Survey results:

I interviewed some people to see what’s their opinion and feelings about their social media state change. Here are the questions I asked them:

1. What’s it like to watch your fans grow?
2. How does this affect self-perception/self-perception (self-esteem)?
3. With more people following you online, do you think you have more friends in real life? Will you feel lonelier? / and not lonely)
4. Does it feel like an addiction?
5. How do you think the change of social status (rising fans) on online platforms has changed your life?
6. What do you think of these platforms where you have a lot of followers? For leisure? Hobbies? Business?)

When people received a lot of “likes” or positive comments on social media platforms, they will feel more recognized by others and more confident. It’s common for people to have the feeling of addiction. When someone else’s “like state” is unstable, they will be afraid to see their dynamic state. They will get anxious when their fans are dropping. Compare to the off-line social, anxiety from social media platforms is renewed every second or minute.

With the development of fans, the idea of using social platforms as a career will arise, but most people will find it’s difficult and give up.

I imagine I will have a totally different life if I have 100,000 followers. I’m a person who almost don’t use social media. I don’t use Facebook, Instagram, Ticktock. I only kept WeChat for family connection because I dislike the software mixing my personal life and work/school together. I like the feeling of having a few close friends instead of a bunch of normal friends. I like face to face interaction instead of staring at the screen and sending text all the time. But I know it will be very hard for me to gave up these platforms if I have 100,000 followers(whatever which one).

I think many people study social media as an outsider’s perspective even if they are using these platforms, which can be relatively rational. And their scholar/artist trait enables them to resist social media craving for a certain degree. But the majority of people do not have that kind of trait. And I never look down the attraction and charm of social media platforms.

I’m thinking about how does the change in social media state change a person. What’s the difference between it and the real-life social state changing. How does social media shape a person? What role does it play?

A real-life social states change in the real world: People begin to say hello to you everywhere: in class, on a bus, people want to be in the same group with you, people like to invite you to parties. A typical high school queen bee movie figure. There are a lot of high school movies talk about a person become welcome but lost he/her original charm. What will the story happen on the internet?

If I wake up in a morning and found I have tons of fans, greeting me, praise me, asking me out, inviting me to dinner, give me a present. If every time hundreds of people click “like” in a few seconds I post a moment.

What will happen?

The problem with metrics is a big problem for AI

This article talked about some problems in AI and put forward some ways to improve it. We can’t measure the things that matter most. Metrics can, and will be gamed. Metrics tend to overemphasize short-term concerns. Many metrics gather data of what we do in highly addictive environments. 

One way yo keep metrics in their place is to consider a slate of many metrics for fuller picture. Data should be combined with listening to first-person experience of those working at these companies. Another key to keeping metrics in their proper place is to keep domain experts and those who will be most impacted closely involved in their development and use.

Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty

The writer used his own experience to illustrate the phenomenon of inadvertent algorithmic cruelty and possible ways to avoid it. He emphasized the importance of empathetic design. He promote people to increases awareness of and consideration for the failure modes, the edge cases, the worst-case scenarios, which are definitely important aspect for designers to consider and think about.

The black box society

The article makes a metaphor of the current secrecy problem as “black box”, a recording device and a system whose workings are mysterious. “Knowledge is power. To scrutinize others while avoiding scrutiny oneself in one of the most important forms of power.” The law aggressively protected the secrecy in commerce while staying silent when it comes to personal privacy. 

It might be worthwhile if the decline in personal privacy was matched by comparable levels of transparency from corporations and governments. But sadly, it hasn’t. The commerce and technology industries are still keeping the box closed, using three strategies: “real” secrecy, legal secrecy and obfuscation. 

“Transparency is not just an end in itself, but an internal step on the road to intelligibility.”

The authority is increasingly using algorithms, while there are a lot of questions we need to query. Are they fair? To what extent can we trust these automatically made decisions, instead of decisions based on human reflection? The distinction between state and market is fading. 

The era of being faith in big data must end

This Ted talks about what if algorithms are wrong. There are two aspects that the algorithm could be wrong. The first one is data, the second one is the definition of success. “Algorithms are opinions embedded in code.” The marketing trick tries to make people believe that algorithms are scientific and tries to intimidate people with algorithms. Algorithms can have deep destructive effects with good intentions. Algorithms can’t make things fair, because they repeat our past practices, our patterns. They automate the status quo. In some ways, algorithms are killing minorities. 

“data laundering” A process by which technologies hide ugly truths inside black-box algorithms and call them objective. 

We should check our data integrity; we should introspect the definition of success; we should improve our accuracy and we should give a long-term effect on the attention it deserved.

Data scientist: We should not be the arbiter of truth. We should be translators of ethical discussions that happen in a large society.

