Instagram has been growing rapidly in the past few years into one of the most popular social apps out there, especially among young people. It is a very picture focused platform, with that comes with a very strong like culture. Other than liking their friends’ fresh new pictures, people also like on other contents that they are interested in. With every putting hashtags in their caption, we have already organized those contents for them, and Instagram has algorism to feed us more similar content as the ones we liked. It all seems like a good idea to have our feeds personalized with our preference, yet it also becomes a very popular place to advertise drugs. Recent searches on Instagram such as #oxy, #percocet, #painkillers, #painpills, #oxycontin and #adderall contains thousands of pictures of people showing off about their party life, drug addiction, and with some mixture of enticements for drug dealers. If you like or follow one of the drug dealers account, you’ll then be promoted by the algorithm with more pictures from other dealers. All that drug dealers need to do is to put the hashtags, and social media will do the rest of the work for them. “We’re not yet sophisticated enough to tease apart every post to see if it’s trying to sell someone illegal drugs or they are taking Xanax cause they are stressed out,” said Everson, Facebook’s vice president for global marketing solutions. “Obviously, there is some stuff that gets through that is totally against our policy, and we’re getting better at it.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/instagram-has-a-drug-problem-its-algorithms-make-it-worse/2018/09/25/c45bf730-bdbf-11e8-b7d2-0773aa1e33da_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1c07dba5895a

Ford recently teamed up with Ekso Bionics to develop a vest that can help workers hold extra weight and reduce risks of injury at the assembly line. The vest has already been tested in two Michigan vehicle assembly plants, employees in 15 Ford factories in seven countries are now wearing the exoskeleton vest. A typical Ekso vest wearing worker has to reach up to screw in bolts onto the car that’s overhead, which can add a lot of pressure to their back, neck, and arms. According to the news, “the vest helps lift and support from five to 15 pounds per arm and can be worn by workers who range from 5-foot 2-inches to 6-foot 4-inches tall.” Workers feedbacks on the vest are vastly positive. I think this is a very good example of technology helps making human activities easier and safer. There are only so few of such wearable techonology that is available currently and I think the potential for such technology is limitless. And in the future, I believe there will be more and more wearable technologies that can help us with many aspects of life.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/ford-workers-exoskeleton-vests/#/1

While League of Legends is still leading the gaming industry around the world, there is another game rising to the top quickly in the past year. Today it’s very hard to go the social media and not come across contents that are related to the game “Fortnite”. Taking the concept after the game PUBG, Fortnite has taken on a very different approach to make the graphics look very cartoony and combined building elements from that of Minecraft. Currently, Fortnite holds the record of most game related videos uploaded on Youtube in a month. Also, when Drake joined a popular twitch streamer to do a live stream of Fortnite gaming, it set an all-time high record of concurrent views. But how exactly did Fortnite climb up to the top so fast? First of all, Fortnite is made free to download which makes it has no barrier to entry. Therefore, Fortnite can open up to more demographics, especially of those in young ages. It also doesn’t require a lot of processing power to run, you don’t need the latest graphics card and processors to run it smoothly unlike that of PUBG. Another thing that really helped Fornite to take off is that it has included my pop culture references in the game, which is really appealing to young generations. As one of the top streamers, Dr. DisRespect tweeted “Fortnite dominating the skins game”, Fortnite essentially has given the characters personalities. Everyone can customize their characters how they like it to be; therefore, it has made an intense game into a fun game of representing themselves and everyone is more willing to share their funny game plays on social media, which helps the game to reach more potential players.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-fortnite-became-the-biggest-game-on-the-internet?ref=scroll

