Luddite. December 2023. Page Version ID: 1189255462. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Luddite&oldid=1189255462 (visited on 2023-12-10).
I remember learning about this in my AP World History class in high school. My teacher at the time emphasized that resistance to new technology is a common theme throughout history for good and bad reasons.
Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt, […] [then] came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; […] [W]hen they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: […] this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
It's interesting hearing that thousands of years ago there was a strong aversion against a new invention/technology emerging among the public. We often are fearful of newer developments, which is not inherently a bad thing.
Land Back. December 2023. Page Version ID: 1188237630. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Land_Back&oldid=1188237630 (visited on 2023-12-10).
Land Back has always been an interesting concept to me because it makes me wonder how it would look in practice. What examples of land back has there been to groups around the world.
There are many ways a CEO might intentionally lower profits unfairly, such as by having their company pay more than necessary when buying something from the CEO’s friend’s company. But even if a CEO decides to reduce profits for a good reason (e.g., it may be unethical to overwork the employees), then they are still violating their fiduciary duty, and the board of directors might fire them or pressure them into prioritizing profits above all else
It seems like with a profit motive there is a natural interest in overworking employees. Many political philosophers point out that there is an inherent conflict between workers and owners.
Meg van Achterberg. Jimmy Kimmel’s Halloween prank can scar children. Why are we laughing? Washington Post, October 2017. URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/jimmy-kimmel-wants-to-prank-kids-why-are-we-laughing/2017/10/20/9be17716-aed0-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html (visited on 2023-12-10).
This has kind of made me rethink how I joke around with children. Generally, as most people do I think pranking children is usually harmless but I didn't consider the impact on a child's sense of trust and betrayal.
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.
I think a major issue for a lot of more sensitive people is that they did not develop this idea that you are not your worst moment.
Doxing. December 2023. Page Version ID: 1189390304. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Doxing&oldid=1189390304 (visited on 2023-12-10).
Recently, I have seen the actress from the Romeo and Juliet reboot be insanely harassed on Twitter, since she is Black. Pretty much all the harassment has been because of her looks and has been incredibly racist.
17.1.1. Reflections# Have you experienced or witnessed harassment on social media (that you are willing to share about)?
I had a friend that kept getting harassed by an anonymous account on Instagram. They knew that they knew the person in real life, because the harasser would reference things from my friend's life to intimidate them.
United States congressional staff edits to Wikipedia. December 2023. Page Version ID: 1188215095. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=United_States_congressional_staff_edits_to_Wikipedia&oldid=1188215095 (visited on 2023-12-08).
This makes me think about how often it can be very obvious when someone's PR team is editing Wikipedia pages. For example, yesterday I was looking into the ongoing Diddy/Trafficking case. I went to the page of a label executive who is implicated in the case, and it was obvious it was edited in a positive way.
Wikipedia [p12]: Is an online encyclopedia whose content is crowdsourced. Anyone can contribute, just go to an unlocked Wikipedia page and press the edit button. Institutions don’t get special permissions (e.g., it was a scandal when US congressional staff edited Wikipedia pages [p13]), and the expectation that editors do not have outside institutional support is intended to encourage more people to contribute.
Why are some articles unlocked and some are locked? For more active unfolding events, do they lock articles so there is more verification for information that is critical to the moment?
Devin Coldewey. Study finds Reddit's controversial ban of its most toxic subreddits actually worked. TechCrunch, September 2017. URL: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-controversial-ban-of-its-most-toxic-subreddits-actually-worked/ (visited on 2023-12-08).
It is interesting seeing that this ban actually worked and that there was such a dramatic decrease in activity from users that were active in these subreddits. Compared to years ago, Reddit has seemed to be a lot more cleaned up.
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.
Since it is standard to have heavy moderation for spam on any platform, it makes me think when did it become common to moderate that. Has there been platforms that have failed because of too much spam?
Anya Kamenetz. Selfies, Filters, and Snapchat Dysmorphia: How Photo-Editing Harms Body Image. Psychology Today, February 2020. URL: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202002/selfies-filters-and-snapchat-dysmorphia-how-photo-editing-harms-body-image (visited on 2023-12-08).
I saw a TikTok recently saying the same exact thing in the article. That people used to come into cosmetic surgery offices with pictures of celebrities they wanted to look like, however now people are coming in with pictures of themselves with filters.
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?
This is interesting, because recently I have seen a series of Instagram commercials on Youtube, depicting teenagers (mainly teenage girls). It makes me wonder how Meta is able to justify doing that, while knowing their platform is harmful for that demographic.
