Guilt–shame–fear spectrum of cultures. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1184808072. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fear_spectrum_of_cultures&oldid=1184808072 (visited on 2023-12-10).

18.1. Shame vs. Guilt in childhood development# Before we talk about public criticism and shaming and adults, let’s look at the role of shame in childhood. In at least some views about shame and childhood[1], shame and guilt hold different roles in childhood development [r1]: Shame is the feeling that “I am bad,” and the natural response to shame is for the individual to hide, or the community to ostracize the person. Guilt is the feeling that “This specific action I did was bad.” The natural response to feeling guilt is for the guilty person to want to repair the harm of their action. In this view [r1], a good parent might see their child doing something bad or dangerous, and tell them to stop. The child may feel shame (they might not be developmentally able to separate their identity from the momentary rejection). The parent may then comfort the child to let the child know that they are not being rejected as a person, it was just their action that was a problem. The child’s relationship with the parent is repaired, and over time the child will learn to feel guilt instead of shame and seek to repair harm instead of hide.

Doxing. December 2023. Page Version ID: 1189390304. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Doxing&oldid=1189390304 (visited on 2023-12-10).

17.1. Individual harassment# Individual harassment (one individual harassing another individual) has always been part of human cultures, bur social media provides new methods of doing so. There are many methods by which through social media. This can be done privately through things like: Bullying: like sending mean messages through DMs Cyberstalking: Continually finding the account of someone, and creating new accounts to continue following them. Or possibly researching the person’s physical location. Hacking: Hacking into an account or device to discover secrets, or make threats. Tracking: An abuser might track the social media use of their partner or child to prevent them from making outside friends. They may even install spy software on their victim’s phone. Death threats / rape threats Etc. Individual harassment can also be done publicly before an audience (such as classmates or family). For example: Bullying: like posting public mean messages Impersonation: Making an account that appears to be from someone and having that account say things to embarrass or endanger the victim. Doxing [q1]: Publicly posting identifying information about someone (e.g., full name, address, phone number, etc.). Revenge porn / deep-fake porn Etc. 17.1.1. Reflections# Have you experienced or witnessed harassment on social media (that you are willing to share about)? 17.1.2. Learn more# I’ve Had a Cyberstalker Since I Was 12 [q2] Chrissy Teigen’s fall from grace: The rise and fall of Chrissy Teigen shows how drastically Twitter changed in 10 years. [q3]

Crowdsourcing. December 2023. Page Version ID: 1188348631. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Crowdsourcing&oldid=1188348631#Historical_examples (visited on 2023-12-08).

16.1. Crowdsourcing Definition# When tasks are done through large groups of people making relatively small contributions, this is called crowdsourcing. The people making the contributions generally come from a crowd of people that aren’t necessarily tied to the task (e.g., all internet users can edit Wikipedia), but then people from the crowd either get chosen to participate, or volunteer themselves. When a crowd is providing financial contributions, that is called crowdfunding (e.g., patreon [p1], kickstarter [p2], gofundme [p3]). Humans have always collaborated on tasks, and crowds have been enlisted in performing tasks long before the internet existed [p4]. What social media (and other internet systems) have done is expand the options for how people can collaborate on tasks. 16.1.1. Different Ways of Collaborating and Communicating# There have been many efforts to use computers to replicate the experience of communicating with someone in person, through things like video chats, or even telepresence robots [p5]]. But there are ways that attempts to recreate in-person interactions inevitably fall short and don’t feel the same. Instead though, we can look at different characteristics that computer systems can provide, and find places where computer-based communication works better, and is Beyond Being There [p6] (pdf here [p7]). Some of the different characteristics that means of communication can have include (but are not limited to): Location: Some forms of communication require you to be physically close, some allow you to be located anywhere with an internet signal. Time delay: Some forms of communication are almost instantaneous, some have small delays (you might see this on a video chat system), or have significant delays (like shipping a package). Synchronicity: Some forms of communication require both participants to communicate at the same time (e.g., video chat), while others allow the person to respond when convenient (like a mailed physical letter). Archiving: Some forms of communication automatically produce an archive of the communication (like a chat message history), while others do not (like an in-person conversation) Anonymity: Some forms of communication make anonymity nearly impossible (like an in-person conversation), while others make it easy to remain anonymous. -Audience: Communication could be private or public, and they could be one-way (no ability to reply), or two+-way where others can respond. Because of these (and other) differences, different forms of communication might be preferable for different tasks. For example, you might send an email to the person sitting next at work to you if you want to keep an archive of the communication (which is also conveniently grouped into email threads). Or you might send a text message to the person sitting next to you if you are criticizing the teacher, but want to do so discretely, so the teacher doesn’t notice. These different forms of communication can then support different methods of crowdsourcing. 16.1.2. Learn More# If you want to learn more about crowdsourcing, you can look at the research from the ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing [p8]. For example, you can see: Best paper awards from 2022 [p9] Best paper awards from 2021 [p10] Best paper awards from 2020 [p11]

