Nathan Jurgenson – The Social Photo – (book, pp. 1-15)
I remember when I first got Instagram, I’d add all my friends and wheel through all the different filters to see which one looked the best. I can definitely attest to these old, vintage, nostalgic styles. I think it’s interesting because I think people my age who were born in the late 90s, we grow up with these older technologies of cameras where we take these less accurate and pixelated images, yet now as we’re older we yearn to go back to those childhood days and place these filters on as if we were transported back.
Jill Walker Rettberg – “What can’t we measure in a quantified world?” (talk, 20m)
It’s crazy that in such a digitized world, almost everything we do can be tracked or measured. This idea of life-logging or self quantifying seems both immensely interesting and at the same time scary. We were already talking about third parties taking our data, how would we know that these apps aren’t reusing the information we give them? That’s another topic, though. I was surprised that someone even created an app to measure sex. Something that people would consider so intimate and emotional, data and logic just seems to be the complete opposite and frankly a mood killer. Speaking of tracking, I downloaded an AI texting app that keeps track of the texts that I send over my phone. It counts the amount of times emojis are used, question marks, words in order to measure and guess what kind of a person it is that you’re talking too and will tell you to check up on someone if they’re acting weird. While I have always thought that not everything could be measured, I might have just been convinced otherwise. Sure, some data is unreliable, but we learn from it, fix the tweaks, and we continue measuring.
Ben Grosser – What do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on FB (article)
I won’t lie, there are times that I have been on Reddit, and if something has a ton of upvotes I will upvote it without thinking too much into it and vice versa for ones with a ton of downvotes. While I would normally go with my gut, when I see these numbers, my instinctual reaction is to follow the majority. I also felt this way with mutual friends on Facebook. If I don’t know who they are, I might accept them just solely based on the fact that we have 300 mutual friends (I don’t do that now for my safety now, and will ask others about them before I accept). Even outside of social media. We are also judged on our self worth numerically through grades, net worth, and even age! If somebody is younger than me, I normally feel more confident talking to them since I feel a bit wiser. I’m wondering if our idea of good scores in academia correlates with our want for high scores in social media as well. The more metrics we give of ourselves, the more they use it against us.