###### tags: `CDA`
# Reading Responses (Set 1)

## Reading responses 5 out of 5

### Sep 17 Fri - Attention
Older generations often criticize technology for dragging us away from the 'criticals' of life. However, in chapter 9 of Chayko's *Superconnected* we gain a deeper understanding that every 'evil' comes with again in one way or another. The chapter begins by addressing how communication worked before technological advancements explaining how technology has allowed people to minimize communicative distance while increasing connection and usability. It continues by addressing what is one of the most talked-about ‘flaws’ of technology, the stress and mental impacts it has on its users. The way in which we talk about technologies impact on us as people at a mental level has always been in a negative light.Reading Chayko made me realize that we often don’t acknowledge the positives in this, the positives of feeling and being connected with people all over the world. Chayko points out the convenience, adaptability, mental health benefits and strength of being connected that often gets pushed to the side in favour of the dark side of this technological world. While noting the positives Chayko is not naive to the negatives, she speaks on the idea of “McDonalizing” which compares our use of technology to that of a fast-food chain that pays little attention to create quality products or in our case a quality life. While Chayko makes the underlying point that most of the positives derive from closer connections and not the larger network, I like to focus on these positives because again I don’t think it’s something that happens a lot when speaking of technology.

I think one of the most noteworthy moments for me was when Chayko spoke about people who are miss informed about children with Learning disabilities (LD) and the so-called impacts technology has on them. Noting that ‘when given a device to complete tasks, students with communicative disorders demonstrated an increased attention span and higher levels of social interaction’ (p185). As someone who very openly talks about life with an LD, this discussion always touches me close to home. I have had many conversations with my peers and previous teachers about how my LD impacts me and how I have turned my disability into my ability, I could not have done this without the use of technology. So obviously it somewhat enrages me when people make comments like “well the reason you developed an LD in the first place was that technology impacted your attention span.” Granted technology wasn’t as amped up as it is now when I was diagnosed however it is very aggravating to hear people blame technology for biological wiring of the brain that differs from their own. Especially when using technology has gotten me to the educational level I am today, a place where I wouldn’t be without it. I often get weird looks when using speech to text, having a million things underlined on a document because they are spelt incorrectly, and typing out my notes in class very differently from my peers. Most of the time they don’t know I have an LD because I don’t fit the ‘image’ of someone who would. However, it’s the older generations that tell me to ‘get off my screen’ or ‘you can’t learn anything that way that really gets to me, because of my LD I learn differently than others and I have spent years harnessing technology as a way to help me rather than as a way to impact my LD. So while technology is adapting our everyday lives before we criticise I think it’s important to look at where it has gotten each and every one of us in a positive light.

## October 1st - Learning
“You learn from mistakes”, a statement that growing up many of us never hear the end of, whether it be from teachers, parents or role models. To be honest as children we get somewhat mixed signals when it comes to learning and how to view it and go about it. We get told that to be smart we have to be quick, to retain the information we must reread and highlight the details. Many of these mistakes are highlighted throughout the passage. It’s noted that the practices we once believe worked don’t which has been proven through various research studies across the world. “When we talk about learning: we mean acquiring knowledge and skills by having them readily available… to make sense of future problems and opportunities. (pg.2)” I think this statement is very notable because it embodies the idea that everyone has a learning style that differs from those who sit next to them in class. Others don’t need to know why you understand a topic and how you found that understanding, only you do. The only thing you must do when it comes to learning is understood why it makes sense to you in a way that you would later be able to recall. However, I think it should be noted that the best way to find this understanding is to first have some form of prior knowledge and secondly be able to connect new knowledge to yourself and your experiences. Everyone has the basic knowledge to live in this world and it is the adaption and addition of new knowledge that allows us to learn and grow. “We need to keep learning and remembering all our lives” (pg. 2) as this statement suggests without learning we cannot advance in life. It is part of a larger cycle that flows throughout life built upon our experiences and understanding of the world around us. Which in turn lends itself to what the text calls a good tool for learning, “drawing from personal experiences and mistakes” (pg.8). Connecting our life to the things we are learning allows us to dive deeper and ask questions we wouldn’t ordinarily ask and often find ourselves learning more than our original goal. This is because we can find the gaps in our knowledge, which makes “learning harder making it stronger and last longer” (pg.9). By filling the gaps we begin to learn more and better. Not only this but it is these personal experiences that we connect more to the the things we are learning and give us the motivation to find answers. It’s for these reasons that I am a big believer in experiential learning because it forces us to experience things and ask questions we would not from just reading a textbook. On page 15 the text speaks about how college students attempt to copy everything word for word and never get anywhere and I believe the reason we do this is because we don’t strive to learn anymore we strive to pass tests. It’s easy to fall into this trap sitting in a lecture hall but forcing students to experience tasks and problems first had allowed them to explore the unknown and dive deeper. So while we learn from mistakes we also learn from ourselves and our understanding of the world. Experiencing tasks first had allows us to find the knowledge we wouldn’t ordinarily see, and find the mistakes we are taught to learn from.