For any information that is publically available, yes. That is, anything you posted publically on the social media. In the age of the Internet and Big data, everyone now has the power in hand to generate any content on social media for millions to see. As the saying states, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Though I respect that everyone is entitled to their opinions and is indeed free to express them, sometimes words do inherently have consequences. Different from expressing opinions in real life, words do tend to stay on the internet, even after you deleted them, which brings to the question of privacy. Because of such an open environment on the internet, the line of privacy also got blurred. To look at the concept of privacy from a modern approach, the term “contextual integrity” was developed by Helen Nissenbaum of New York University, in which it is described as people nowadays do not require a complete privacy as long as certain social realm is met. According to Nissenbaum, contextual integrity is defined by four variables. The first one is the that privacy is provided by appropriate flows of information, followed by the capacities in which the individuals sending and receiving the information are acting. The third one is the information that is involved in the flow, and lastly is the “principle of transmission”. In the realm of social media, people are more than willing to share their personal thoughts or personal information without thinking about the consequences. As the correlation between one’s social media data and the person is dramatically increasing, it is very important to consider what content we are posting on social media, because your data might just represents you one day.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/07/18/josh-haders-all-star-game-controversy-shows-how-online-ghosts-will-haunt-us-forever/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2f9898677f55

Nowadays with all the digital technology evolving at a rapid speed, we have been introduced into a new realm of the digital world. In the digital world, it’s a wild wild west of no rules or restraints. Everyone is an explorer in this world. But as early explorers like google or facebook have gained enough knowledge of it to establish their own system within the realm, they essentially have the power to manipulate how this system works. However, check and balance is the foundation of everything. As those tech giants gaining more power, it is certainly important to have rules to put in place so that the power they have won’t be abused and our rights as average users can be protected. When we travel from pages to pages on the internet, we leave a trail of personal information, and those information are collected and stored by the companies. Pieces all this information together, they inherently have a portrayal of who we are. This is essentially our information created by us, companies shouldn’t have the right to just do whatever they want with it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/technology/tech-industry-federal-privacy-law.html

The article “Network Introduction” is a intro level review on the very complex system of network. Briefly, network is a pattern of relationships that connect people, ideas, institutions or objects. Network reveals the relationships between different individuals. With more individuals in the network, it also makes it much more difficult to break down the relationship between them. A network is essentially a graph made of nodes and links. Each node represents each individual, and links are the connections between those nodes. Together they reveals the whole network. What’s even more fascinating is that according to Six Degree of Separation theory, each two random individuals in the network within six steps. It is also a representation of our real-life social network, and the entire earth population is in this network. With people now getting closely connected more than ever before through social media, it is believed that this six steps are getting even smaller.

Newman-Networks_an_Introduction_chap7_pp168-234 (1)-ta8i3w

The article “Online Reviews Are Biased. Here’s How to Fix Them” points out the problem that online reviews about products or services generally tend to represent the extreme views, in which customers with very good or bad experience are more motivated to leave a review. Instead, those with normal experience barely write reviews, which explains why two or three stars reviews are rarely seen online. To fix such polarized reviews online in general, the author offers two approaches. The first one is prosocial incentives. By reminding customers that their reviews can also help others who are seeking jobs, it is found that customers are more likely to leave an unbiased review. The second approach is a monetary incentive, which offers customer money to write reviews. In the study conducted by the author, most participants are paid 20 cents per review with some get paid more. Compared to prosocial approach, results from monetary tends to be more biased unless the incentive is high enough.

https://hbr.org/2018/03/online-reviews-are-biased-heres-how-to-fix-them

The article “Watching television without pity” generally expresses the trend of convergence between television and internet as the popularity of internet platforms are on the rise. TV shows now often times offer their own platforms for fans to interact and express their thoughts about the show. This emergence transforms audiences from passive consuming to active engagement, which makes them feel more involved in the process of the show and increases fan loyalty. This also gives producers the means to get more insights on how their core audiences about the show. As the author quoted, ““If the Internet is your audience, TV is quite like a play…Movies are a done deal—there’s no give and take—but in a play, you listen to the applause, the missing laughs, the boos. It’s the same with the Internet. If you ignore that sort of response, you probably shouldn’t be working in TV right now” (Sella 2002, 62) But the author also argues that the creative interaction among the fans also comes with exploitation by producers. Those fans who spend hours on platforms such as TWoP to share their opinions and devotions are the “free labor” in the “social factory” environment.

