How Social Media gets to know you
Ever notice how if you search for tacos on your computer or phone suddenly you see tacos everywhere you go online? Instagram shows photos of tantalizing taco platters, Facebook feeds you ads for taco restaurants, Pinterest suggests taco recipes, YouTube recommends videos of celebrities making tacos and Tik Tok sends you clips of people reacting to biting into a taco garnished with ghost peppers.
Just how did all these sites know you were interested in tacos anyway?
Who tracks you and how do they do it
There are several ways that your online activity may be tracked:
- Websites download cookies, or small bits of data, to your internet browsers which track your online activity.
- Your phone's GPS tracks your physical location.
- Your internet service provider can see everything you do online.
- Many phone apps track your physical location, can download files, take photos and video, even read your text messages and call log.
Fake News. It's Your Fault
Books on Social Media @ UA-PTC Libraries
American Girls by
Instagram. Whisper. Yik Yak. Vine. YouTube. Kik. Ask.fm. Tinder. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media. What it is doing to an entire generation of young women is the subject of award-winning Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales's riveting and explosive American Girls. With extraordinary intimacy and precision, Sales captures what it feels like to be a girl in America today. From Montclair to Manhattan and Los Angeles, from Florida and Arizona to Texas and Kentucky, Sales crisscrossed the country, speaking to more than two hundred girls, ages thirteen to nineteen, and documenting a massive change in the way girls are growing up, a phenomenon that transcends race, geography, and household income. American Girls provides a disturbing portrait of the end of childhood as we know it and of the inexorable and ubiquitous experience of a new kind of adolescence-one dominated by new social and sexual norms, where a girl's first crushes and experiences of longing and romance occur in an accelerated electronic environment; where issues of identity and self-esteem are magnified and transformed by social platforms that provide instantaneous judgment. What does it mean to be a girl in America in 2016? It means coming of age online in a hypersexualized culture that has normalized extreme behavior, from pornography to the casual exchange of nude photographs; a culture rife with a virulent new strain of sexism and a sometimes self-undermining notion of feminist empowerment; a culture in which teenagers are spending so much time on technology and social media that they are not developing basic communication skills. From beauty gurus to slut-shaming to a disconcerting trend of exhibitionism, Nancy Jo Sales provides a shocking window into the troubling world of today's teenage girls. Provocative and urgent, American Girls is destined to ignite a much-needed conversation about how we can help our daughters and sons negotiate unprecedented new challenges.
Call Number: Ottenheimer North Library Circulation Shelves HQ799.2.I5 S25 2016ISBN: 9780385353922Publication Date: 2016-02-23
Antisocial Media by
One of the signal developments in democratic culture around the world in the past half-decade has been the increasing power of social media to both spread information and shape opinions. After the Arab Spring of 2011, many pointed to the liberating potential of platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Yet five years later, as many Americans reeled in shock from the election of an authoritarian bullshit artist (using philosopher Harry Frank's technical definition of the term), a few perceptive observers began looking at new at the social and political effects of dominant social media platforms, particularly Facebook. And they did not like what they saw.The media studies and IP scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan is one of those sharp observers, and in Anti-Social Media he argues that our descent into dystopia stems in no small part from trends that have developed in the online world. The 2016 election saw a remarkable and dispiriting increase of people hiving themselves off within ideological echo chambers and treating fake news as real. Vaidhyanathan provides a structural explanation of why this happened, and he has located a culprit: social media, and more specifically Facebook. The founders of Facebook may have had (some) good intentions, but he contends that they have created a Frankenstein's monster that they have neither the will nor capacity to rein in. Fake news abounds, and the algorithms that undergird the platform drive people inexorably to news sites that conform to their ideological predilections - which Facebook can figure out with ease. Serious news reporting, already in a parlous state, has suffered even more as people on platforms like Facebook (meaning most people) are bombarded by both snippets of news from multiple sources and ads that look like news. Deliberative democracies require informed citizenries able to distinguish facts and falsehoods. By weakening those skills, social media is eroding the very foundations of our democratic republican culture. Social media-driven false news campaigns and ideological echo chambers are not only visible in the US, either - they are clearly on the rise in Europe and across the developing world too. Vaidhyanathan closes by offering offers a number of smart policy proposals that attack the problem, but they will undoubtedly be hard to enact. But the first order of business when facing a significant new crisis is to recognize its existence and explain what it is. Anti-Social Media promises to be that path-breaking initial step toward understanding how social media is quickly undermining not only centuries of democratic progress, but civil society itself.
Call Number: Ottenheimer - North Library 2nd Floor Circulation Shelves HM851 .V345 2018ISBN: 9780190841164Publication Date: 2018-06-12
The Chaos Machine by
Finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism From a New York Times investigative reporter, this "authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media" (New York Times Book Review) tracks the high-stakes inside story of how Big Tech's breakneck race to drive engagement--and profits--at all costs fractured the world. The Chaos Machine is "an essential book for our times" (Ezra Klein). We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we have understood. Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social network preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. As Fisher demonstrates, the companies' founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus on maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone. Traversing the planet, Fisher tracks the ubiquity of hate speech and its spillover into violence, ills that first festered in far-off locales, to their dark culmination in America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol Insurrection. Through it all, the social-media giants refused to intervene in any meaningful way, claiming to champion free speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless profits. The result, as Fisher shows, is a cultural shift toward a world in which people are polarized not by beliefs based on facts, but by misinformation, outrage, and fear. His narrative is about more than the villains, however. Fisher also weaves together the stories of the heroic outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors who raised the alarm and revealed what was happening behind the closed doors of Big Tech. Both panoramic and intimate, The Chaos Machine is the definitive account of the meteoric rise and troubled legacy of the tech titans, as well as a rousing and hopeful call to arrest the havoc wreaked on our minds and our world before it's too late.