Spamming. December 2023. Page Version ID: 1187995774. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spamming&oldid=1187995774 (visited on 2023-12-08).

14.1. What Content Gets Moderated# Social media platforms moderate (that is ban, delete, or hide) different kinds of content. There are a number of categories that they might ban things: 14.1.1. Quality Control# In order to make social media sites usable and interesting to users, they may ban different types of content such as advertisements, disinformation, or off-topic posts. Almost all social media sites (even the ones that claim “free speech”) block spam [n1], mass-produced unsolicited messages, generally advertisements, scams, or trolling. Without quality control moderation, the social media site will likely fill up with content that the target users of the site don’t want, and those users will leave. What content is considered “quality” content will vary by site, with 4chan considering a lot of offensive and trolling content to be “quality” but still banning spam (because it would make the site repetitive in a boring way), while most sites would ban some offensive content. 14.1.2. Legal Concerns# Social media sites also might run into legal concerns with allowing some content to be left up on their sites, such as copyrighted material (like movie clips) or child sexual abuse material (CSAM). So most social media sites will often have rules about content moderation, and at least put on the appearance of trying to stop illegal content (though a few will try to move to countries that won’t get them in trouble, like 8kun is getting hosted in Russia). With copyrighted content, the platform YouTube is very aggressive in allowing movie studios to get videos taken down, so many content creators on YouTube have had their videos taken down erroneously [n2]. 14.1.3. Safety# Another concern is for the safety of the users on the social media platform (or at least the users that the platform cares about). Users who don’t feel safe will leave the platform, so social media companies are incentivized to help their users feel safe. So this often means moderation to stop trolling and harassment. 14.1.4. Potentially Offensive# Another category is content that users or advertisers might find offensive. If users see things that offend them too often, they might leave the site, and if advertisers see their ads next to too much offensive content, they might stop paying for ads on the site. So platforms might put limits on language (e.g., racial slurs), violence, sex, and nudity. Sometimes different users or advertisers have different opinions on what should be allowed or not. For example, “The porn ban of 2018 was a defining event for Tumblr that led to a 30 percent drop in traffic and a mass exodus of users that blindsided the company” [n3].

