Anna Margaret Foster

Readings:
A Day in the Life of a Social Media Manager
A Week in the Life of a Senior Meeting and Event Planner
A Week in the Life of a Graphic Producer/Designer

After reading the “Day/Week in the Life of” articles, I learned many things about the field that I am pursuing. As a senior journalism major who has specialized in public relations, I always have known that I wanted to be in an environment that allows me to communicate with others while working. The main thing that stood out to me in these readings is something that I have always expected as a journalism major but that all three of the people in each field seem to share in their daily work; a far from routine day. Peters, Thorowgood, and Thorndike all detailed how they often spend many hours working with clients just to go home and spend all night to work on a project. The nights are long in this field and it often requires a lot of self-discipline to be able to keep up. Another thing I found interesting is that the people spoke about how drastically COVID-19 has changed their work environment. I have never really thought about how people in these fields have had to resort to strictly digital mediums in the wake of the pandemic and how difficult it is to make this change. Many people are having to learn new technologies for the first time in order to keep up with the tasks that used to be simple before 2020.

Readings:
IRL Podcast: What If Women Built the Internet?
Why coders want to optimize the world

In the last episode of the IRL podcast hosted by Manoush Zomorodori titled “What If Women Built the Internet?”, founders of a company Kate Dweyer and Penelope Gazin discussed how they used a fake mans name to send emails to others in order to be taken seriously. I find this very sad to hear but I also think that this kind of sexual discrimination still goes on in the workplace today. I feel like way more often, men get taken more seriously in the office and heard more than women, but we must realize that inclusivity in the work place reaps more success. When we give all people the chance to represent themselves, we create a safer internet full of diverse ideas and values where everyone can feel heard.

In the Vox podcast “Why coders want to optimize the world” with host Hope Reese, Reese and Clive Thompson talk about how diversity in the workplace of coding is becoming more prevalent with more women applying to take the job. The podcast discussed how algorithms push content up and how it is important to have people of diverse backgrounds to code information so that it will include a broader audience. I find it very important to show diversity in the work environment and I feel like we are moving forward in the right direction, but that is not good enough.

Readings:

Device Etiquette
You 2.0 Deep Work

When reading these articles, I thought more deeply about how as a society advances so does technology. We have everything we ever need to know constantly at our fingertips, which can be both extremely beneficial and also pose problems. We often get distracted by technology and this can effect the amount of work that we get done and even limit our overall performance. By reading these articles I was educated on what “deep work” is because I had never heard of that phrase before.

Readings
Under Employers’ Gaze, Gen Z Is Biting Its Tongue On Social Media
Inside the Weird, and Booming, Industry of Online Influence

In the NPR article by Hafsa Quraishi, Quarashi speaks with journalism student Malak Silmi about the link our social media plays in finding jobs. According to the article, 70 percent of employers and job recruiters check social media during the hiring process, which I find very interesting and kind of have mixed feelings about. I understand that employers want their companies to uphold a good image but I think that what you do outside of work should not dictate whether you get a job or not. I mean sure if you are questionable of a person’s character after an interview you could look to their social media for more insight on their life, but I do not agree with employers not hiring a candidate because of content they found on social media. The article also discusses how social media users of the GenZ generation often clean up their profiles or delete old posts that no longer reflect their personal life. Gen Zers also can make sure their profile is only visible to people they want by setting their account to private, changing their profile name, or creating a fake account. Although there are multiple ways to control your social media presence, the Armer of CareerBuilder still urges young people to post with caution.

In the Wired article titled, Inside the Weird, and Booming, Industry of Online Influence, writer Paris Martineau discusses how few influencers properly disclose information about receiving money, gifts or products from brands to advertise. According to the article, in 2018, more than 3.7 million ads were posted to the Instagram in 2018, but those numbers only include properly disclosed ads. Having a massive social media following comes with responsibility though, as many influencers are looked at for trustful reviews and feedback of products. There are also engagement services that can take the average Instagram platform to new heights by using your social profile to like, comment, and follow others in hopes of gaining a follow back.

Both of these articles gave me an insight on how big of a role social media and an online presence plays in our daily lives. Social media is a job for some, but for others it can be the exact reason they do not make money. I found it interesting that employers find it helpful to look through a job seekers social feeds because I feel like this could create a bias of who the person could be as an employee.

Readings
How The Times Analyzed Location Tracking Companies
Wearable Technology & Being Tracked at Work

Tests done between July and November by the New York Times to examine the location tracking industry, tested both the Android and iOS versions of 10 apps. In The New York Times article, “How The Times Analyzed Location Tracking Companies“, reporters found that many apps were transmitting our data to other sites. The test showed that each app tested granted permission to collect location data as well as that many location companies receive data from app makers. The article gives a list of the apps included in the test, along with comment from the companies. Apps such as WeatherBug, The Weather Channel, theScore, and GasBuddy, to name a few each collect location data from their users on both Android and iOS when a user gave permission.

The Washington Post posted in a 2019 article that researchers at Dartmouth are coming up with a mobile-sensing system that can measure employee performance with almost 80 percent accuracy. The app monitors physical and emotional signals that employees produce during the day to evaluate bias. The results showed that high performers tend to have lower rates of phone usage and also had better sleep than the lower performing colleagues. Some argue that these tools of collecting information of employees is meaningful to the workspace, but at the same time could be volatile if it falls into a company’s hands without consent.

