Week 8 - Identity and Representation

This is the eight week of Digital Practices.

This Week:

• Description:

We learned a bit about identity in the lecture and how we put ourselves online, such as social media. We are influenced by others to create a better representation of ourselves online. We are going to look at strategies for interrogating algorithms that are built into systems in relation to identity. We are going to understand how algorithms understand us, begin talking about political, social, interpersonal and economic issues related to algorithms. The input is the data we share, output is advertising profiles on different platforms, process is when we consider ways we can try and unblack box the algorithms that categorize us.

• Reflection:

So from using twitter I can identify what content I see, block or mute accounts as well as identify and change who can direct message me. Using facebook, I can see what my primary location is or am near to. As well as the friends I have recently added. It also has a list of advertisers that use my information, mostly those which I have interacted with before. Using google ad centre, I can see that google somewhat accurately knows me and my age as well as my relationship status based on ads. We also used the sumpter method to identify how algorithms use our data, it’s a very time consuming process. So it is something that I can continue doing.

• Work to be done for next week:

I can try and continue with the sumpter method.

Overall Thoughts:

It is interesting but it does make me feel really bad looking through other people's accounts and finding out what they do, despite us being friends. I guess this is what social media platforms always do without us knowing. It is a really long process too, which is something I am not really interested in doing again.