to grab people's attention and show the best version of themselves. All of this demonstrates what is described in the article as “context collapse,” where users “flatten” their audience into one large group.

Social media today has taken a turn to make content more authentic. Recently, the platform BeReal has become a popular social media site where users must post a front and back photo within the two-minute time window selected by the app. This allows users to share unfiltered content with their followers. Many of my friends have downloaded the app, but I was reluctant to become a user as to me it seemed like another distracting fad rather than a unique social media app. Although the app pushes users to be genuine, I have seen my friends and other users display and show off how interesting their lives are, ultimately defeating the purpose of the app.

### Dec 02 Fri - Authenticity, Work, & Influence
Canceled. One word that is any influencer or celebrity's worst nightmare. Being “canceled” has become a popular term to describe the widespread public scrutiny and ostracism of celebrities and social media influencers for a controversial action or statement that has come to light. This recent term has gained much power and popularity over the last century through the emergence of what Brook Duffy, Kate Miltner, and Amanda Wahlstedt describe as “hateblogs” and “anti-fandom” culture in their research article “Policing “Fake” Femininity: Authenticity, Accountability, and Influencer Antifandom.” The report details how anti-fans are constantly looking for inauthenticity and fraudulence in influencers' content waiting for any moment to critique and criticize their actions. In addition, many of these “call-out” blog sites heavily target female influencers and discuss topics that are gender specific to women. Specifically, GOMIBLOG is one of the most popular influencer hate blogs where users accuse female influencers of being inauthentic and enforcing an unobtainable level of female perfection. The article then emphasizes that the hateful remarks published on these blogs are most often rooted in the widespread hate for gender roles enforced in society and social media. In effect, “targeted influencers serve as individual scapegoats for the hatebloggers’” anguish of the idealized beauty, relationship, and career standards placed on women today.

After reading this research article, I was able to gain a different perspective to cancel or “call-out” culture that I was unaware of previously. Most of the time, I had no remorse for female influencers when being criticized for face-tuning their pictures or overly glamorizing their lives as they were portraying a false reality to the public. But after reading this article, I realized these influencers are victims of the unrealistic beauty standards that social media has enforced. Although they are attributing to the problem by posting unauthentic and fake content, the root of their actions is caused by a much bigger issue, gender roles. Instead of wasting time attacking influencers, hate bloggers should focus on making a positive change such as supporting organizations that are actively combatting societal gender roles.

### Dec 06 Tue - Pushback
Commentary is an essential part of life. It is how we share information, create discussions, and show interest in our everyday lives. Whether it is having a debate in a class, expressing your opinion on a new TV show with your friends, or posting a review on a restaurant, comments fuel our society. Without commentary and engagement, it is impossible to make improvements and achieve an understanding in a discussion. But can commentary be taken too far and become uncontrollable? Yes, and it has become an arising issue on social media and other online platforms across the web. As described in chapter eight of Joseph Reagle’s book “Reading the Comments,” many online websites and blogs have begun to turn off comment sections in an attempt to control the messages being posted on their articles. Companies such as the Blog site Boing Boing have struggled to maintain a positive relationship with the comment section. In fact, in 2003 the blog chose to take down the comment section altogether but was quickly adopted back into the site after the company realized that preventing users from commenting was “a passing fad: it did not last, and unruly comment did.” Boing Boing has now adopted a new hybrid system of forums and comments that many other companies such as Gawker media have implemented. The Discourse System allows users to comment “off the main page, and a moderator can promote select comments to the story’s page.” This new hybrid system has been proven effective by many companies as it has been able to mediate comments, producing intentional and thought-provoking discussions.

Online comments are often posted out of impulse and are intentionally controversial to insight banter. But should comments always be restricted online? Although online commentary can be inappropriate and “inflammatory” I think it can be demeaning to users when companies choose to limit commenting as it suggests that the users are unable to control their behavior in the comments. I understand when it is an academic site such as the New York Times that promotes educated commentary but for other platforms such as Instagram and Youtube, I think the nature of the content on those sites provokes inappropriate comments.