The main takeaway from both of these articles is that most apps and websites that we visit often collect our information and use it to evaluate consumer habits. I was very aware that many websites use location services if we allow them, but I did not know that almost every website does these things. In today’s fast paced world, as we quickly click through ads, we must stop and realize that many of these websites may not be using our information for the right reasons, and many times we may not even realize we are allowing these companies access to this part of our lives.

Readings
IRL Podcast: Bot or Not
IRL Podcast: Privacy or Profit, Why Not Both

When Veronica Belmont spoke with Jack Hirsch, CEO of Butter.ai. and an avid supporter of net neutrality, in the IRL Podcast: Bot or Not, Hirsch talked about how the Federal Communications Commission in America (FCC) voted to kill the rules in place to protect open internet. The public logged more than 22 million votes in support of keeping net neutrality rules leading up to the vote, but Jack found out that among those in favor were millions of fake comments from dead people, made-up email addresses and others whose names were stolen to make comments about messages supporting repeal of the rules. This brought Hirsch and Belmont to the conversation of bots and how they are used by programmers to influence consumers. Belmont also spoke with Lauren Kunze, CEO of Pandorabots, the world’s largest developer of Chatbots about how bots are having a serious real world impact on policies and affecting individual’s lives in general. According to Kunze, there is a 100% chance we have interact with bots in our routine internet activity without even knowing it. Belmont argued that bots are fundamental to our online lives, but we have to be careful about what part of our lives our impacted by them.

In the IRL: Podcast: Privacy or Profit, Why Not Both, Manoush Z. began with footage of CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerburg, speaking in a developers conference about how Facebook committed to starting a new chapter and protecting the privacy of its users. Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, also said their site is on board with privacy and security for all. Manoush brings up an interesting point in the discussion about how Facebook gives its users privacy by offering closed groups and giving people the power to choose who sees what they do on the site but does nothing to address true security concerns that Facebook users have.

The main point that both of these podcasts raise is that big companies are using their privacy policies to protect their positions of power while still leaving us to wonder what our data is being used for. Yeah, bots can be used for good, but at the same time all of the online sites we use are collecting our data and we don’t know why. This causes a huge rift in trust between online consumers and the internet sites that they visit and it is our job to figure out how to mend this problem.

Readings & Video:
IRL Podcast: Algorisky
Emoji: The Complete Wired Guide to Emoji
The Tinder Algorithm Explained 
https://emojipedia.org/

During the IRL podcast, the author talked a lot about algorithms as recipes and how they influence our lives in so many ways. The Tinder Algorithm was also explained in one of the readings, where studies show that even though Tinder uses algorithms in their matchmaking attempts, people still would gain better real-life experiences from meeting and getting to know someone in person. Many of the readings also talked about our digital connectedness and how it weakens our everyday face to face interactions with one another. I did not know how much algorithms influenced our lives and was very informed on how much say algorithms really do have in the information we consume. I also looked at the Emojipedia which showed me how much technology is steadily changing. New emojis are being created constantly which humans use constantly to communicate with one another and share their emotions.

Readings:
Timeline History of Computers
“How Digital Technology is Destroying our Freedom”

When reading Timeline History of Computers, I found it interesting how long the idea of computers and the computer-based model have been around. Though the first computer may be considered Joseph Marie Jacquard’s automatic loom built-in 1801, the first fully electronic computer was not developed until 1944, which was very surprising to me because that is less than one hundred years ago. I also learned that Apple did not launch their first computer, Apple II, until 1977, and Apple Macintosh was not featured until 1984. According to the article, Wikipedia was not born until 2001, and I found it extremely surprising that within the first three years of existence, the site surpassed one million entries.

In the transcript of the conversation between media theorist and author of the book Team Human, Douglas Rushkoff, and journalist Sean Illing, titled “How Digital Technology is Destroying our Freedom,” Rushkoff and Illing discuss how technology influences social progress. The main takeaway I took from this reading is that our society is so caught up in digital technology that we let it impact our deepest thoughts and emotions, which is precisely what Rushkoff advises against. Rushkoff also talked about algorithms and how they are designed to put images and ads on your feed that line up with your recent searches to influence you to buy things or engage with other sites. A disconnect between humans caused by consumer advertising is also a point that Rushkoff discusses in the transcript. I found it very interesting that Rushkoff said that marketers want us to be unsatisfied so that we look to products to fill that void, but we can only fill that void through real human connection. I also found it interesting that Rushkoff put so much emphasis on the importance of engaging in face-to-face interaction with others in a time when digital technology runs so much of our lives. Rushkoff’s discussion of capitalism as “viewing human beings as resources to be exploited, not served” also made me think more deeply about the issues surrounding our world and the way we work.

My expectations for DMS 101 is to gain an understanding of how digital media is used in a variety of ways throughout our lives and to be able to recognize how I can use different forms of digital media to give information to the public. I also expect to learn how to enhance my skills in digital writing through this course. Outside of scrolling on social media and reading the occasional article online, I do not feel like I am very educated in digital media and on the real impact that it plays in our lives. I am curious to learn more about how digital media can affect our human connections and how we need to adapt to the constant changes in technology to keep up with connecting with the public.