Week 1 Notebook

Gotta love using Gemini to create graphics and images.  This is so foreboding.  

Digital natives' actual" skills and algorhythmic resistance behaviors.  These were good reads.  I especially appreciated Professor Dennen and colleagues' article that investigated, with a good sample size, the actual social networking skills that students have.  I was surprised to see what I would think of as lower usage of bookmarking and content tagging.  And the results around sharing opinions and responding or initiating conversations surprised me, but perhaps that is because I'm in the generation of people who like to be keyboard warriors on social media around political topics.  I also assumed that digital natives were just a bunch of content creators all endeavoring to become the next big influencer.  Clearly, I have a lot of assumptions in my own head as well, so this article was quite interesting in terms of setting the record straight, or at least giving some baseline behaviors that we can build from.  It is surprising that LinkedIn isn't used as much in college classes.  At one of the companies I used to work for, they gave us access to mountains of course materials through LinkedIn Learning, and I know there is a lot of free, quite good content on LinkedIn around professional topics.  I imagine it could be a good source for case study material, too.   I was a recent newcomer to Slack--it was used by the coach I worked with to manage her coaching community, and I used it at the edtech I worked at.  Professionally, it is sort of hard to search when you have a lengthy conversation with someone and have to reference that later, or someone leaves, and you can't find it at all.  But it was a HUGE benefit vs. managing an inbox.  

Side note: while I know this isn't necessarily educational or professional, I'm surprised that dating sites didn't get covered in the study (not that I could tell at least).  It is certainly a place where that specific cohort likely goes to create a goal-oriented personal profile and use a great deal of critical thinking and discernment skills.  I'm in the group on Facebook called the "Burned Haystack Dating Method".  I was fascinated by it because the creator, a professor at UW-Madison, began it as an idea for how to sift through all the bad dating profiles out there using rhetorical analysis and some brutal blocking tactics.  She has just published a book, and I think the community on FB has over 200K people in it.  She has named several rhetorical patterns that get used regularly in men's dating profiles.  The goal of the method isn't to rule people in as possible dates, but to rule the bad ones quickly out so you spend less time in dead-end conversations and meet-ups.  It also promotes several algorhythmic resistance behaviors.  She is a self-proclaimed hard-core feminist, and as creator and moderator, she's reached out to several dating sites when they "recycle blocked profiles"-- because even in that setting, "no" apparently doesn't mean no??  Anyway, it's an incredible community and teaching site and method.  I'm not in the dating game, but it's an interesting group to be in.  And it dovetails nicely with all the red-pill, high-value, dating rhetoric out there on the web. 

Regarding algorhythmic resistance behaviors, I LOVE the idea of this.  I read the article looking for some specifics, because again, until our robot overlords catch on, I want to use as many of these tactics as I can.  So, I used Gemini again for some details.  I've used feed curation and detoxing myself, without knowing I was part of the resistance.  I'd be interested to know what other folks do.  Gemini's discussion is below if anyone else is interested (emphasis is Gemini's):  

"Algorithmic resistance behaviors are tactics people use to evade, manipulate, or subvert digital systems—like recommendation feeds, gig economy management, and dynamic pricing models—to regain personal control, privacy, or economic agency. [1, 2]

Examples span a wide variety of contexts:

• Obfuscation & Data Poisoning: Users provide platforms with deliberately false, misleading, or chaotic data. For example, some graphic designers have figured out how to Tweet highly profane or bizarre images along with the phrase "I would buy that shirt" to trick online shopping bots into stealing and posting uncredited designs, rendering the bot's scraping logic useless.
• Algospeak & Linguistic Evasion: To bypass automated content moderation or shadow-banning, activists and creators alter their text. This includes replacing letters with numbers, misspelling words, or using emojis in place of banned phrases.
• Gig Worker "Gaming": Food delivery drivers and rideshare contractors often use workarounds to subvert algorithmic management. Examples include rejecting low-paying batches to manipulate the platform’s surge pricing or running multiple apps at once to prioritize better routes.
• E-Commerce Evasion: To avoid being targeted by dynamic pricing or tracking cookies, shoppers use incognito windows, swap devices, or abandon shopping carts to trigger automated "discount" emails from the retailer.
• Active Feed Curation: Users intentionally "train" social media algorithms by consciously clicking on, liking, or hiding specific posts to break out of echo chambers. Others use third-party tools like ad blockers or custom chronological feed extensions to bypass platform suggestions entirely.
• Algorithmic "Detoxing": A more passive, yet deliberate, resistance behavior involves practicing digital wellness—such as scheduled screen detoxes, disabling auto-play features, or spending time completely offline to opt out of the "engagement economy"."