We also hope you are able to recognize how trends on internet-based social media tie to the whole of human history of being social and can apply lessons from that history to our current situations.
The great thing about the internet is that everything is documented. Every tweet, every post, every sentence is still on the internet and accessible. This in turn makes it easy to apply past happenings to our current situations over the internet.
We covered a number of topics in relation to social media: Bots Data History of Social Media Authenticity Trolling Data Mining Privacy and Security Accessibility Recommendation Algorithms Virality Mental Health Content Moderation Content Moderators Crowdsourcing Harassment Public Shaming Capitalism Colonialism
The "history of social media" is from such a short time period yet there are millions of different important occurrences that have happened over the internet. CNN and Fox are generally the biggest news outlets in the country, but Instagram and X communicate news faster and more widespread without a doubt.
A government owns the businesses (sometimes called “government services”)
Socialism is a system where the government or the community collectively owns and manages resources and businesses. The goal is to reduce economic inequality by ensuring shared ownership and fair distribution of wealth.
“an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market”
This is a great definition of capitalism. However, I feel there are so many levels to capitalism that one definition doesn't have the ability to truly highlight the many depths and sections that it contains.
In this view, a good parent might see their child doing something bad or dangerous, and tell them to stop. The child may feel shame (they might not be developmentally able to separate their identity from the momentary rejection).
I felt this when I was younger. The simple idea that one of my parents were mad at me made me feel both shame and guilt. In this case, it's actually good that the child begins to learn the difference between constructive criticism and shaming.
In at least some views about shame and childhood1, shame and guilt hold different roles in childhood development:
Shaming and guilt for a child has a certain time and place to create a mature adult. Although, excessive use of either of these can cause extreme self-esteem and self-image issues.
Cyberstalking: Continually finding the account of someone, and creating new accounts to continue following them. Or possibly researching the person’s physical location.
Cyberstalking is an act that is all too easy to do online and is not talked about very much. I believe this is because you can log onto someones social media and see their whole life with the touch of a button. it's almost as if it's normal now.
Individual harassment (one individual harassing another individual) has always been part of human cultures, bur social media provides new methods of doing so.
The fact that people can sit behind a screen and say whatever they feel with no consequence is interesting. 100 years ago, direct criticism would be said face to face and dealt with accordingly.
There have been many efforts to use computers to replicate the experience of communicating with someone in person, through things like video chats, or even telepresence robots].
This has been an effort since screens with cameras originally hit the market. Although, I feel that there will never be a true way to replicate face-to-face interaction between two humans. Creators may become close, but true interaction in conversation will always occur when two individuals are in the same location.
When tasks are done through large groups of people making relatively small contributions, this is called crowdsourcing. The people making the contributions generally come from a crowd of people that aren’t necessarily tied to the task (e.g., all internet users can edit Wikipedia), but then people from the crowd either get chosen to participate, or volunteer themselves.
I've never heard of the term crowdsourcing before. Although, after having had learned the term, it makes sense how it applies to almost all websites on the internet.
Some systems have no moderators. For example, a personal website that can only be edited by the owner of the website doesn’t need any moderator set up (besides the person who makes their website).
This makes a lot of sense for websites that are only authored by one source. However, for an app such as Instagram, moderators are needed to keep the "citizen journalists" under control.
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, mass-produced unsolicited messages, generally advertisements, scams, or trolling.
Personally I feel that this is vital for social media. A surplus of extra advertisements or information makes for an unusable platform and quickly deteriorates. This may be one of the largest reasons Instagram, X, Facebook, etc. are so popular.
Many have anecdotal experiences with their own mental health and those they talk to. For example, cosmetic surgeons have seen how photo manipulation on social media has influenced people’s views of their appearance:
It's interesting that people have done experiments of how social media effects self appearance. My question is if there's a significant difference between men and women, and if so, how much?
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.
Honestly this makes sense. I have younger sisters that have both had odd instances on social media and particularly Instagram. Especially during quarantine when many people's screen time sky rocketed.
