I think this is my big takeaway in this class. With all of the information I have learned about social media, the most interesting bits for me was how nuanced a lot of topics are. Aspects I usually stand negatively on I discovered ways they could be used for good. For example, I disliked bots because most of my experience with them were spam bots in the comment section or useless automated responses, but this class gave some examples I never took a second to think that a bot was doing that job that were good. For example, auto captioning. queues (to schedule posts), and even a Twitter spam bot that exposes hypocrisy for companies that tweet on International Women's Day yet have a gender pay gap. I have a more complete view now about bots.

I forgot this was already mentioned in previously chapters, but I think the existence of ASCII can be an example of how Anglophone/American programmers (I don't know the specifics of the how ASCII was invented, but I would assume programmers invented it) can overlook other groups of people. ASCII only includes symbols and letters used in the English language, so languages that don't use the Latin alphabet are left out. Fortunately for today, Unicode is mainly used, which includes other scripts, which means more inclusivity. This is good for social media companies because they can reach more users around the world.

Yeah, this is pretty evident with all of the Disney princess live action remakes. While they still do original movies, they don't make them as often as remakes or sequels. With that said, I believe this can backfire in the long run as the audience complains more and more about bad/unnecessary sequels.

If my parents did this and it was shown in Jimmy Kimmel's late night show, I wouldn't be scarred at them "betraying" that they pretended to eat all of my Halloween candy than the fact they recorded it, and it could be viewed to anyone. The internet never forgets, so wouldn't be any way I could erase the video completely from the internet if I (or the kids who were recorded) wanted to. There also probably wasn't any consideration about how I (or the kids who were recorded) would feel about people watching an embarrassing moment.

On the topic of how crowdsourcing can benefit researchers, one website one of my teachers mentioned that allows the general public help with research projects is Zooniverse ( https://www.zooniverse.org/ ). For example, one project, Davy Notebooks Project, is a project on there to transcribe manuscript notebooks of Sir Humphry Davy. Another one, Drones for Ducks, is a project where people identify waterfoul from a bird’s eye view to help develop technology to identify them automatically.

Another example of a crowdsourcing platform is Kickstarter or other related platforms like this. In Kickstarter (as far as I understand), people can post there a monetary goal to reach for a project or fundraiser and then users and donate however much they want to contribute. For example, if someone wants to create a collection of enamel pins to sell but they currently don’t have the funds to do so, they can submit a post about the project and ask for donations. In some cases, there are perks associated to donating and depending on how much one donates, they can earn even better perks.

This is why I personally stay with social media even with the negative sides to it, as I said earlier in a previous comment on this chapter. I look at fandom content I like. I enjoy cooking videos, and occasionally I would try to cook new recipes based on a video I saw. For example, I've been wanting to try and make sushi bake for a while, and when I learned how relatively easy it is to make it from the youtube videos I saw on how to make it, I started making it. From that, I got my family to like sushi bake, so they always anticipate the next time I plan on making it again.

I relate to this sentence a lot because whenever I feel overwhelmed, one thing I like to do is scroll on social media to ignore the things that make me overwhelmed. It's easy to pass time on social media without realizing so much time has passed because watching/viewing new content is easy. After trying to finally get back to working on whatever I need to do, I always feel distressed that I wasted so much time on social media when I could've been doing the other activities.

Reading the conditions for biological evolution, while I'm sure it is an oversimplification for a complex topic, I found myself instantly making parallels between that and the lifespans and trends of internet memes. With replication, I thought about the screenshots and photoediting people do to emerging memes. For variations and mutations, I thought about how certain meme formats/skeletons/templates can be used in many different ways, both visually and audibly (ex. Tiktok sounds). For natural selection, I thought about how there are certain memes that people try to make work, but it doesn't ever really take off, and some are good enough that they become a prominent part of the internet for a while. I thought of Among Us as an example of that. Never until now have I thought about memes like this.

User trust is a big one. If a company were to become careless with how they store data and then a data breach happens to their company and exposes their carelessness, their users may lose trust in their product, stop using it, and actively discourage any prospective users in using their product. This can take a huge toll on the company's future.

One topic that is somewhat similar to this issue is doxxing. Doxxing is when someone publicly posts private information about a user, usually one who wants to be anonymous online. There are probably a bunch of ways one obtains the targeted user's private information, but I think a common way they get it is just through information the targeted user themselves shares online. This is why being careful about what you post online publicly is important if you want to keep your personal identity private because even the most seemingly "meaningless" data could be useful in tracking you down.

