This article describes Eli Whitney's life and accomplishments, which was inventing the cotton gin and muskets. It primarily talks about his invention of the cotton gin and how he believed that it would help to end slavery but actually ended up prolonging it for another 70 years. I think that this example goes to show that something that is useful and can be used to make people's lives easier can be just as easily detrimental as it is useful, which kind of applies to tech, automation, and programming in a way. I think it just emphasizes why considering ethics and making intentional design choices is crucial for both tangible and technological things.

A monopoly is described as a situation where only one supplier of a commodity is available giving them full control of the market, they can decide how many of the items to sell, how much they cost, as long as there is a reasonable demand for the item. This can be frustrating to individuals who seek out commodities as their value is extremely inflated. For example, natural diamonds are a part of a monopoly and should not cost as much as they do, but there is still a demand for them which makes them seem like they are more valuable and more of a status symbol than they really are.

It's really interesting to me how the solution to this is to try to copy the features after purchasing the company. All the social media apps tend to look the same even though they are owned by the same people but I feel like the charm of using one app over the other is the difference. One app could be better at something than others and have different uses, for example, I use TikTok because I like the algorithm better than instagram reels.

This article defines the different types of cultures that revolve around guilt shame and fear. They all have similar effects on how people act but their way of thinking varies slightly. This can be seen in how someone from a guilt society would tend to think about how their own actions affect people and someone from a fear culture would tend to think about how their actions would affect themselves. I think that in all cultures/societies there is a sense of order but what is defined as right and wrong, or socially acceptable, differs greatly.

Cancel culture in the media these days is a way that we use to keep people accountable for the actions. I think that anyone can get cancelled but it is usually more prevalent in celebrities or influencers because they actually have a platform and an audience that looks up to them. While there have been outrageous reasons for cancelling someone, I think that for the most part it is a good thing because it allows people to think for themselves whether or not they should support a person given both sides of a situation but sometimes the information can be skewed or it can reinforce someone's perspective and give them more fuel to the fire.

I think that this is really interesting to see because American citizens are so used to our amendment granting us freedom of speech that we think things like this happening are really bizarre. However, in recent light, this is slowly becoming our reality. There is an influx of news regarding the United States that we, as a society, don't even know about because it is being covered up so well. This applies to both our government and the big name companies that have been developed here. For example, there was a controversy with openai and a whistleblower employee who ended up dead that many people, especially in the tech industry, didn't know about or even how recently, citizens are claiming that their phones are being seized and looked through upon re-entry to the United States. Censorship and content moderation is more familiar to us as a society/country than we think.

This article talks about copy pastas and how they are essentially long blocks of text that people copy and paste for a variety of reasons but mainly with the intent to troll people. Often times it is a bunch of nonsense or includes a recent internet slang, or sometimes it can be an image made up of text symbols. In my opinion, I think the spread of this phenomenon comes from people attempting to insult others who have said the thing that they are copying and pasting. Like, they are reiterating it to emphasize how stupid it sounds.

This page talks about digital detoxes and how it's essentially when a user voluntarily refrains from using social media by deleting their account or app. This is done to protect the users mental health and/or prevent them from becoming addicted to using it. I think that personally, digital detoxes can be good for users, it forces them from developing bad habits but I also think that there is some sort of underlying issue, whether that be in the person or the system itself, if a person decides that they need to get rid of social media completely to preserve their mental health.

I think that it's really interesting how we as a society promote the usage of social media even though it's detrimental to a lot of people, but primarily young individuals. Social media has its benefits, which primarily is to keep updated and connect with people that you normally couldn't, but at the same time it promotes users to only share the best/worst parts of themselves. I think that this responsibility shouldn't necessarily fall on the social media companies, but I think that some steps should be taken to educate the user base on its harmfulness/provide resources for those who need it. To say that young individuals should be banned completely from usage seems a little extreme and I think that that responsibility should fall on the parents or guardians.

Cultural appropriation is something that has come up a lot lately on social media. It can be described as the inappropriate adoption of other cultures traditions or identity. The reason that this is such a problem is because people dont realize that extent of their actions. As an asian American, I see this most often when creators online wear traditional clothing items. I believe that to people of my culture, it feels offensive because in media and growing up, people do not view us favorably. We have always been the root of the joke whether we wanted to be or not and I think that it's interesting to see how people who weren't affected by these things growing perceive things. There is also the problem of sexualizing traditional clothing, which is given the defense of "I think it looks nice", it goes to show that there is a lack of consideration behind the meaning of things.

When I first saw the term replication, I thought of how on TikTok there are trends and people will recreate the videos, often word for word. Sometimes this can be done to make fun of the original post and sometimes it's done to add a personal twist on a cute video trend. This feels like a large part of TikTok now and it's interesting to see how it's viewed by different people but something that stands out to me is how even though people are recreating ideas, they oftentimes don't give out any credit to the original creator and the platform doesn't do anything to recognize this.

