Week 15 Reading Response

NUMBERS ON FACEBOOK

I mostly agreed with this reading but I think the author overestimates in parts the influence of the numbers on certain user behaviors on Facebook. I'd like to think for example that sending and accepting friend requests is still more influenced by human discretion than it is by our obsession with numbers. There's a host of reasons why, to each individual person logging on to the social media platform with histories and experiences and prejudices, etc, a "+1" shouldn't just be a "+1." But what do I know? The author does state that many view their friend counts as status markers and I do have have a friend who once said he had to start an additional Facebook account long ago because apparently they'd reached the limit on the number of friends they were allowed to keep on Facebook.

THE PROMISE OF BIG DATA

On the subject of human discretion (maybe there's a better term for this), I read this article and one of the things that jumped out at me was the part about how the people who volunteered through crowdflower to help analyze Sarah Fortune's "movies" had no scientific expertise. Generally, I tend to come at crowdsourcing from a cynical standpoint because as someone who works in the creative field, I've seen enough companies use crowdsourcing as a way to take advantage of people eager to prove their creative worth. The end results almost always end up sacrificing nuance that comes with applying expertise to the problem in favor of something that is cheap and crowd pleasing. I'm not sure how this translates in the field of scientific research but I suspect having a large group of non-scientists analyze scientific data comes with its own problems.

SOCIAL BIAS

This article had me asking the question: can sensitivity, perspective or awareness be programmed into software? I suspect the answer is yes but I take the many unfortunate examples provided in the article of software displaying bias as just another negative effect of a deeply rooted culture in the tech industry where heterosexual white males see a lot more representation than any other group.

HYPOCRISY

I have little to add after reading this article because I honestly don't fear website trackers like most others do. I'm especially indifferent to fears about google analytics being embedded inside web pages. Maybe it's just my experience with google analytics. It doesn't strike me as some nefarious thing that companies pay big bucks for (it is readily available to anyone with a google account) and I suspect the same for some other trackers. I've used google analytics code on many websites I've designed and I can say that the end goal there for the clients have always been to help make the user experience better by seeing how people were engaging the content. I'm not saying this is the same for all analytics software and all trackers but I just find it mildly amusing when something I use and check often gets lumped in with big, scary tracking softwares.