Chain letter. December 2023. Page Version ID: 1188532303. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chain_letter&oldid=1188532303 (visited on 2023-12-08). l8 Pyramid scheme. December 2023. Page
I did not realize chain mail started off in a physical form then carried onto the digital form when emails started becoming popular.
e book Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years [l6] describes how, before the printing press, when someone wanted a book, they had to find someone who had a copy and have a scribe make a copy. So books that were popular spread through people having scribes copy each other’s books. And with all this copying, there might be different versions of the book spreading around, because of scribal copying errors, added notes, or even the original author making an updated copy. So we can look at the evolution of these books: which got copied, and how they changed over time.
This reminds me of how in a previous chapter it was mentioned that before news became consolidated into large corporations, conspiracy theories would run rampant from random people printing their own pamphlets.
Rumman Chowdhury. Sharing learnings about our image cropping algorithm. May 2021. URL: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2021/sharing-learnings-about-our-image-cropping-algorithm (visited on 2023-12-07).
It is actually really interesting that this was acknowledged by Twitter, because I remember seeing this happen when users first noticed it on the platform. I wonder if this acknowledgment would have ended up happening if this got noticed under Elon Musk's ownership of the platform.
When creating computer programs, programmers can do things that aren’t possible with architecture (where Universal Design came out of), that is: programs can change how they work for each individual user. All people (including disabled people) have different abilities, and making a system that can modify how it runs to match the abilities a user has is called Ability based design [j18]. For example, a phone might detect that the user has gone from a dark to a light environment, and might automatically change the phone brightness or color scheme to be easier to read. Or a computer program might detect that a user’s hands tremble when they are trying to select something on the screen, and the computer might change the text size, or try to guess the intended selection. In this way of managing disabilities, the burden is put on the computer programmers and designers to detect and adapt to the disabled person.
Something in my Client-Side Development class that has been emphasized was the importance of listing metadata in html. This benefits users who use screen readers, who may be unable to view a picture, but can listen to the alt text.
Jacob Kastrenakes. Facebook stored millions of Instagram passwords in plain text. The Verge, April 2019. URL: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18485599/facebook-instagram-passwords-plain-text-millions-users (visited on 2023-12-06).
At first, I assumed Meta was knowingly storing the passwords in plain text. The article did not go into detail on why they were stored in plain text, other than saying "various errors" contributed to that lapse.
Some governments and laws protect the privacy of individuals (using a Natural Rights ethical framing). These include the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation [i3] (GDPR), which includes a “right to be forgotten”, and the United State’s Supreme Court has at times inferred a constitutional right to privacy [i4].
I have noticed that on various applications and platforms, I have been given more agency in what information I can share. This has been recent. For example, my Instagram used to be public, and if I wanted to view the insights of a post, there would be a disclaimer saying that it may not be accurate to EU users, since regulations are different in the EU.
Kurt Wagner. This is how Facebook collects data on you even if you don’t have an account. Vox, April 2018. URL: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profiles-data-collection-non-users-mark-zuckerberg (visited on 2023-12-05).
This makes me wonder if there is any legislation proposed to combat this. It seems rather unethical that when someone does not intend to interact with Facebook in any form, can still be targeted by them for the sake of advertising.
Some data is directly provided to the platform by the users. Platforms may ask users for information like: email address name profile picture interests friends Platforms also collect information on how users interact with the site. They might collect information like (they don’t necessarily collect all this, but they might): when users are logged on and logged off who users interact with What users click on what posts users pause over where users are located what users send in direct messages to each other
It is also important to note that platforms also make very educated guesses on other important aspects of a person's identity for the purpose of showing them hyper-specific advertisements.
Is It Funny or Offensive? Comedian Impersonates FBI on Twitter, Makes MLK Assassination Joke. January 2020. URL: https://isitfunnyoroffensive.com/comedian-impersonates-fbi-on-twitter-makes-mlk-assassination-joke/ (visited on 2023-12-05).
I actually saw this when it first was posted on Twitter because it came on my timeline, and I had been following Jaboukie for awhile. Even then it caught me off guard, but since I was familiar with Jaboukie, I was able to quickly understand the context and move on.
Film Crit Hulk goes on to say that the “don’t feed the trolls” advice puts the burden on victims of abuse to stop being abused, giving all the power to trolls. Instead, Film Crit Hulk suggests giving power to the victims and using “skilled moderation and the willingness to kick people off platforms for violating rules about abuse”
This reminds me of what advocates for uncensored free speech often parrot. That in the marketplace of ideas, truth will always emerge. However, that is clearly not true. Recently with the rebrand of Twitter under Elon, Twitter has become a cesspool of hate and bigotry.
lonelygirl15. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1186146298. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lonelygirl15&oldid=1186146298 (visited on 2023-11-24).