Natural Selection Some characteristics make it more or less likely for an organism to compete for resources, survive, and make copies of itself
The wooly mammoths were unable to adapt to a changing landscape and the reduced availability of their preferred food sources, eventually leading to their extinction. This is a result of natural selection favoring species better adapted to the conditions, rather than a deliberate process causing extinction.
Biological evolution is how living things change, generation after generation, and how all the different forms of life, from humans to bacteria, came to be.
Biological evolution is the process when a living being must adapt to a factor of the surrounding environment to better thrive. This may come to food, sleep, or effectiveness in another vital area to maintain survival.
What people near you have been liking, interacting with, or hovering over (they can find your approximate location, like your city, from your internet IP address, and they may know even more precisely)
This is a bit of a scary thought honestly. The fact that specific apps have the ability to access my IP address is insane. This along with the fact that there's a chance that our phones are listening to us to know what to recommend is crazy. I'm guessing this is all tied up in the "terms and conditions" that nobody reads before using a new app.
When social media platforms show users a series of posts, updates, friend suggestions, ads, or anything really, they have to use some method of determining which things to show users. The method of determining what is shown to users is called a recommendation algorithm, which is an algorithm (a series of steps or rules, such as in a computer program) that recommends posts for users to see, people for users to follow, ads for users to view, or reminders for users.
I can completely understand how a recommendation algorithm would be vital to growing a business or online account. As a consumer online, it's prevalent when specific videos or posts are recommended onto my page, especially posts specifically pertaining to my personal interests.
Which abilities are expected of people, and therefore what things are considered disabilities, are socially defined. Different societies and groups of people make different assumptions about what people can do, and so what is considered a disability in one group, might just be “normal” in another.
It makes a lot of sense that people have different perspectives from their own abilities and disabilities. I can understand that the people we surround ourselves with become our social "norm". We all have different experiences in different environments.
A disability is an ability that a person doesn’t have, but that their society expects them to have.1 For example:
I forget that these examples are struggles in everyday life for those exposed. I've never thought about being too tall on an airplane would be a disability, but I can understand how that would be the "absence" of an ability. On the flip side, being too short to reach something at the grocery store is something that my short mother experiences all the time.
When we use social media platforms though, we at least partially give up some of our privacy.
This is a short statement but speaks volumes. When we go online and create profiles, we're in turn giving up a portion of ourselves to the world and therefore creating an outside view on our behalf. It could be positive or negative, but the view to the outside world is public and prevalent.
There are many reasons, both good and bad, that we might want to keep information private.
This is the most in-depth list I could possibly find for reasons to keep our information private. One I found particularly interesting was the last one and being surveilled by a company or government. We often don't think about these things or even expect them to be true, but they very well could be true.
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
Although users would usually not permit that platforms can use all this information, it's usually listed in the "terms and conditions" that nobody reads before using an app. TikTok for example has extensive reach into peoples phones after downloading the app, although many don't care for the information to be shared anyways.
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
I always found it interesting that some website require you to use a profile picture. I'm sure there are people out there that don't feel the need to put a photo of themselves on the internet in that sense. Instead they use a photo of their dog or a photo of the beach etc... A minuscule aspect but I thought I'd give an opinion.
Punish or stop: Some trolling is in service of some view of justice, where a person, group or organization is viewed as doing something “bad” or “deserving” of punishment, and trolling is a way of fighting back.
This is a way that people online like to hide behind their screens and voice their opinion without consequence. Whether it be a simple troll or a detailed paragraph, the feeling of "punishing" someone online can feel powerful and easily accessible.
If the immediate goal of the action of trolling is to cause disruption or provoke emotional reactions, what is it that makes people want to do this disruption or provoking of emotional reactions?
Honestly, people tend to get a thrill out of getting to mess with other people. Because of this, the internet is a great place for people to get their fix. Amusement is definitely the most prominent factor when it comes to trolling onlline
As a rule, humans do not like to be duped. We like to know which kinds of signals to trust, and which to distrust. Being lulled into trusting a signal only to then have it revealed that the signal was untrustworthy is a shock to the system, unnerving and upsetting. People get angry when they find they have been duped. These reactions are even more heightened when we find we have been duped simply for someone else’s amusement at having done so.
