Nathan Jurgenson – The Social Photo – (book, pp. 1-15)

This article made me think a lot about the rise of photography. This is really the original form of social media. There was a lot of people who thought negatively about photography similarly to how boomers think about social media today. Having smart phones has definitely extended the true meaning of photography and how it is so accessible to billions of people around the world. One quote I liked from this reading was “I treat social photography here less as an evolution in photography or as

the advance of amateur snapshot photos and more as a broader development in self expression memory and sociality.” This is a good point to make because there has definitely been a huge change in photography due to the accessibility of cameras, and the social media revolution, but a majority of these images that are shared isn’t really photography but rather a way for someone to document there life and express themselves. 

Jill Walker Rettberg – “What can’t we measure in a quantified world?” (talk, 20m)

I found it interesting that the main focus here was wearable items outside of your iPhone. Since this is from 2014 where apple watches weren’t as popular, there was lots of other inventions for tracking yourself and digitizing your life. The sex app really stuck out to me for a few reasons. I think it a really poor way to measure sex, and this idea can be explained with other applications too. With step trackers, sleep trackers, heart rate monitors, and many other “wearables,” humans are getting a very skewed view of what they think they’re body is telling them. Not to say technology doesn’t assist us in measuring certain things about it, it’s just that it is a small slice of the big picture. A few thousand extra steps, or few extra minutes of sleep that was recorded on your phone, can give you a wrong idea of how your body is actually improving or not. 

Ben Grosser – What do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on FB

The most interesting part of this article is when you discussed the metrics of Facebook and what they really mean. Obviously the main purpose behind metrics is tap into ones psychology and make them use the platform for. That is the primary goal of Facebook because they want to keep growing. A great way to describe this addiction is when you explained how people get anxiety from likes and the timeliness of them. When things get older and don’t get enough likes, you have no choice but to crave an escape from this feeling.. so you post more. And since social media is so quick, and so vast, the idea of something getting “old” can be a few days, or even just a few hours for some.