I've done a digital detox before and I always feel like I have much more time in life. I also tend to get a lot more sleep too. This is also reflected in the study talked about in this wiki page where 59% of users use phones before sleep and within 30 minutes of waking up. It's crazy how reliant people are on technology.

Something that this chapter doesn't mention is the fitness community. Some can view it as negative but in my opinion, fitness community is beneficial for people and it helps with lots of mental problems too. Some might feel discouraged when comparing with successful people online but this should only encourage them to do better.

I've always loved the Onion because of their satirical articles and videos. This one just seems to be a parody headline with a picture of a teen asking if the other person is ok with being in a TikTok. It shows how becoming viral, while some may want to become viral, is a big fear for others. It kind of goes along with that tweet that says "Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it." No one wants to be the main character being dogpiled on.

This shows that the whole goal of the internet is to evoke a reaction, whether good or bad. An easy way to go viral is to just make people angry because people will inevitably engage with the content which boosts the post in the algorithms.

I like this statement and agree with its message. The internet is full of dog piling on someone to mock a person as a meme. You always want to be laughing at a meme, not become one.

Echo chambers are real and happen all the time online. People don't realize it but the algorithm has made echo chambers such a big problem. I am lucky enough to have friends with different views so I get to see how these echo chambers play out. Some of my friends constantly get the same videos that push an agenda and without any nuance, my friends also start to believe what is pushed.

This happens a lot but I had the algorithm recommend things that were things I talked about with others. The recommendation was a bit too good. I can't tell if it's because I subconsciously did things that told the algorithm that I wanted to see those things or if my phone is listening.

I have a friend that is color blind but our friend group a lot of times forgets that he is color blind. The first time it affected us however was when we were playing a minigame that required standing on the correct colored tiles and my friend struggled a bit with it but we all still had a good time. It's not often seen as a big disability but I can see how such an impairment can make certain tasks harder, especially with more severe color blindness. One thing I saw in the wiki page was the stuff on the color blind glasses. While it may help some people differentiate colors better, I heard that it was a big scam and don't actually give people normal vision. I remember when Logan Paul wore them and he pretended to have an eye-opening experience but he later said in an interview that it did nothing for him at all.

I think I disagree with this definition of "disability" because there are disabilities that are definitely objective and not a subjectively defined thing based on society's expectation. There's just a medical model versus the social model of what being disabled means. Disabilities could be a result of the body or mind but it can also be because society failed to accommodate different bodies and minds. A bird born without wings is not disabled because society expects a bird to fly. Even without society, the bird will die on its own. The bird is objectively disabled. In the end, society can partially define disabilities while others are objective disabilities.

This article has a scientist talk about the ethics of using social media posts. A lot of scientists use social media posts as data like for disease trends, political campaigns, and misinformation. Scientists justify this and say that "it was public already". However, the article argues that while the data is public, a lot of people post not knowing that their social media posts might be used for research instead of just being seen by their followers, friends, or family. I think that it's hard to argue against the scientists being able to use public posts because of how useful the data can be. However, people need to be aware of the digital footprint they leave behind and also scientists will need to think more about the ethicality of their use of the data.

Because of how easy it is to bury privacy rules under pages and pages of Terms of Service that no one reads, I think it should be an obligation for social media companies to ask the user if they are allowed to track data at all. Many apps have an opt out feature that is hidden. It's possible to opt out but many users won't even know it exists or assume that they are by default opted out. Perhaps companies should be made to assume that the user opts out first and ask if they want to be opted in for better algorithms.

After reading through the article, I think that it was only a matter of time until survey system would stop working. The internet is always adapting and according to the article "Prolific, a tool for scientists conducting behavioral research, had no free screening tools in place to make sure that it delivered representative population samples to each study". This is kind of crazy considering that the surveys were for money and at some point it would be exploitable.

They survey being online in the first place would have skewed the participants being much younger than the population as a whole. When dealing with data online, it is important to think about how to distribute it online and make sure a system is in place.

A commonly said phrase is 'correlation does not equal causation' and it's something I was taught in my statistics class. A lot of times you can find data that seem to correlate but there's always different factors that aren't considered. Online, it is very easy to lie or make up information using graphs and charts that correlate but don't show the full story. This could be used to push different ideals or political views which can be harmful.

I thought that this meme was funny and pretty harmless. A lot of trolls or pranks nowadays are at the cost of the other and while they get a lot of clicks and views, it's sometimes immoral and rude.

Although this could fall under the category of amusement, I think another reason for trolling is for content creation. Getting a response or 'ragebaiting' is very engaging for audiences and can grow and account quickly.

Schrodinger’s Assholes are just people who can’t commit to their beliefs. They say what they actually believe but when others don't support that opinion, they back out. They are ingenuine people. I would think that there would be less of these online though and more in real life since you can be anonymous online and say whatever without consequences.

This is a big problem with streamers too since streamers can interact live with their viewers. Long time viewers might also think they have a sort of friendship with the streamer if the streamer actively replies to their chat. I wonder though if there is a similar thing the other way around where content creators might mistake a relationship with a viewer.

While this might not be the first meme, it is what I consider the birth of internet memes. This source talks about LOLcats, which are pictures of cats with humorous text which was popularized on 4chan. All memes in my opinion stem from this. It's crazy how far memes have come since then from being images of cats to short clips on reels.

Something this makes me wonder is whether rumors and conspiracy theories were more believable then than now. Back then, it would've been a lot harder to prove a theory false and would take longer to find evidence proving otherwise. With the internet, it is a lot easier to access reputable sources and learn about and debunk a theory. However, the internet also allows for more disinformation to spread along with the information. Not only that but it also becomes much easier to create fake evidence.

I have been a fan of the Onion for a long time and I love reading their satirical articles. It looks like couple of the other annotations on this article haven't actually read it or don't understand that it's satirical. This is obviously satire for performative people online who like to show off on their social media accounts about what they did whether its helping others or accomplishing something. In this case, a woman has gone to a third world country for a short 6 day stay and has taken pictures of herself for clout instead of actually helping the kids in need.

I think it is ironic how Elon Musk threatened to not buy twitter because the number of spam bots was too high and after he purchased Twitter, the problem only worsened. However, this isn't an issue with just Twitter/X. Bot traffic has surpassed human traffic online for the first time in 2024. Now that it's been two years, I can only assume that this has worsened. People already talk about "dead internet theory" where the internet is just bots reacting to bots. With a ton of AI content being pumped out daily and comments being filled with bots, a lot of online interaction is really just bots talking to bots.