Reading Responses (Set 2)
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### November 6th, 2018
Online dating has permanently left its mark on the process of forming a relationship. Any stigma against it has now faded, and it’s en route to becoming the norm. However, when face-to-face interaction in not needed demonstrate interest, biases and lies arise. In his 2009 article, “How your race affects the messages you get,” Rudder shares data on biases on a popular online dating site, OkCupid. The main takeaway from the data is that race plays a pivotal role in determining which recipients will write which senders responses to first-contact attempts. However, all races match each other more or less evenly, and reply rate correlates to matching (Rudder, 2009). Therefore, races should respond to each other about evenly, but racial biases and prejudices still stand. Rudder (2010) followed this article up with a write-up on “The big lies people tell in online dating.” The most prominent of these lies is that men, almost universally, lie about being two inches taller than their actual height (Rudder, 2010). Furthermore, people make 20% less income than that which is reported on their profile (Rudder, 2010). Another characteristic of user profiles is that the better the picture, the more likely it is to be out of date (Rudder, 2010). Regardless of the prominence of racism and deceit on the platform, OkCupid has been the breeding grounds for plenty of successful relationships. Among those is the relationship of Chris McKinlay and Tien Wang, whose story is detailed in Poulsen’s (2009) “How a math genius hacked OkCupid to find true love.” McKinlay, a mathematician at UCLA, had poor compatibility with women in his area. Therefore, he did data sweeps to determine what profile qualities were important to groups of women he was interested in. McKinlay used this data to set up two seperate profiles, each optimized for its target audience. McKinlay went on 88 dates with matches gleaned from these profiles before meeting Tien, who he is now engaged to.

I feel that online dating is only going to become more prominent the convenience of mobile apps like Tinder. When two people match, any uncertainty about both parties’ interest in a romantic connection is purged. This subverts the anxiety-inducing process of discerning this mutual interest in real life.

### November 9th, 2018
It’s rare that someone makes a post on social media where they actually say how they feel. Usually, one will need to contextualize the post and use second-order information to decipher the author’s intention. Ilana Gershon (2010) defines second-order information as “not what is actually said but rather the background knowledge of a situation and expectation of communication that allows one to interpret the words.” In Gershon’s (2010) “How do you know?,” she speaks on the implications second-order information have on ending relationships. Gershon (2010) writes that interpreting a media message depends on three intertwined elements: How second-order information “encodes the sender’s intentions”, “how it encodes the context of the message”, and “how is encodes what the sender knows.” Gershon’s (2010) research contains a multitude of interviews with high school and college students who had ended their relationships due to second-order information gleaned from social media. For example, one interviewee, Mary Anne, broke up with her boyfriend after he reacted angrily that a friend of hers posted a song entitled “Get Another Boyfriend” on her Facebook wall. Her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend used this post to assume the content of conversations Mary Anne had been having with her friend who disapproved of their relationship. Her boyfriend used second-order information to make assumptions about the intention and context of the message, which ultimately lead to the dissolution of their relationship. Each of the interviewees share a similar experience.

I am always intrigued when an author describes a phenomenon that all people are aware of, but is difficult to define, such as second-order information. With every Instagram post I see or every tweet I see, I’m looking to make connections with what is going on in the poster’s personal life that would lead to their post. It’s habitual, and I can’t help myself. I never had a name for this phenomenon until reading about “second-order information.”

### November 20th, 2018
The internet, and the anonymity it provides, accidentally gives the insufferable a platform. The perpetrators of these online attacks are known as trolls, haters, and bullies. In his 2015 chapter, “Alienated: You fail it! Your skill is not enough!,” Joseph Reagle distinguishes between trolls, haters, and bullies, and explains why toxic behavior emerges online. Trolls behave in a way designed to annoy others. “Don’t feed the troll” is a popular internet mantra, warning against giving the trolls the attention they seek (Reagle, 2015, p. 92). Trolls are distinct from haters, who upset and belittle others with extreme hostility and ad hominem attacks on any potentially sensitive aspect of their target’s character (Reagle, 2015, p. 99). Like trolls, it is generally advised that one ignore haters, but haters can’t be ignored when they make “threatening phone calls, including to family members, friends, and employers” (Reagle, 2015, p. 100). The third type of “keyboard warriors” are bullies, who are different from trolls and haters in that they repeatedly attack their target (Reagle, 2015, p. 112). Bullies abuse their power in order to harass or belittle their targets (Reagle, 2015, p. 100). Reagle proposes that the toxicity found in online behavior is party due to anonymity, which spurs deindividuation, or “a loss of sense of self and social norms” (Reagle, 2015, p. 94). In addition to deindividuation, online interactions lack the social cues, context, and information that a regular interpersonal exchange does. Therefore, “we can easily blunder without realizing how we are affecting other people” (Reagle, 2015, p.94).