Non-data scientist: This is a political fight instead of math tests. We need to demand accountability for our algorithmic overlords. 

Automating inequality

More evolution than revolution. They rationalize and recreate politics. They promise to address bias but in fact, they just hide it.

They create empathy override, it eased emotions. The talk then gives some examples of people losing qualification of medical service due to algorithms. The limitations of data itself cause enormous concern. Feedback loop.

My experiment opting out of big data made me look like a criminal

The author wrote her experience of trying to opt out of big data. And she found that she was being treated as a criminal. She was suspected by banks because she withdraw a lot of cash. She has to carefully choose her words when she needed to communicate with other people online.  What she said “No one should have to act like a criminal just to have some privacy from marketers and tech giants.” is absolutely right but happening right now. 

I imagine I will have a totally different life if I have 100,000 followers. I’m a person who almost don’t use social media. I don’t use Facebook, Instagram, Ticktock. I only kept WeChat for family connection because I dislike the software mixing my personal life and work/school together. I like the feeling of having a few close friends instead of a bunch of normal friends. I like face to face interaction instead of staring at the screen and sending text all the time. But I know it will be very hard for me to gave up these platforms if I have 100,000 followers(whatever which one).

I think many people study social media as an outsider’s perspective even if they are using these platforms, which can be relatively rational. And their scholar/artist trait enables them to resist social media craving for a certain degree. But the majority of people do not have that kind of trait. And I never look down the attraction and charm of social media platforms.

I’m thinking about how does the change in social media state change a person. What’s the difference between it and the real-life social state changing. How does social media shape a person? What role does it play?

A real-life social states change in the real world: People begin to say hello to you everywhere: in class, on a bus, people want to be in the same group with you, people like to invite you to parties. A typical high school queen bee movie figure. There are a lot of high school movies talk about a person become welcome but lost he/her original charm. What will the story happen on the internet?

If I wake up in a morning and found I have tons of fans, greeting me, praise me, asking me out, inviting me to dinner, give me a present. If every time hundreds of people click “like” in a few seconds I post a moment.

What will happen?

Safiya Noble – Algorithms of Oppression

This talk is about the algorithms is oppressing certain groups of people. Actually, I think the algorithms are oppressing all of us. Because it uses the feature to measure people, and people shouldn’t be tagged. Due to the big data and algorithms “we have the tendency that computers make better decisions than human beings.” Women are coded as girls, woman of color are more likely to be mold as pornographic.

Ruha Benjamin – Race After Technology

This video talked about technical issues related to race. People in different colors and races are facing different interfaces. I like what she described imagination as a battlefield. And she gave us some examples like the police app. The purpose of the app is to report crime, but in reality, it became a tool of avoiding the crime. What people see about how dangerous an area is is dependent on the number of people imagined crime instead of real crime seems sarcastic to me.

Lisa Nakamura- Laboring infrastructures

This video is mostly around VR. She talked about people in the tech field who tried to use VR to create empathy, mostly by putting people into another person’s view and life. Such as refugees and other people who are having a hard life. This process is described by Romain Vak as a process of hacking your own body. And there are lots of people who are not able to turn the imagination into empathy, but something else.

What do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook | 

Computational Culture

The Social Photo

This material talks about the relationship between photography and social media from the documentary vision perspective. The writer wrote about vision changes at first. How we see is historically located and socially situated. Then the phenomenon of nostalgic filters became extremely popular raise the question of why they become popular and what do these photos mean. What behinds those analog-style photos is their social cognitive: authority, the feature of documentary and a sense of significance. The author talked about the social photos’ attributes and the transformation of the concepts of photography and photos. “What fundamentally makes a photo a social photo is a degree to which its existence as a stand-alone media object is subordinate to its existence as a unit of communication.” The focus is shifting.

Jill Walker Rettberg – What can’t we measure in a quantified world?

“A wonderful thing of digital media is you can measure it.”  There is something in common between the ways that we have seen photographs and the way we thinking about data and measurements. Just like photos were a representation of reality, we thoughts data representation of reality. But actually, those data usually have errors and should not be considered as reality. The word “Dataism” came out. Social media is bringing us up to be really good post-industrial citizens. We live in a day that is obsessed with numbers. 

I used to like measure myself from every perspective I can imagine. But then I found many measurements I’ve done is just creating noise in my life – they are not the truth of life and they are not actually helping. I think I gain a simpler yet happier life by throwing some criteria away.

What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook

This article detailed explained why we are in an age that everything is evaluated by numbers and how facebook constructed their rules of “more”. I like the extension very much. I think it reveals an attitude that people should have to see things and comment on things. More purified and natural. 

