Going into the Big Data project not knowing much about it besides the two TED talks, Alessandro Acquisti’s “Future without Secrets” and Glenn Greenwald’s “Why Privacy Matters”, I believed that Big Data was a bad, privacy invading thing. After looking through the “Big Data Resource” page I saw that it wasn’t bad or good, but I very complex topic. While I still intend on leaning towards Big Data being a negative thing, I found some good naysayers with good points. One such source was Kenneth Cukier’s TED Talk, “Big Data is Better Data”, which opened up all the positive thing’s big data does and can do. Cukier’s speech was mainly positive, but it also brought up points that interested me and made me uneasy, such as machine intelligence challenging human’s jobs. Also, another route I am considering exploring is how some people are more apt to have their privacy invaded by Big Data as brought up in Christopher Soghoian’s TED Talk, “Your Smartphone is a Civil Rights Issue”. It was interesting to find that Apple products have better security in protecting your data, but are more expensive. While Android products are more affordable but have less security and protection of your data, meaning that low income people are hence more vulnerable. The Big Data sources I found really interesting, eye opening, and varied on the sides they took. Since I did not know much about Big Data before this project the sources were an overload of information. I plan to think about what direction I want to take my paper in and to revisit these sources.
Tag: context
In chapter ten of Mind Change, I agreed with Greenfield’s claim that “a lifetime of early exposure to the influences of Facebook and Twitter is producing a cultural mindset that is different from that of previous generations” (page 119). Within this piece of literature, and many others including the Atlantic article “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” or It’s Complicated by Danah Boyd, there is specific evidence, such as increased depression levels, that back up this argument.
Although I found many of Twenge’s claims not to be evident in my own life and many of her examples I considered exaggerated or to be the most extreme cases, I do agree with her claim that smartphones are negatively affecting teens’ sleep. Twenge states “In just four years from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep. The increase is suspiciously timed, once again starting around the time when most teens got a smartphone.”; in this quote Twenge provides a statistic to back her claim that teens’ sleep is affected and then ties it’s time frame to that of the smartphone to support the other half of her claim that the smartphone is the cause. Further than the statistics provided by Twenge, there is science to why smartphones inhibit sleep; the blue light that is emitted from the screen has been proved to delay the release of sleep inducing hormones. Also, I find this claim personally to be true; often times I find myself exhausted laying in bed at night yet still awake because I am caught up on something on my phone: Netflix, social media, or just the internet itself.
I worked on adding in a relevant quote and would revise it’s framework.
“They see social media as a place to gather with friends while balancing privacy and safety with humor and image.” (Pg. 47)
“Impressions we make on others are a product of what is given and what is given off.” (Pg. 48)
“Teens…are grappling with battles that adults face, but they are doing so while under constant surveillance and without a firm grasp of who they are. In short, they are navigating on heck of a cultural labyrinth.” (Pg. 53)
I found chapter one of It’s Complicated by Danah Boyd to be very insightful as it refers to a number of perspective on how teens take on online identities. I agreed with the point that how you portray yourself online is becoming increasingly more complicated as we deal with how different audiences view the posts – from our peers to potential employers. I have definitley experienced this myself; I find myself considering what my grandparents and teachers would think when posting photos online.
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