13.1. Social Media Influence on Mental Health# In 2019 the company Facebook (now called Meta) presented an internal study that found that Instagram was bad for the mental health of teenage girls, and yet they still allowed teenage girls to use Instagram. So, what does social media do to the mental health of teenage girls, and to all its other users? The answer is of course complicated and varies. Some have argued that Facebook’s own data is not as conclusive as you think about teens and mental health [m1]. Many have anecdotal experiences with their own mental health and those they talk to. For example, cosmetic surgeons have seen how photo manipulation on social media has influenced people’s views of their appearance: People historically came to cosmetic surgeons with photos of celebrities whose features they hoped to emulate. Now, they’re coming with edited selfies. They want to bring to life the version of themselves that they curate through apps like FaceTune and Snapchat. Selfies, Filters, and Snapchat Dysmorphia: How Photo-Editing Harms Body Image [m2] Comedian and director Bo Burnham has his own observations about how social media is influencing mental health: “If [social media] was just bad, I’d just tell all the kids to throw their phone in the ocean, and it’d be really easy. The problem is it - we are hyper-connected, and we’re lonely. We’re overstimulated, and we’re numb. We’re expressing our self, and we’re objectifying ourselves. So I think it just sort of widens and deepens the experiences of what kids are going through. But in regards to social anxiety, social anxiety - there’s a part of social anxiety I think that feels like you’re a little bit disassociated from yourself. And it’s sort of like you’re in a situation, but you’re also floating above yourself, watching yourself in that situation, judging it. And social media literally is that. You know, it forces kids to not just live their experience but be nostalgic for their experience while they’re living it, watch people watch them, watch people watch them watch them. My sort of impulse is like when the 13 year olds of today grow up to be social scientists, I’ll be very curious to hear what they have to say about it. But until then, it just feels like we just need to gather the data.” Director Bo Burnham On Growing Up With Anxiety — And An Audience [m3] - NPR Fresh Air (10:15-11:20) It can be difficult to measure the effects of social media on mental health since there are so many types of social media, and it permeates our cultures even of people who don’t use it directly. Some researchers have found that people using social media may enter a dissociation state [m4], where they lose track of time (like what happens when someone is reading a good book). Researchers at Facebook decided to try to measure how their recommendation algorithm was influencing people’s mental health. So they changed their recommendation algorithm to show some people more negative posts and some people more positive posts. They found that people who were given more negative posts tended to post more negatively themselves. Now, this experiment was done without informing users that they were part of an experiment, and when people found out that they might be part of a secret mood manipulation experiment, they were upset [m5]. 13.1.1. Digital Detox?# Some people view internet-based social media (and other online activities) as inherently toxic and therefore encourage a digital detox [m6], where people take some form of a break from social media platforms and digital devices. While taking a break from parts or all of social media can be good for someone’s mental health (e.g., doomscrolling is making them feel more anxious, or they are currently getting harassed online), viewing internet-based social media as inherently toxic and trying to return to an idyllic time from before the Internet is not a realistic or honest view of the matter. In her essay “The Great Offline,” [m7] Lauren Collee argues that this is just a repeat of earlier views of city living and the “wilderness.” As white Americans were colonizing the American continent, they began idealizing “wilderness” as being uninhabited land (ignoring the Indigenous people who already lived there, or kicking them out or killing them). In the 19th century, as wilderness tourism was taking off as an industry, natural landscapes were figured as an antidote to the social pressures of urban living, offering truth in place of artifice, interiority in place of exteriority, solitude in place of small talk. Similarly, advocates for digital detox build an idealized “offline” separate from the complications of modern life: Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, characterizes the offline world as a physical place, a kind of Edenic paradise. “Not too long ago,” she writes, “people walked with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand” — now, “they often walk with their heads down, typing.” […] Gone are the happy days when families would gather around a weekly televised program like our ancestors around the campfire! But Lauren Collee argues that by placing the blame on the use of technology itself and making not using technology (a digital detox) the solution, we lose our ability to deal with the nuances of how we use technology and how it is designed: I’m no stranger to apps that help me curb my screen time, and I’ll admit I’ve often felt better for using them. But on a more communal level, I suspect that cultures of digital detox — in suggesting that the online world is inherently corrupting and cannot be improved — discourage us from seeking alternative models for what the internet could look like. I don’t want to be trapped in cycles of connection and disconnection, deleting my social media profiles for weeks at a time, feeling calmer but isolated, re-downloading them, feeling worse but connected again. For as long as we keep dumping our hopes into the conceptual pit of “the offline world,” those hopes will cease to exist as forces that might generate change in the worlds we actually live in together. So in this chapter, we will not consider internet-based social media as inherently toxic or beneficial for mental health. We will be looking for more nuance and where things go well, where they do not, and why.

Evolution of cetaceans. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1186568602. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Evolution_of_cetaceans&oldid=1186568602 (visited on 2023-12-08).