I personally think that TikTok does the best job of making good recommendations and I think that a lot of other people agree considering the outrage during its "ban". I think it does a really good job of recommending content through its for you page because a lot of the time the content doesn't have any caption or hashtags but it's still on a topic that I'm interested in. Or even searching a keyword works really well and almost always I can find something relevant to what I searched in seconds.

This article talks about what assistive technology is, which is basically just anything that is used to help disabled people. There are nuances between assistive and adaptive technology, mainly the fact that adaptive technologies main audience would be for disabled people while assistive could be used by everyone. For example, prosthesis is adaptive while the zoom function on your phone is assistive. This is interesting to me because the article talks about a lot of the different assistive and adaptive technologies/equipment that exist out there.

I think that this is incredibly important to think about and to highlight. I think the expectation in our current society is to create things that work for the majority of people and then later down the line develop something that works for minority groups. Most features aren't accessible right away due to constraints and also just the fact that minority groups are such a small percentage of users that it's not feasible due to time and budget to develop something that works for everyone. I think this can be tied back to some of the ethical frameworks and it makes you wonder if it's more beneficial to put out a product that can help people in the moment but excludes a group, or to prolong the wait for that product until it can include everyone. I wonder what other people value and what they think is the best way to go about situations like that.

This article talks about how Facebook collects data on both users and non-users who interact with content on the Facebook platform. It talks about how things like liking, viewing, friends, and even sharing contacts allows Facebook to have access to personal data about you that can be used to target ads or other purposes. I feel like this is really invasive especially to non users who just view a video or something on the platform.have their data collected without their knowledge and have it be used for something that they don't even know or interact with. I think it is less but still unethical for Facebook to be doing this with users but I think that most people already know that in some way their data will be used by sites like this.

I think this is really interesting to me because I when I first heard the term data mining, I thought about how people would mine data from updates in games and websites for product information not for increased usage. These are just some of the ways that I've heard the term being used so learning that companies themselves mine for data about you to increase your usage feels a little scummy for lack of better words. It feels like these companies are capitalizing off and encouraging addictions by using personal things about a person without their active knowledge.

"trolling" is a common phrase/concept in social media and it consists of harmlessly playing jokes or sparking amusement for the person through frustrating the other person/people. It is commonly accepted that there are people who like to be frustrating for their own enjoyment and the common thing to be told is to ignore them and not feed into their actions. I think this is interesting how we on social media have accepted that these types of people exist and formulate our own opinions and course of actions to take.

I think this is really interesting coming from someone with a lot of gaming background. I think now a days, trolling has more negative implications than it originally did. Most people who are considered to be "trolling" are doing it to spark a reaction out of other players. It usually involving griefing other players and ruining the game experience rather than something like forum boards of naive questions. It makes me wonder when this change happened and why.

I was interested to know what this was after reading about it in the chapter and I was shocked to find that it is basically a far right political conspiracy that accuses democratic celebrities of being satan worshipping pedophiles. I personally find this claim to be interesting since it has so much traction. It makes me wonder how people can just accept the words of a stranger on the internet who claims they have governmental insider information.

I think that this is really interesting because it shows how complex humanity is and how there is always bad to contrast the good. These platforms make me think of reddit, where anonymity is incredibly important but the difference is that reddit is definitely moderated unlike these platforms. I personally find it disturbing that such behavior is encouraged and that people are allowed to visit and post to sites like these without repercussions.

This source explains the basics of HTML and what it is consists of, which are HTML tags that tell the browser what to display and are structured like this, <body>. HTML files need to be declared by specifying the doc type. HTML is fairly simple and can be enhanced using multiple other languages and tools such as javascript and css to add visual appeal and interactivity.

I previously took a programming course that explained how often we come across image data and how easily it can be mutated for further processing or even made more accessible using algorithms. I think it's interesting how applying an algorithm can drastically change what we see and how we interact with images simply because it is made up of numbers. Different kinds of colorblindness can be addressed by adjusting the color values and it makes me wonder why social media doesn't make this more accessible to users. As a non colorblind person, I assume that most people deal with colorblindness through their phone or monitor settings but I think that it would be a nice touch to incorporate this in their platform as well considering how easy it is to apply.

This is a website where people can buy followers on social media, that are usually bot accounts to boost the perceived popularity and engagement a person has on certain platforms. I personally think that websites like these are taking advantage of young and impressionable people. It feels almost like a predatory industry because social media is used to "influence" others and a person's follower and like counts are used to determine how reliable they are. This gives false impressions to others who might not know better and also takes advantage of people who want fame by enticing them into spending large amount of money over time to keep up their appearances.

I think the main reason that social media platforms allow bots to operate is simply because it is difficult to monitor and detect what accounts are bots and which are not. It would require a large amount of effort to differentiate and not unfairly ban real people from using the platform. I think in combination with this, banning accounts that seem like bots would significantly reduce engagement that these platforms receive due to the numbers. A large amount of views and likes are probably from bots, so taking this away might make it seem like the platform isn't popular.