I think this video on Jennifer Lawrence is a perfect example of online personas, and people's parasocial relationships with celebrities. Jennifer Lawrence in the video is said the be the ultimate cool girl. Doing things like hanging out her her male co stars, casually eating junk food while maintaining a slim figure, and being unfiltered. A stark contrast from her often serious and tough roles-- such as Katniss Everdeen. This left a lot of people speculating if her "cool girl" personality was even real, or just something she contrived to seem more relatable. So as this shows, no matter how Jennifer Lawrence acts, she will always have people questioning the authenticity of what she choose to display to the public, despite them not even knowing her in person.

Lonleygirl15 is a great example of authenticity when it comes to online personas. What was an online web series following 16 year old Bree's mundane life which soon spiraled into a mystery revolving around her parent's religion, viewers were drawn to her simple, home recording type videos with a dark twist. However after people became skeptical about Bree, and if her whole story itself was real, people were quick to point out video inconsistencies, and create theories about the whole ordeal. And while the bad press garnered some temporary publicity, the show eventually died off after it was revealed to be scripted with hired actors. Overall, it was that belief that the events and characters were real which drew people to the series in the first place. So of course audiences finding out they were hoaxed inevitably led to the series infamous reputation within online history.

This chapter about authenticity really make me reflect on the current "performative" male trend. As you may know, the stereotype for these performative males goes along the lines of things like drinking matcha, wearing tote bags, listening to indie music like Clario... etc. In hindsight, you can chop this up as just ones interests, regardless of their gender. But the reason it's such a big trend is because people can sense when a guy is doing it purely for validation. More specifically- female validation, since these interests are more stereotypically women's interests. So like the text reads, "humans do not like to be duped", and when people can tell something is inauthentic, they're not going to take it seriously.

For me, My Little Pony always relates back to a place of nostalgia, but it's fandom of grown men called "Bronies" display a great example of strange internet subcultures within social media history. Social media has always been a place for people to find their niches, even if they are "weird" or socially unacceptable. That's why sites like 4chan have existed to allow for the posting of unregulated content. However, one thing I will say about subcultures within social media is they usually always find a way to get political at some point. From furries being tied with leftist views, Taylor Swift fans now being called MAGA with the release of her new album, and even bronies having a Nazi problem, it seems the internet and politics have always been intertwined within history.

4chan has undeniably been one of those social media sites I had herd about, but never really used. When I recently decided to visit the site, I was shocked by it's retro user interface, and confusing layout. People on 4chan seem to post in their own niche subcategories, and reply in threads like reddit. The whole site itself feels like lost media, but people post regularly, and even talk about current events. Overall, I think the site is a great example of how despite the site looking rather out dated, and confusing to use, it still has a loyal fan base which values un-regulated speech over flashy and newer designs.

User interfaces, may seem like such a small aspect of an app's design, but in reality contribute tremendously to it's success. For example, TikTok's scrolling algorithm is what makes us addicted to it. The basically endless push of new content is what has personally made me "doom scroll" for hours. Same with tinder, as the swipe right on a person's profile to show interest, or swipe left to indicate you are not interested, dramatically simplifies it's usability to where you could be swiping non stop, compared to if it were a menu with a "next" button. So in total, under interfaces are not only good for creating those annoying little "x"s on ads, but also making an app become successful in the long run.

This article is a great example of the downsides when it comes to the simplification of data. To briefly summarize, it basically explains that during the 2024 Superbowl, 75.85% of traffic from X's advertising was fake. Advertising companies learned that while their viewership seemed high, their website clicks/content engagement was staggeringly low in comparison. This revealed that X had a huge bot problem. A real example talked about in the article was how a small business owner, despite having 29,000 views on his ad posted to X, Google Analytics reported that X wasn't the source of any of the traffic during that time. This shows that simplifying certain data, such as social media traffic, can blur the line between what is human vs. bot. However, bots cannot be entirely to blame, as the article talks about how this could be an Elon Musk problem as well. The 2023 Superbowl was only a few months after Musk had acquired twitter and had 72% less fake traffic. So, it’s possible that money hungry billionaires like him could be purposely exploiting data simplification, and allowing more bots onto his site in order to increase profits made from advertisers.

The image from this tweet shows the gender selection options from what is assumed to be an online tax form. Hilariously though, besides "Male" and "Female", it also displays the options "N/A", "Unknown", and "Tax Entity". Aside from this being a funny yet really bad mistake on the website's part, it also ironically displays the difficulties people within the LGBTQ community may face when it comes to data collection. Since gender can be considered a spectrum, it can become extremely complicated to accurately create a way to gather data on ALL the genders, besides the main two (male and female).

My friends and I often love taking photos, and I've noticed that when we try sending photos to each other on apps such as Instagram..etc., the image quality does become fuzzy. Sending images through iMessage/email on the other hand, often doesn't distort the photo too much, or can even keep the same quality. Now relating back to our reading, this I found is because for such a big app like Instagram, compressing the photo makes it much faster to upload and download images. IMessage however keeps the quality because it is sent between apple servers (mainly relating to iPhones), and email just attaches the full file, which often takes longer to download but will retain much of it's resolution.

Although I'm not a Star Wars expert, reading this made me feel a bit bad for the film and it's crew/cast. The article pretty much summarizes how although Star Wars: The Last Jedi has received a lot of hate over the years, it would found that about half of the backlash was politically motivated or wasn't even human (bot generated). This makes me wonder, when it come's to criticism online, whether reviews, comments, and analytics, how much of it can we truly trust as genuine?

This article talks on how app ranking can be manipulated, with a photo of a Chinese worker with about 100 phones as the main focus. The worker is assumed to be manually uninstalling and re-installing these apps to boost it's ranking in the app store. One detail mentioned in the article that I personally found shocking was the fact the worker had to wear a heavy coat and use a hand warmer, suggesting that her working environment must be very cold. Despite app boosting services costing $65,000 a week, these workers are most likely underpaid, and made to preform in poor working conditions.

Since bots are automated social media accounts, mainly made by lines of code, one thing they will struggle with is replicating authentic human responses. For example, Someone who buys follower bots on Instagram will often display unequal follower to engagement ratios. So whilst their follower count may be in the millions, their likes and comments often underperform since these bots were not programed to interact with content as well. In addition, responses from AI bots like Chatgpt are basically an accumulation of data from the web/ fed to it. So it's answers cannot be considered authentic human based knowledge.

Reading this, I was shocked at the apathy these tech owners showed to concerns from people like Kumail. Personally, I've seen plenty of horrible, and even criminal things on the internet. From cyber bullying, nudity, gore, etc... not only are these things out there, but often unregulated and easily accessible. As a tech owner, ethically, it's you're responsibility that you go to extreme measures to stop things like this from being shared/spread on your platform. Being tech owners, these people are defiantly smart enough to be aware that things like this could happen. So I think them being "shocked" is all an act, as they know any publicity, even bad publicity, still helps push the popularity of their platforms.

Like the text discusses, Nihilism can branch out to its own subcategories as well. For example, existential nihilism refers to the idea that life has no meaning/purpose. This in turn can lead to depression and apathy. Active nihilists, on the other hand see life’s meaninglessness as a freeing condition and will instead take this as a sign to do whatever they want. Political nihilism on the other hand associates with our political system, and believes that current political systems are flawed and must be destroyed. So yes, while these different types of Nihilism skim down to ethics having no inherent meaning, what makes them differ is what they choose to focus on, and how they inevitably cope with this idea of thinking.