Social Bias and Technology

In How Social Bias Creeps Into We Technology  Elizabeth Dowiski mentions a study that found that Google ads were biased when showing high-paying jobs, showing more jobs to male users than female users. Before reading this article, I had a mindset that technology could not possibly be bias towards people because the algorithms and code behind a certain technology could not possibly have stereotypes and prejudice within it's code.

If we are now seeing bias behavior within technology, then we must take into consideration what our behavior is online so that websites and programs that are tracking and collecting our data, have an appropriate image of who we are. Although the internet is a tool that we use to connect with others, to learn, etc. it has, in my opinion, also become another platform where we are to market ourselves and create our personal brand to potential employers, universities, friends, businesses, etc. If we are to now see social bias within our technologies, then we must continue to be aware of what we are communicating to others by the websites we click, the photos we share, and the things we buy, because whether we like it or not, whether we agree with it or not, we are all now being categorized by our online actions.

Social Media and Feelings

While reading John Bohannon's article Will Facebook make you sad? and Johann Hari's The Likely cause of addiction, there was a similarity between the both that stood out as the main cause as to why people and/or rats either felt sad or fell into an addiction was their environment and whether or not they felt sad. Bohannon wrote about a study by Ethan Kross and Ann Arbor that found that the more a user used Facebook, the sadder the user felt, but their findings also include that in order to have a negative on Facebook, a user must be "passive meaning they look more into what others posts than actively participating in the online community. In other words, the "passive" user of Facebook is a outcast and alone, creating this environment  that makes the user believe that they are different from everyone else.

What is very interesting about Hari's article, is how in depth it changes the perception of addiction and how it uses well known historical events such as the Vietnam war and how Americans were affected by their environment leading to an addiction to heroin that was quickly defeated once the surviving soldiers made it back home.

Putting these two pieces together, it would be very interesting to see more people actively participate on Facebook, creating a more positive social environment for themselves, and seeing a positive impact on their emotional state. In this day an age, when people spend a huge amount of time on social media, it is important to understand that the way that they communicate thru these online platforms can potentially affect their emotional health depending on the experiences they go thru. As a society, we emphasize on our social health based of our offline experiences such as accidents, education, etc. but it is now apparent that our online experiences are to be equally considered as well.

The Spiral of Silence and Cialdini's Principles

The Spiral of Silence, which is idea that people withhold expressing their ideals if they think that the people close to them such as their family and friends have different views on those ideals, from is an interesting phenomenon that somewhat resembles some of Dr. Robert Cialdini's principles of persuasion.

James Vincent's article The 'Spiral of Silence': How social media encourages self-censorship online focuses on the idea that individuals suppress their thoughts within their social media accounts due to the spiral of silence. While reading, this phenomenon reminded me of social proof because the social media user was relying on what others say in order to decided whether or not they wanted to share their beliefs online. In regards to social proof, they were looking to other to see what the correct response was from whatever the majority of either the public was or the majority of the people close to them.

Commitment and consistency also came into mind because social media provides both a temporary and permanent platform to store information and the posts we make for others to see. I believe that in this day and age, most social media users are aware of the fact that once something goes onto the internet, it is there forever, even after it is deleted. Because of this long-lasting effect that posts have, social media users are aware that if the commit to a "side" or an idea, they are expected to show consistency and "defend" their beliefs. Going back to the spiral of silence, if users are more inclined to share their ideas when others share the same belief, then it is more likely for a user to be consistent with their stance on an issue/idea if their surrounding network of people believe the same thing.

Bush's 2003 Address to the Nation

In an effort to better understand the American people during that time, I decided to read the polls first rather than our former president George W. Bush’s 2003 speech when American first began a war against Iraq, more specifically Saddam Hussein. The polls showed that the American people do not usually agree with going into war, and although Colin Powell’s speech helped the American people support a war more than before, it still did not impact Americans in the long run because there was this public opinion that American should have not interfered in Iraq as the losses were not being properly justified by the gains of sending our troops to war in Iraq.

After reading President Bush’s address to the nation, I concluded that President Bush wanted the American people to feel as if the problem in Iraq was affecting us in such an imminent way that the only solution, was that our troops were to interfere before the problem escalated into our land. I believe that one of the most powerful sentences in his speech was when he mentioned that we would send our troops in order to “not have to meet [the war] later with armies of firefighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.” I believe that the speech before hand had the innocent citizens on Iraq in mind and how we were entering the war, not to conquer the land, but to restore peace, and the sentence above changed the initiative of the speech and made it relevant to the safety of the American people. Former president Bush framed the upcoming war in a manner that made it important to every single person and mentioned that it was not just the US helping, instead the US alone was just one out of more than thirty-five countries helping Iraq in their time of need.

Priming in Politics

Taking into consideration what priming means and the current presidential election, I found Dan Cassino's study very interesting because it explains in further detail why people are supporting republican presidential candidate Donald Trump although his positions and his comments on issues are hostile and most of the time, unreasonable. An analysis by the Washington Post found that most of Trump's supporters were male, white and poor; taking this into account, then the media that the Trump/Pence campaign is releasing is very important because it is priming audiences to believe a certain way in order to gain a response that will lead to the support of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump Jr. uploaded the following ad on his Twitter account in attempt to explain the Syrian refugee crisis in 'simple terms'. This ad is an example of how the Trump campaign is seeking the approval and appealing to their main audience of uneducated white males. If the Trump campaign starts to advertise themselves as a way for men to keep their 'masculinity' then they can potentially gain more supporters on the basis that keeping a female out of office, can keep the threat of feeling less masculine low.

Although Cassino did mention that there is hope in fixing this masculine versus feminine mindset, it is scary to think that people can be primed to believe and thus behave a certain way in order to accommodate the social norm placed by the media presented and/or behavior of others. Since men do "often react in... strong ways to what they see as threats to their masculine identities" it is nice to see that Cassino found that young liberal men are changing that behavior by starting to create a future mindset that both male and female are equal and neither gender is better than the other.