I agree that I do indeed do not like to be duped. I am a person that likes to have control over situations even when it is most definitely out of my own personal control. Being lied to and having to accept the fact that it was false reality is always something that takes time for me to wrap my head around. On top of this, it would give me even more mental trouble to have found out that it was to fuel someone else's amusement.
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.
I find this quote particularly interesting because it's a blatant example of fake news to the public. Along with that, it's astonishing that the channel continued to grow even after having been proved to be fictional. It goes to show that people want to see or even believe things that are seemingly outlandish.
Before this centralization of media in the 1900s, newspapers and pamphlets were full of rumors and conspiracy theories. 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.
It's interesting because it shows how people communicated information in the past without current day technology. Graffiti and hand-copying books were the ways of interactivity. This history offers means into our evolving knowledge-sharing methods.
Graffiti and other notes left on walls were used for sharing updates, spreading rumors, and tracking accounts Books and news write-ups had to be copied by hand, so that only the most desired books went “viral” and spread
This is interesting because it shows how people in the past shared information before modern day technology. Graffiti was used for updates and said rumors. Hand-copying works meant only the most intriguing texts had the potential to go "viral," displaying the effort shown in information dissemination. This history gives valuable information into our evolving tactics of sharing knowledge of interactivity.
Computers typically store text by dividing the text into characters (the individual letters, spaces, numerals, punctuation marks, emojis, and other symbols). These characters are then stored in order and called strings (that is a bunch of characters strung together, like in Fig. 4.6 below).
This is interesting because it shows how computers keep and process textual information by breaking it down into individual characters and putting them in a sequence, creating what is commonly known as strings. Comprehending this process is important for various applications, including word processing, data analysis, and computing development, as it makes the foundation for how computers work with human interaction and textual workings.
Binary consisting of 0s and 1s make it easy to represent true and false values, where 1 often represents true and 0 represents false. Most programming languages have built-in ways of representing True and False values
This is interesting because binary code's simplicity in representing true and false values as 0s and 1s forms the baseline for various digital systems, and majority of programming languages incorporate this basic concept for logic and decision-making in software.
On the other hand, some bots are made with the intention of harming, countering, or deceiving others. For example, people use bots to spam advertisements at people. You can use bots as a way of buying fake followers, or making fake crowds that appear to support a cause (called Astroturfing).
Some bots are intentionally designed to cause harm or deceive others. For instance, they might flood users with incessant and unwanted advertisements, manipulate social media follower counts to create a false sense of popularity or influence. These deceptive practices highlight the darker side of bot usage in the digital realm, emphasizing the importance of vigilance and awareness when encountering bots online.
Bots, on the other hand, will do actions through social media accounts and can appear to be like any other user. The bot might be the only thing posting to the account, or human users might sometimes use a bot to post for them.
In my personal opinion, the use of bots on social media presents a double-edged sword. On one hand, bots can offer convenience and automation, making it easier for users to manage their accounts, schedule posts, and engage with their audience more effectively. They can be valuable tools for businesses and individuals looking to streamline their online presence.
“Rational Selfishness”: It is rational to seek your own self-interest above all else. Great feats of engineering happen when brilliant people ruthlessly follow their ambition. That is, Do whatever benefits yourself. Altruism is bad.
The idea of "rational selfishness" calls for prioritizing one's self-interest as a rational decision, emphasizing that profound accomplishments in fields like engineering happen when highly motivated people relentlessly go after their goals. In this case the focus is on doing what benefits thyself, while altruism is perceived in a negative light.
Being and becoming an exemplary person (e.g., benevolent; sincere; honoring and sacrificing to ancestors; respectful to parents, elders and authorities, taking care of children and the young; generous to family and others). These traits are often performed and achieved through ceremonies and rituals (including sacrificing to ancestors, music, and tea drinking), resulting in a harmonious society.
Confucianism serves as a blueprint for people on how to lead their daily lives, putting the importance on the cultivation of a virtuous character. It is primarily regarded as family-centric, with its core values focused on giving support to family and community. Also, Confucius emphasized the significance of schooling as the most important means for people to acquire and internalize these moral values.