In INFO 201, I learned about a topic similar to this; I learned about how framing certain parts of data, that is how it is presented, what is emphasized and what is not, can affect how a viewer interprets the data. For example, https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/5evfe9yd#nj1tilswp20 The context of the data shown is unemployment rates from Obama's first term presidency. The top one appeals more to Democrats because it highlights unemployment decreasing since the highest peak, and the bottom one appeals more to Republicans because it highlights that the unemployment rate has been over 8% for 43 months.

This is tough because my instinct tells me to simply pretend it doesn't exist and don't acknowledge it in hopes they will stop. From my experiences, which are mainly from social media accounts trolling about whatever topic and I passively see them, it works. I do understand there are scenarios where that might not always work. I remember watching Anthony Padilla's interview with QTCinderella and her expressing her frustration towards "pranksters" who try to get her and her roommates house swatted because it has happened a couple times. She says that it feels like there is no right or wrong solution to stop it from happening because on one hand, if they acknowledge it, others might do a copycat and do it for the attention, while on the other hand, if they don't acknowledge it, the "pranksters" could keep persisting until they do get a response. In this case, either decision could be potentially bad.

One example I see all the time with trolling is where a bilingual person says a phrase, usually a nice one, "say" that phrase in another language, and claim that's what it means in the other language when it is absolutely not. It could be that what they said in another language is offensive. The purpose of these videos is amusement, especially for those who speak both languages, and other users who speak just the one language usually are cautious of what the poster is "teaching".

I see this a lot on social media, particularly on video sharing platforms. Some of the concrete examples I remember tend to be on parasocial relationships towards women. For example, it's not hard to find stories of female streamers being harassed by delusional fans thinking they have a relationship together. Beyond that, there are numerous stories I've heard in the kpop fandom of delusional fans doing insane actions for the idols they love.

I think another way of anonymity encouraging authentic behavior is being able to ask questions anonymously during class. For me, I just don't like the idea of people knowing I specifically asked whatever question and whenever zoom class meetings being recorded, I just don't want my name to be on the transcript of the recording. I don't know. Privacy reasons I guess. By having a way to ask questions anonymously, whether it is asking a question directly on the teacher's ends for Zoom, or using a "make yourself anonymous" feature to cover my name in the classroom board, I find it more comfortable to publicly engage in class content.

This era is what I grew up with; much my time growing up (and I guess still now) was on social networking websites. The biggest appeal to these websites is the connection and ability to communicate with people, especially if they're long-distance. Especially with the long-distance part, messaging through a social media's direct/private message feature is an alternative to texting them with a phone. It's also interesting looking back how cool "Facebook" was back then. Now, it is kinda associated with being "dead" (not a lot of people use it now) and old people mainly using it.

For age, putting it in an integer would be the most logical step. As for constraints, the lower boundaries would be 13 and 130 since social media sites generally tell people to be at 13 years old before using the platform and the person who lived the longest died at 122. As for name, strings would be the most logical step. There perhaps will be a max character limit so someone doesn't spam nonsense on their app.

I think a really good example of seeing this simplification play out is in the census where they don't list out all of the different race and ethnic groups one can be. I am not 100% certain why that might be, but it could be that there could be many different kinds of races and ethnic groups or it could be that they are still debates about what is considered a "race" and/or "ethnic group"

Regarding recommendation algorithms, this is one of the ways I think social media has changed. I remember when Instagram's feed layout was still the most recent on top and when ads weren't so prominent there. Now, at least with me feed, a series of posts that were posted at wildly different times that aren't organized in any way. Also, there are posts I see on my feed that I don't even follow, but Instagram recommends their page to me.

I have had unfortunate experiences with the use of bots and/or automated responses in resolving an issue I had with a social media platform. It was frustrating because it felt like my responses weren't being truly heard and there was no way to get it fixed since the bot would say the same things over and over. While I recognize that bots may be seen as helpful for platforms with many users, as a consumer, it is awful.

This is one framework I only somewhat disagree with because great feats may not always happen (or at least just happens) when brilliant people follow their ambition. For some, their self-interests come at a price for others. For example, the iPhone. I won't deny that it is an amazing feat of engineering, but the iPhone does come with environmental issues and human rights issues in regard to the components and processes to make the iPhone.

I found this point interesting because these conversations (pre- and during 2017) and points are still being made (probably even more now). For example, those deep fake videos recently that look like certain celebrities and content creators. With technology rapidly increasing, I wonder how or if laws will change to reflect it as well.