I’m writing my essay on the topic of online anonymity, specifically how I believe it should remain to exist. This information will be valuable for my counterargument.

### November 27th, 2018
Self-esteem is plummeting as quickly as social media is rising. In his 2015 chapter, “Shaped: Aw shit, I have to update my Twitter,” Joseph Reagle examines the relationship between comment and self-esteem. Reagle (2015) poses the question, “How does the nonstop steam of our own and other’s picture and status updates affect self-esteem and well-being?” (p. 124). Reagle (2015) notes that healthy self-esteem is linked to how people respond to negative feedback rather than the number of positive messages received (p.131). Learning to cope, which is the ability to face threatening situations realistically, is the foundation on which self-esteem is built. This skill is especially important with the prevalence of comments, as they are a form of feedback (p.131). Furthermore, Reagle (2015) notes that our natural tendency to compare ourselves to others is especially threatening to our self-esteem in the information age, as we are bombarded with the highlights of our friends lives via social media feeds (p. 131). Later, Reagle (2015) states that the rise of social media is linked to the rise of narcissistic personality traits found in college students (p. 138). Psychologists Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell note that the internet encourages an unhealthy self-obsession (Reagle, 2015, p. 138). In overview, the internet is largely responsible for the prevalence of low-self esteem and narcissism among adolescents and college students.

I’d like to take a deeper look into the relationship between self-esteem and narcissism. It seems as if narcissists have high, but very fragile, self-esteem, but I’ll take a look at what experts have to say on the matter.

### December 4th, 2018
Comments are terrible. Those who run websites with comments know this best. As such, they put defense mechanisms in place to filter out the nonsense. In his 2015 chapter, *Conclusion: Commenterrible*?, Joseph Reagle writes about strategies websites have used to control the quality of comments. For example, blog Boing Boing uses a modified version of human moderation. Instead of fully deleting comments of questionable intent, such comments had their vowels removed. This strategy was cleverly dubbed “disemvoweling” (Reagle, 2015, p. 172). Ultimately, unruly comments prevailed. CNN and others use a voting system, where users can down-vote comments they deem harmful. However, this system has proven to be ineffective, as those who are down-voted are likely to post more and lower-quality comments (Reagle, 2015, p. 172). Another failed strategy was Google’s attempt at integrating YouTube and Google+ in an effort to make users comment as their real names. This ended up alienating users who preferred they pseudonymity offered by YouTube, as well as those who did not want YouTube to be a social network (Reagle, 2015, p. 176). As for success stories, comment systems that operate off of the website’s main page are shaping up to be a good solution to the comment problem. Platforms like Discourse separate the main page and comment page, while moderators can promote quality comments to the main page. This has been “incredibly effective” for early adopters (Reagle, 2015, p.173). Regardless, larger sites are opting for systems which call for “identifiable users, single sign-ons, and the social graph” to achieve quality comment sections (Reagle, 2015, p. 175). Reagle shows his skepticism for these methods, noting that such methods are designed to benefit a website’s proprietors (and advertisers) first and their users second. Reagle (2015) concludes by alluding to previous chapters while reflecting on the current state and future of comments. Reagle also answers the question if we are better off avoiding comment. This phenomenon of users purposely avoiding online content is covered extensively in Ricardo Gomez and Stacey Morrison’s (2014) *Pushback: The growth of expressions of resistance to constant online connectivity*. Reagle (2015) states that comments are near-inescapable, and while the negatives seem to weigh the positives, “there are many benefits to today's comment” (p. 185).

Despite my opening sentence, I don’t believe that online communication is as awful as it’s made out to be. I think it comments people that would otherwise never be connected and enables quality dialogues and discourse. There will always be people who try to abuse online communication, but I believe that the majority of people try to put it to good use. Also, I don’t believe it’s possible to opt out of digital communication. Digital communication is now the most prevalent form of communication, and to opt-out be a major inconvenience personally and for any party trying to reach you. It is only possible to opt-out if you’re not planning on communicating with other people.