## October 8th - Cooperation
Gossip whether we like it or not fills much of our everyday life. I am someone who always tries to avoid being involved in it all together however as hard as I may try it is somewhat of a natural makeup of our life. In the paragraph Gossip written by Joseph Reagel, we are presented with the idea that gossip is part of our human evolution, deriving from the social grooming and communities we associate with. To be honest I’ve never thought too deeply about gossip in this sense as it always seemed to me to be largely encouraged by social media. Thinking about it now however it makes sense that it is something that is in the makeup of who we are as a species. Reagel presents an interesting quote by Robin Dunbar stating that “gossip requires a sophisticated type of social cognition know as the theory of mind through which we infer the mental states of others” (Reagel, 2015). I think this is a point of interesting discussion as it argues that gossip is deeper than simply talking about another person it is inferring their mental being.

I’ve heard of The Dilemma before but again it is not something I have ever questioned or connected it further than what is present to me. This idea that “it is a powerful mathematical cartoon of a struggle central to life, between conflict and cooperation and between the individual and collective good” (Nowak, 2011) is not something I had ever taken away from this police interrogation tactic. I think it’s simply because I had not applied The Dilemma to everyday life, although after reading these two passages I am beginning to see the connection between gossip and this tactic. When we gossip we are talking about another individual without knowing if they are ever talking about us, in a positive or negative light. Similar to The Dilemma if one of you talks and the other doesn’t one of you is made to look worse than the other. If you both talk you feed into what Reagel would argue is part of the social constructs of life, and if neither of you talks you are most likely not connected to one another or covering up that connection. This is where the idea that gossip is part of evolution begins to form for me when it is stated that “mechanisms of cooperation shape cultural evolution, the patterns of how we change the way we behave...what we say... When we learn from each other and act accordingly (Nowak, 2015)”. This for me explains why we gossip because we see and hear others do it so we do it to protect ourselves in the race for life. Gossip and its connection to us as a race are rooted in who we are and how we became be, it’s a natural instinct to protect ourselves and those around us and this is the way in which we do so verbally. So as much as I try to stay out of it it’s central to my path of natural selection.

## Oct 15 Fri - Haters
I grew up in the ‘beginning’ of many social media platforms. My friends and peers where downloading and creating accounts on new platforms all around me. However, I was told by my mum that I wasn’t allowed to download Instagram until I reached the age restriction. For a while, I was fine with this until I became bullied at school for not being ‘cool’ because I did not have an online presence. My mum however was adamant about it because she could foresee the issues with online hate and cyberbullying even before they began to happen to me. Once I turned 13 I joined Instagram and being new to the app I remember simply following everyone I ‘knew’, these people were not all necessarily my friends. I posted three times in my first day of images I believed were ‘artsy’, none of which featured myself but instead nature and art. I was soon approached by an older individual that told me that ‘maybe that wasn’t the best approach to building my profile and ultimately my following.’ As I kept posting photos I began to be bullied online and in person for the profile I was creating because it didn’t ‘fit in’.