This is actually so interesting. Even nowadays, I feel like people have trouble differentiating between real and fake on the Internet, but since this was the early days of Youtube, it was an entirely different context. People had no reason to not believe it to be real.
Early in the days of YouTube, one YouTube channel (lonelygirl15 [f1]) started to release vlogs (video web logs) consisting of a girl in her room giving updates on the mundane dramas of her life. But as the channel continued posting videos and gaining popularity, viewers started to question if the events being told in the vlogs were true stories, or if they were fictional. Eventually, users discovered that it was a fictional show, and the girl giving the updates was an actress. Many users were upset that what they had been watching wasn’t authentic. That is, users believed the channel was presenting itself as true events about a real girl, and it wasn’t that at all. Though, even after users discovered it was fictional, the channel continued to grow in popularity.
This reminds me of the prank era of Youtube (Mid 2010s). Lots of Youtubers got popular doing "Social Experiments", where they would often anger bystanders. These videos often had a racial undertones, and typically would be faked with actors.
Jason Parham. A People’s History of Black Twitter, Part I. Wired, July 2021. URL: https://www.wired.com/story/black-twitter-oral-history-part-i-coming-together/ (visited on 2023-12-10).
It is fascinating how the origin of Black Twitter, is from such a specific subset of Black people. This being individuals that were college-aged around 2008. Even when I am navigating Black Twitter nowadays, it seems like people in their late 30s have had their Twitter accounts the longest.
Before this centralization of media in the 1900s, newspapers and pamphlets were full of rumors and conspiracy theories [e2]. And now as the internet and social media have taken off in the early 2000s, we are again in a world full of rumors and conspiracy theories.
This is actually extremely interesting to think about. It makes me wonder what conditions in the 1900s caused news to become so centralized? I assume it was the lack of accessibility to even be on TV. It was a lot easier to just print some pamphlets out, and this mirrors how social media is so accessible that we are running into the same problems.
Twitter. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1187856185. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter (visited on 2023-12-01).
This is fairly off topic, but in recent years as social media has gained more prevalence, I have noticed that tweets and other types of posts have earned their own way of citing sources. Something I wonder is, when did Tweets start getting cited, and which format was the first to cite them?
Lists# The first way of combining data is by making a list. So we can make a list of the numbers from 1 to 10: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Learning about different data structures like lists, arrays, and dictionaries makes me wonder about the different applications for each one. For example, when are arrays used in social media, and why would they be selected over a list?
Wikipedia:Bots/Status. May 2022. Page Version ID: 1087413133. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Bots/Status&oldid=1087413133 (visited on 2023-11-17).
I was not aware that Wikipedia permitted bots on the platform. Before this class started, I assumed most platforms on the internet were heavily against the use of bots because of their association with spam.
Antagonistic bots can also be used as a form of political pushback that may be ethically justifiable.
This is just an anecdote, but I feel like ever since Twitter has been under new ownership with Elon Musk. The bot problem got a lot worse. I don't necessarily mean spam bots, but bots that farm engagement since you can get paid on Twitter now.
Started out as a critique of the idea, popular in some circles following World War 2, that men are naturally more fully developed, and more morally mature, than women. As the first care theorists pointed out, the only way this could be true is if we try to learn about ethics only by considering the lives and views of men. In American society at the time, male and female socialization were starkly different from each other. Of course socializing males and females to act in different ways will lead to them having different moral responses to situations. It is absurd, then, to come back and say that one way is more morally advanced than the other!
I'm genuinely surprised that this ideology became popular following World War II, considering the massive responsibilities women had to take up outside the household and in the workforce. It seems counterintuitive to the historical events preceding the spread of this idea.
Actions are judged on the sum total of their consequences (utility calculus) The ends justify the means. Utilitarianism: “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” That is, What is moral is to do what makes the most people the most happy. Key figures: Jeremy Bentham [b34] 1700’s England John Stuart Mill [b35], 1800’s England
Earlier in the text it is noted that European ethics focus heavily on the outcome rather than the intention. This seems to be consistent with Consequentialism with emphasizes that it is only the ends that matter and not how you arrived there. This makes me wonder what material changes caused this massive shift during the Enlightenment/Scientific Revolution?