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# Reading Responses (Set 2)
## Tuesday 23 March - *Online dating and Living Alone*

One thing that stuck out to me with the Ferdma article was the statistic of same-sex couples that met online. Most of the article was concerning heterosexual couples, so this statistic was only a small thing, but add still: around 67% of same-sex couples met online. A very large number, to be sure, but one that doesn’t really surprise me.

Most gay bars are targeted towards gay men. Most are frequented by gay men. Gay bars and clubs remain some of the few spaces in which queer people gather collectively, ie, one of the few places queer people typically met other queer people. Over the last few decades though, gay bars (and most especially those not aimed at gay men) have started to vanish, either bought out as areas gentrify or slowly ran dry of customers. Dating apps seem like the most natural recourse then, as queer people currently comprise only around 7% of the adult American population, and it ca be quite hard to meet someone organically.

This brings me to a different point then, how do queer people meet on dating apps? Grindr aside, there’s not another large, well-known queer dating app -- the scene is split between queer-exclusive apps and mainstream apps, none of them dominating the landscape. Many non-queer apps are also known for being beset by algorithm issues, showing people outside of set preferences. But the community’s moved online, for better or worse, and all anyone can do is go with the flow.

I think of Klinenberg then. The big question (why are we living alone now more than ever) also seems to beset queer spaces (why are they disappearing now more than ever). Why is it that some spaces and “normal” practices are disappearing? I would say that it points to a different kind of connectedness. Whether it’s meeting communities online or being able to stay in touch with friends, the internet has changed how we connect. With the queer community so widely distributed among the population, queer spaces online have popped up, helping to eliminate isolation, especially in non-urban areas with a wider population spread.

The movement of community online was always going to mean a loss of some sort, but it has also led to a gain of another sort. Is that better or worse? I don’t really think it’s either. I think it’s just different.

## Tuesday 30 March *- Shaped*

A few things have changed online since the early 2010’s. The quality of online comments is not one of those things. It seems like the public’s view on Reddit is one of those things (it’s gone significantly down).

Online comments are trash - this is widely known - but people still persist with reading them. Exactly why is a question that might just be unanswerable. Perhaps it’s a kind of perverse pleasure in seeing all that idiocy. Perhaps it’s just kind of amusing. Perhaps people just like to get angry.

Now, that’s not to say that all internet comments are bad, some actually contain interesting insights or genuinely funny jokes. This is far from a universal experience though, and trolls seem determined to wreck even the kindest comment section. The NYT comments are generally pretty decent, though not exempt from all angry, incomprehensible ranting. NYT Cooking comments (called Notes in the app) might be the only comment section I’ve found with no angry rants or hate speech, but it’s also in a subscription-based app entirely about recipes, so that makes more sense.

Despite this trend, people still use social media for self-validation and it’s more a part of our everyday lives than ever. With more SNS and more pressure to be on them or miss out, I can definitely see how ranking against other people proliferates. I don’t see much of that though. I follow some friends (none of whom are really big into social media) and then a bunch or artist so I’ve found that I’m not necessarily at constant risk of FOMO or comparisons. Now, if I followed more celebrities and influencers, I can definitely see my self-esteem taking a bigger hit, but that’s part of social media now: the ability to highly customize it.

I think that by now some of the novelty of social media has worn off and what we post has become different. It’s a bigger part of our lives than ever, that’s for sure, but the backlash to social media has also grown. Now, as far as I can see, there is an emphasis on IRL activities that are not necessarily fully documented as well as those that are. The activities that are documented also tend to be curated so that they comprise only a small part of any given person’s life, further distancing the viewer from a negative effect. But maybe that’s just me.

## Tuesday April 6 *- Algorithmic Discrimination*

Discrimination is algorithms is dissappointing, but not surprising. Though we as a society would like to imagine the Internet as some place apart from reality, uninfluenced by human evils, it exists within our society and will take on the evils and vices of what we do. The Internet is just a tool, and it can be used and misused just like any other.

I remember reading about the racial image bias several years ago. Maybe I read that BuzzFeed article, maybe it was some other article, I don’t remember. I remember how many people were so shocked and appalled when it came out, and I partly wonder why. It’s not that the Internet itself is actually racist, all it did was mirror back to us the racism of the society it was built in, the society that uses it. Now, it’s not pleasant to be faced with that, but it could have also served as a way to reckon with our culture’s innate racism and biases that are so strong that they affected Google. As I remember, it didn’t. Instead it led to a push to change the algorithm to be less representative of society. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, POC users shouldn’t have to be confronted with racism when they do a search. But it also seems like a missed opportunity to have a real conversation as to what caused the search bias in the place.