Andrejevic, Marc – Watching Television Without Pity-2ddqekl

To understand social media logic, first we have to understand what social media is. Unlike traditional mass media where the producers and audiences take on strict roles, in which all the content creation is controlled in the hands of producers and audiences job are strictly to consuming the well-prepared content. In social media, it creates a much more interactive platform where every audience has the power to create content at the same time. In fact, social media is mainly powered by the massive amount of user-generated content. Therefore, social media logic is also very much different from mass media logic.

The social media logic is illustrated in four key terms: programmability, popularity, connectivity and datafication. Programmability in mass media is referred to as the continuous flow of media content 24/7 manipulated by the producers to keep audiences hooked. In social media, programmability is defined as how the algorism of a social media platform can influence users’ experiences on consuming and creating information. It might seems like it’s more on the technological side of the social media, but it’s a two way street in which the algorism is affected by human agency. Social media sites have to constantly update their programmings, big or small, to offer users better experiences so that they will stay on the site.

Second is the popularity aspect. Although mass media has been practicing the “popularity” by pushing people with more fame and exposure on to the screen, social media in the early days set their agenda to give every user equal share in their content being seen. However, it has changed over years with algorism filtering out more popular content to put it on top. In most social media platforms, the popularity is determined by likes and followers. “Like” is the currency in social media, the more likes you get the more popular you are, and your content is more likely to be seen by other users. It also sometimes translate into real life financial gain because companies are likely to approach to sponsor their content, and those companies knows that their ad will be much more likely to be seen as well.

Thirdly, connectivity is social media platforms’ ability to connect users with other users and user-generated contents. Unlike mass media where media institutions set their agenda to what people their content is speaking to, social media connectivity are mostly forged by users themselves. Users are choosing what kind of content they would like to browse and what groups they want to connect with. Once users have shown their preferences, again the algorism kicks in and start to recommend contents that are more likely to fit the user’s taste. Such function may seem more convenient to the users, but it also introduces questions of how much of personal data is being analyzed by these companies. It is a similar mechanism to the targeted ads which has already faced a lot of privacy challenges.

Last but not least is the datafication, it is defined by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier as “the networked platforms to render into data many aspects of the world have never quantified before.” At its essence, every single thing that’s being generated on social media platform is data, from an account name change to a new crazy Trump tweet. With social media growing larger everyday, more and more data is being added onto the already massive data flow daily. The term “raw data” is brought up in the article, which describes that the massive amount of data that is channeling through the network is “raw”. Whether data can be raw or not is a very big and profound question. In my opinion, raw data is very hard to achieve because any alteration or manipulation to the data changes the nature of the data, and as the data channels and stored through the network it’s also being altered simultaneously.

Understanding Social Media Logic – Van Dijck & Poell (1)-1upaksx

This article generally introduced emoji about how it’s developed and then integrated into our communication. Emoji seems to be just a tool we use in our daily online interaction, but it has always been embodied with commercial purposes from its birth till now. According to the article, the emoji as we know today all started with a yellow smiley face. It was first used by the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, and Ohio’s Guarantee Mutual Company as a marketing campaign to restore public images because a smile is always contagious and people are more likely to be appealed to it. On the other side, the popularity of the emoji today also has to do with its social effect. We as people are heavily relied on visual communication just as much as we do on linguistics communication. Therefore, when we rely solely on the written language in social media and messaging, it is very prone to miscommunication. Emoji brings the visual element into the online communication environment, which enables it to create a much more similar environment as face to face communication. But different from face to face communication, emoji has formed its unique culture with millions of users interact around it every day. To learn more, please refer to the article https://sites.tufts.edu/mythritualsymbol2017/files/2017/08/stark-crawford-conservatism-emoji.pdf