Call Number: Ottenheimer - North Library 2nd Floor Circulation Shelves HM742 .F58 2022ISBN: 9780316703321Publication Date: 2022-09-06
The art of invisibility : the world's most famous hacker teaches you how to be safe in the age of Big Brother and big data by
Your every step online is being tracked and stored, and your identity literally stolen. Big companies and big governments want to know and exploit what you do, and privacy is a luxury few can afford or understand...Kevin Mitnick uses true-life stories to show exactly what is happening without your knowledge, teaching you "the art of invisibility"--online and real-world tactics to protect you and your family, using easy step-by-step instructions. Reading this book, you will learn everything from password protection and smart Wi-Fi usage to advanced techniques designed to maximize your anonymity. Kevin Mitnick knows exactly how vulnerabilities can be exploited and just what to do to prevent that from happening.
Call Number: Ottenheimer - North Library 2nd Floor Circulation Shelves & Ottenheimer - South Library TK5105.875.I57 M58 2017ISBN: 9780316380508
Understanding Digital Tracking
What is done with this information?
Most tracking is done so that your online activity can be used for targeted advertising. That's the reason that you might suddenly see lots of ads for taco restaurants if you search for tacos.
These records of your online activity can also be used to influence the information that you see online. For example, if you searched the internet for information on COVID-19 for a research paper, you might suddenly see information about resources for COVID-19 patients in your social media feeds, even when you search for unrelated topics.
Why should I care that I'm being tracked online?
Social media sites work to keep you engaged so they can sell advertising. To do this they will track what you are interested in and show you more things that are similar to what you have already searched. That may be fine for tacos and shoes, but what about false or harmful information?
Internet searches on the topic of COVID-19 might turn up information that is both true and false. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference, especially with a topic like COVID-19 where the facts are changing quickly due to scientific experiments, medical breakthroughs and changes in the virus itself. When we are uncertain about what is true and false, we are more likely to pay attention to those sources that feed our confirmation bias.
How to stop tracking on your computer
- Use privacy plug-ins or extensions in your browser.
- Adjust cookie settings in your browser.
- Set your browser to start in private mode.
- Change your browser's default search engine to one that does not track your activity, then use it.
- Opt out of sharing data on all online services that you subscribe to such as Facebook, Google, and Instagram.
- Use a browser that does not track your online activity.
How to stop tracking on your phone
- Turn off the phone's location tracking.
- Turn off location tracking in apps.
- Limit ad tracking on your phone.
- Use a private browser on your phone.
- Search in private in Chrome, Firefox Android, Firefox iOS , or Safari.
You're being manipulated and don't even know it
Librarian
Confirmation Bias
eBooks on Social Media @ UA-PTC Libraries
Facebook Society by
Roberto Simanowski takes Facebook as a starting point to investigate our social-media society--and its insidious consequences for our concept of the self. Presenting a creative, philosophically informed perspective that speaks to a shared reality, Facebook Society asks us to come to terms with the networked world.
Call Number: Online e-book. Click title to access.ISBN: 9780231544344Publication Date: 2018-09-24
The Routledge Handbook of Mass Media Ethics by
This fully updated second edition of the popular handbook provides an exploration of thinking on media ethics, bringing together the intellectual history of global mass media ethics over the past 40 years, summarising existing research and setting future agenda grounded in philosophy and social science. This second edition offers up-to-date and comprehensive coverage of media ethics, including the ethics of sources, social media, the roots of law in ethics, and documentary film. The wide range of contributors include scholars and former professionals who worked as journalists, public relations professionals, and advertising practitioners. They lay out both a good grounding from which to begin more in-depth and individualized explorations, and extensive bibliographies for each chapter to aid that process. For students and professionals who seek to understand and do the best work possible, this book will provide both insight and direction. Standing apart in its comprehensive coverage, The Routledge Handbook of Mass Media Ethics is required reading for scholars, graduate students, and researchers in media, mass communication, journalism, ethics, and related areas.
Call Number: Online e-book. Click title to access.ISBN: 9781315545929Publication Date: 2020-03-13
The Culture of Connectivity by
Social media penetrate our lives: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and many other platforms define daily habits of communication and creative production. This book studies the rise of social media, providing both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of major platforms in the context of a rapidly changing ecosystem of connective media. Author José van Dijck offers an analytical prism that can be used to view techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of this transformation as well as to examine shared ideological principles between major social media platforms. This fascinating study will appeal to all readers interested in social media.
Call Number: Online e-book. Click title to access.ISBN: 9780199970797Publication Date: 2013-01-01