12.1. Evolution and Memes# Whale Evolution: Fig. 12.1 A sequence of extinct animals in the chain of evolution from mammals related to hippos and deer into whales and dolphins. From wikipedia [l1]. Drawings by Nobu Tamura [l2] licensed CC BY 3.0# In order to understand what we are talking about when we say something goes “viral”, we need to first understand evolution and memes. 12.1.1. Evolution# Biological evolution is how living things change, generation after generation, and how all the different forms of life, from humans to bacteria, came to be. Evolution occurs when three conditions are present: Replication (with Inheritance) An organism can make a new copy of itself, which inherits its characteristics Variations / Mutations The characteristics of an organism are sometimes changed, in a way that can be inherited by future copies Natural Selection Some characteristics make it more or less likely for an organism to compete for resources, survive, and make copies of itself When those three conditions are present, then over time successive generations of organisms will: be more adapted to their environment divide into different groups and diversify stumble upon strategies for competing with or cooperating with other organisms. 12.1.2. Memes# In the 1976 book The Selfish Gene [l3], evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins[1] said rather than looking at the evolution of organisms, it made even more sense to look at the evolution of the genes of those organisms (sections of DNA that perform some functions and are inherited). For example, if a bee protects its nest by stinging an attacking animal and dying, then it can’t reproduce and it might look like a failure of evolution. But if the gene that told the bee to die protecting the nest was shared by the other bees in the nest, then that one bee dying allows the gene to keep being replicated, so the gene is successful evolutionarily. Since genes contained information about how organisms would grow and live, then biological evolution could be considered to be evolving information. Dawkins then took this idea of the evolution of information and applied it to culture, coining the term “meme” (intended to sound like “gene” [l4]). A meme is a piece of culture that might reproduce in an evolutionary fashion, like a hummable tune that someone hears and starts humming to themselves, perhaps changing it, and then others overhearing next. In this view, any piece of human culture can be considered a meme that is spreading (or failing to spread) according to evolutionary forces. So we can use an evolutionary perspective to consider the spread of: Technology (languages, weapons, medicine, writing, math, computers, etc.), religions philosophies political ideas (democracy, authoritarianism, etc.) art organizations etc. We can even consider the evolutionary forces that play in the spread of true and false information (like an old saying: “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.” [l5]) [1] While we value Dawkin’s contribution to evolutionary theory, we don’t want to make this an endorsement of any of his later statements or views.

Social model of disability. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1184222120. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Social_model_of_disability&oldid=1184222120#Social_construction_of_disability (visited on 2023-12-07).

Disability

Right to privacy. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1186826760. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Right_to_privacy&oldid=1186826760 (visited on 2023-12-05).

9.1. Privacy

Catherine Stinson. The Dark Past of Algorithms That Associate Appearance and Criminality. American Scientist, January 2021. URL: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-dark-past-of-algorithms-that-associate-appearance-and-criminality (visited on 2023-12-05).

8.3. Mining Social Media Data# Data mining is the process of taking a set of data and trying to learn new things from it. Fig. 8.1 Clip from movie Everything Everywhere All at Once [h3] where the IRS agent talks about what information (“story”) she can mine from tax data.# For example, social media data about who you are friends with might be used to infer your sexual orientation [h4]. Social media data might also be used to infer people’s: Race Political leanings Interests Susceptibility to financial scams Being prone to addiction (e.g., gambling) Additionally, groups keep trying to re-invent old debunked pseudo-scientific (and racist) methods of judging people based on facial features (size of nose, chin, forehead, etc.), but now using artificial intelligence [h5]. Social media data can also be used to infer information about larger social trends like the spread of misinformation [h6]. One particularly striking example of an attempt to infer information from seemingly unconnected data was someone noticing that the number of people sick with COVID-19 correlated with how many people were leaving bad reviews of Yankee Candles saying “they don’t have any scent” (note: COVID-19 can cause a loss of the ability to smell): Fig. 8.2 Twitter user @zomsllama pointing out the correlation of COVID cases and candle reviews complaining of no scent [h7].#

Julia Evans. Examples of floating point problems. January 2023. URL: https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/01/13/examples-of-floating-point-problems/ (visited on 2023-11-24).

Data and Metadata

On the other hand, some bots are made with the intention of harming, countering, or deceiving others. For example, people use bots to spam advertisements at people. You can use bots as a way of buying fake followers [c8], or making fake crowds that appear to support a cause (called Astroturfing [c9]). As one example, in 2016, Rian Johnson, who was in the middle of directing Star Wars: The Last Jedi, got bombarded by tweets that all originated in Russia (likely making at least some use of bots).

Steven Tweedie. This disturbing image of a Chinese worker with close to 100 iPhones reveals how App Store rankings can be manipulated. February 2015. URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/photo-shows-how-fake-app-store-rankings-are-made-2015-2 (visited on 2024-03-07).