Wendy Chun – Programmed Visions

It seems impossible for us to know the global picture of new media. Due to the invisibility, ubiquity and alleged power of new media, know the extent, content, and effects of new media seems impossible.

So people started to look into what seems to be common to all new media objects and moments: software in order to have an understanding/ try to have an overview of new media.

Software is a visibly invisible or invisibly visible essence. 

It is the invisible whole that generates the sensuous parts. To know software has become a form of enlightenment. 

Based on metaphor, the software has become a metaphor for the mind, for culture, for ideology, for biology, and for the economy. s a universal imitator/machine, it encapsulates a logic of general substitutability: a logic of ordering and creative, animating disordering. Computers become a metaphor. Software engenders a sense of profound ignorance because of its clarity. We usually don’t know what’s behind our interface. But as a metaphor for metaphor, new media actually has more power. This ambiguous is building a new way to our increasingly complex world.

Matthew Fuller – How to be a Geek (book, pp. 12-14, and optionally pp. 63-71)

Writing about software is to try to draw outdoor conditions that are particular to the way in which computational systems. Computer science has become a fundamental cultural and political. We should treat this as a serious individual culture/ field of study instead of an integral field of other disciplines. Geeks are a group of people who have certain characteristics, they build a huge part in our contemporary life. Geeks created the internet and fight over its meaning. Contemporary technology is not simply an extension of a man. It’s stuffed the way of interpreting the world into a logical abstraction way. Study software requires us to combine computer science part with cultural theories.

Geert Lovink – Sad by Design (podcast w/ Douglas Rushkoff, 60m)

It seems that surveillance capitalism has become the fundamental element of studying new media. Technology will be our evolutionary successor. The speaker talked about a lot of things. Europe is expected to become a force to “fight against” the surveillance capitalism since it does not have it’s own silicon Vally and strict government controls like China. The change is unlikely to come from technology tycoons inside the industry. 

Soren Pold – New ways of hiding: towards metainterface realism (article)

Metainterface is a new interface paradigm. It makes the interface more abstract and ubiquitous. There are two ways of hiding, hide behind the simplified user interface and hide in the internal worlds. Interface draws on an engineering tradition to make itself disappear in transparency. It under both our willingness( the agreement) yet out of our willingness(we don’t know what exactly they are).   

-Shoshana Zuboff

This video talks about what is surveillance capitalism, how it engaged in our life and what will be the future of it. Surveillance capitalism is caused by IT companies using user’s data to surveillance people, and people are not aware of it in most circumstances. Those companies gained our data and sell them to third parties, and we have no idea what third parties will do to them. However, the speaker believes that this phenomenon exists because this is something no one has done before, it takes time for the public to wake up and enact related laws to constrain this behavior. Democracy will defeat surveillance capitalism eventually. 

• Carole Cadwalladr 

Cambridge analytical company was a company using Facebook user’s data to interact with the US presidential election and other political movements. They think politics is like fashion. They found connections between people’s personalities and which side they are more willing to vote for. Facebook was aware of this but didn’t actually try to stop this company from what they are doing. People can be controlled in shadow by some organization by analyzing data and permeate into daily digital life.

-Stuart A Thompson and Charlie Warzel

The smartphone on our phone can precisely track our position data. This applies to both normal people and celebrities. By looking into data, we are able to find who is doing something at where easily. Our demographic information can create audience profiles used in targeted advertising. Some companies offer their own ethical guidelines to govern it because of the absence of federal privacy law. “The greatest trick technology companies ever played was persuading society to surveil itself.”

-Drew Harwell 

Some college is using apps to surveillance their student to see if they attend class. They use data to decide what score can a student get. They even use students’ data to see if a student is “normal”. They thought in this way they can know and guide students better. While students were struggling with technical problems. Some students feel that they are adults and should have basic privacy. There are students and parents believe this kind of software is actually very helpful.

-Helen Nissenbaum

Helen mainly told us about some extension her team made in order to cause obfuscation.  “Obfuscation does not work by hiding rather it works by introducing noise.” Tract me not and Adnauseam is an extension that does random searching for users, so companies like Google and Facebook are not able to find users’ tire patterns. Her extensions are banned by google later on because it harmed the third parties: it harmed the income of commercials. 

-Jenny Davis

The author resists students from tracking clearly. University is a place for people to get through from students to adults, it’s for students to learn how to take care of themselves, do decision because they think they should do this from the bottom of their hearts instead of being forced to things. Learn to choose, learn to manage how to enjoy their freedom under restrictions, decide what are the truly important things to do. The surveillance will spread, not only for students but also for faculty and other university-related students.

When people are facing choices instead of force to choose the good/right things, it’s time for their to check their moral standard. If we want to create a society with trust, dignity, care, we have to give people room to train for these noble characters.