Much of this same logic can be applied to price discrimintation: it is a mirror of classism within our society. I doubt anything will actually be done about it, any regulations would likely be seen as “tampering with the free market,” or “unfairly burdening a business with regulations.”

In the last article, I agree with it’s practice of auditing algorithms. Yes, algorithms as they are now are representative of society, but people often treat them as impartial, and so it is important to try to make them as impartial as they can be. I looked at “Discrimination in the Gig-Economy” specifically. It reminded me of a news story from several years back about resume discrimination where people with feminine or “Black” names got fewer calls for interviews than perceived white men, even if they had the exact same resume (it was an experimental resume that the researches made up). The same discrimination is echoed here, because, I’ll say it again, the Internet is a mirror of society.

## Friday April 9 *- Authenticity*

Much like when considering any piece written about the internet from a decade back, I tend to find the differences between then and now just as, if not more interesting than the content of the article.

The tension between personal branding and “authenticity” was something that boyd touched on several times. I think that, nowadays, the lines between those two have blurred even more. In 2012, boyd was looking at Twitter (primarily, along with Facebook and personal blogs), a platform which, now, might be one of the ones easiest to maintain a sense of artifice in. Tweets can be done totally anonymously, but much of the most popular social media today (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok) tends to demand a greater degree of personalization. That’s not to say that you can’t be anonymous, but that it is far from the general tendency.

Adding that personalization is far from making authentic content, though. Instagram is well known for presenting false views of the lives of those around you. Posts tend to be more thought through, more curated. Instagram introduced the word to personalized branding on a whole new level - now this branding can extend to all aspects of life that can be photographs. Video blogging also opens up a new kind of curated personability. Vlogging is known for demanding the closest thing to authenticity it can possibly get.

What authenticity can be achieved also faces limits. Through moderation, much of which involved the audience reporting the content for moderation. This new kind of power imbalance can really shift how creators shape their content, where the audience holda the ability to punish, as both a unit and as individual actors.

## Tuesday April 13 *- Gendered Work

I don’t know much about influencers. I don’t really follow any, at least not any conventional ones - I follow people who make sponsored posts, sure, but those posts are mostly about art supplies or design challenges. What I mean to say is that I mostly follow artists on Instagram, which makes for a fantastic sample when looking at how gender affects the way people feel the need to do business.

I feel like I should talk about the two shorter articles too though. I had absolutely no idea that fake sponsored posts were a thing. Again, I think this is because I try to surround myself with people who are artists or people who are anti-capitalist/not on social media primarily to make money. “Instagram husbands” is a familiar term to me, though I’ve mostly heard it before as “Instagram boyfriends.” The gendering of the term so that men are primarily situated as the ones offscreen while women are the ones to-be-looked at has a multitude of fascinating implications. The primary ones though, in this case, would be the tendency towards the personalization of social media by women and the higher number of female influencers on Instagram.

And now onto Duffy. I follow a lot of tattoo artists and, thinking on it, the difference between how female/non-binary artists and male artists I follow act is quite stark. I think they work as a decent sample population as I follow tattoo artists from (primarily) America, Canada, and Europe (and gender norms retain some consistency across these areas), in a fairly narrow age range, and all working in the same industry. Most of the female tattoo artists that I follow display a much higher tendency towards disclosing their personal lives online. I’ve read their posts about mental health struggles, physical health struggles, interpersonal relationships. WIth these artists, a much greater parasocial relationship is present as they engage their audience on a much more personal level, adding more context to their art and engaging in Q&A sessions on Instagram stories. The female artists are far more likely to receive backlash. Most of male artists I follow only post their work. There’s one that will post some landscape photos and selfies, another that posts recipes and cooking clips to Instagram stories, but they exist as outliers, as the only two among well over a hundred fellows. The male artists are also far more likely to make sponsored posts.

I have absolutely no metric of measuring their success (ie, how many bookings they get), but both groups tend to post pictures of completed tattoos at similar rates, so there isn’t a readily apparent difference between the two. The female artists, like Duffy notes engage in more soft skills, as is typically expected from women in any field, even online.