I tell this story because unfortunately, it doesn’t surprise me that according to a study by Pew analyzed by Jame Wellemeyer “59% of teens say they have been bullied or harassed” (Wellemyer, 2019). Bullying is something we have unfortunately normalized as part of our society. An idea that is presented by Reagle, “Today, some take their cues from a culture of trolls and grief era in search of laughs… (Reagle, 2019).” We have created a society that normalizes feeding off one another’s hate by calling it a joke. When in actual fact some of these ‘jokes’ are not only diminishing to peoples self-esteem but also others opinions of them, all because a ‘friend’ decided to post a comment hidden behind their screen for everyone to see.

As someone who has been impacted by bullying online, I’ve always thought of it in a negative light and thought that social media would benefit from weeding it out of their systems. I had never thought of the idea which Sheri Bauman introduced, that “some of the most effective strategies to prevent bullying may be ones that cause Instagram to lose users and revenue.” I had always thought of it from a standpoint of someone getting bullied. By Instagram creating a more ‘safe place’ for people, more users would be drawn in. However, this may not be the case because people don’t want to be censored or have their comments ‘weeded’ out. This is definitely an idea that makes me rethink the integrity and values of major social media companies.

## October 26th - Gender, Communication, & Contribution
One of my sports media professors once said to me that ‘having me (a female) in his class was a breath of fresh air for the rest of the students (all males) because they would gain a deeper understanding of the personal aspects of working in sports.’ To be honest I never really thought much of this comment other than that he had noticed I was a people person and speak to personality and interaction over skill. However, after reading Krasnova’s “Why men and women continue to use social networking sites: The role of gender differences”, Slater’s “The Open Source identity crisis” and Molteni’s “The actual science of James Damore’s Google Memo” I have gained a new understanding of why this might be the case.

I have been working at a sports media company since May of this year and have been taking sports media classes since declaring my major in January of last year. In both of these settings, I am more often than not in the minority or odd one out based on just my gender alone. I had noticed that in comparison to my male counterparts I tended to strive to work with my colleagues and peers before working individually with a computer, Molteni would suggest that this is because “women prefer to work with people and men prefer to work with things.” I think this argument is true however in her article it is argued that this is the reason women don’t want to work at companies like Google, which I most definitely do not agree with. In sports media, although progressing, we still have an office environment that can only be described as a ‘boys club,’ it’s an atmosphere that as a female is very daunting at times. Slater describes this in his article when he states “pushing out the women is something we see repeated over and over again; the rise of the growth hacker is an example of this. Doing so allows men to safely perform their masculinity, whilst simultaneously forming a hierarchy- enhancing legitimizing narrative that keeps women out.” It’s hard to explain the environment which I often find myself in better than that, the feeling of being unwanted, ignored and looked down upon just because I am a woman. I don’t know why I’ve never thought about how my feminine traits lead to certain actions and behaviours in everyday life, that is not to say I’m not aware of them but I haven’t truly thought about them in this light before. Maybe it is because I was lucky enough to be raised in an environment where I wouldn’t have had to truly question it. I was taught I could do anything my brothers could, I might have to do it differently or attempt it in another way but if I set my mind to it I could. It’s this difference in attempting that I hadn’t taken a moment to think about.

It is an interesting intersect between my experience and the readings and one which on the first scan I didn’t put together. However thinking about my social network and how Krasnova would describe my use of social media, “women are mainly driven by relational uses, such as maintaining close ties and getting access to social information on close and distant networks, men base their continuance intentions on their ability to gain information of a general nature”, which I believe to be true. I understand more how my own experience leek into not just these readings but ones prior.