Learning Journal II

WE ARE DATA READING | MY RESPONSE

By Santos Nwachukwu

    Well here we go again. Another assignment, another restless night of writing. Reading the We Are Data Readings was very eye opening and helped me understand how social media algorithms help tailor our person user experience on different social media sites. According to "We Are Data" we should test ourselves and browse the internet for a minimum of at least 5 minutes. Doing this shows us how we are assigned a specific role and identity in a database far off. Even with security statements issued by websites promising to protect our privacy, that is mostly just hear say and semantics. The moment we hop in the internet our privacy is lost and our data is constantly being scrounged and analyzed by many different companies to be sold.

    The basis of social media algorithms is structured the same for majority of all sites. Social media algorithms: personalize content and experience based on user activity, determines what posts and advertisements to show said user based on their activity, analyzes data to be sent off to other companies, and filters out potentially harmful content. Maciej Ceglowski explains how the world itself has: "the capacity to be observed, recorded, analyzed and stored into a databank. It is a very scary thought that a lot of things in our society is determined through social media algorithms. We essentially don't "own" ourselves online. Our identity is assigned to us by said algorithms and how we act online.

    Another big factor in what sites collect what data lies in politically influenced power struggles. Many different opposing parties have interests that they use to influence other platforms. For example data mining companies will sell information to political parties to use for voting data. All in all our world was established on data.