Reflection 1: Feed my Feed: Radical publishing in Facebook Groups

The beggining of this text talks about the differences in how social groups on the internet are managed for example the differences between moderation on the Facebook group Cool Freaks Wikipedia Club that requires high level of moderation as opposed to a mailing list like < nettime > and eflux Conversations which only has one moderator that doesn't do much. This lack of moderation can be seen as much more free and liberating in comparasion to groups on social media platforms like Facebook as those tend to be extremely moderated and with reason. These social media platforms survive on the revenue they receive from advertisers thus must ensure that everything occuring on their platforms remain adverstiser-friendly, mailing-lists don't have to worry about this. Which is a key factor in this reading that I feel as though Dorthy Howard has missed, I fundamentally believe that if these social media platforms did not have to conform to advertising standards, the only difference between mailing-lists and facebook groups would be the medium in which people choose to use to share messages. Dorthy does briefly talk about the corportization of Facebook however I feel like a deeper dive into the start of Facebook and how it originated as a hub for students to talk to one another into what it has turned into now could have really benefited the point she was trying make with this article.

Reflection 2: All Together Now: Artists and Crowdsourcing

This article talks about crowdsourcing in a way that was new to me, being an avid video game player the term crowdsourcing is not new to me. However, in the sense of video games, often times crowdsourcing is used interchangeably with crowd-funded where people on the internet can donate money to developpers to help them create a video game they find interesting. This article talks about crowdsourcing in the sense of getting what would typically be the audience in an artistic setting to participate in the creation of the art piece be it through paintings, videos, written messages, etc. Trent Morse, the author of this article also talks about the unfortunate dark side that comes with some crowdsourcing projects and how in some cases the audiences/participants are completely unaware that they are participating in these projects and their name, data, photos, etc get used without their consent. Projects like those raise a lot of ethical concerns for example Trent talks about a project where the artist was able to access peoples personal computers through a glitch in a software and they used that to get hold of the users private images including images showing nudity to use in their project, which their claims wasn't hacking, was in my opinion entirely unethical and also potentially illegal. None of those people consented to have their images, especially images of themselves nude to be used in an art project they did not know of that plenty of people they don't know would see.

Reflection 3: Inside PCKWCK, the live-streamed novel writing experiment that is stressing everybody out

This article is about a writer by the name of Joshua Cohen who created a website named PCKWCK where anyone on the internet could come and join him while he was writing a book titled PCKWCK and users could see him through a livestream and they were able to leave comments as he writing the book. The book only lived for as long as the site did, meaning when he finally finished writing the book, and the domain of the website experied, the book would be gone forever. As Joshua expected when this project first started a lot of the comments he was receiving were what we know of now as troll comments which I feel he was right in expecting to happen, any person given anonymity on the internet will always go crazy with it. However this entire project's goal was not to necessarily write a book but as I understood it, this project was a critique on the decline of physical hardcopy books with the rise of e-books and how these e-books will only exist for as long as someone has a powered device with an internet connection. In regards to the comments users can leave, Cohen wasn't reading them as they were being posted however he would read them later in the day to then incorporate the actual suggestions into the story the next day, like he was crowdsourcing this book, which to me is very reminiscent of Youtubers and Twitch streamers who play video games or do something where they are taking the user comment suggestions into consideration for whatever it is that they are doing.

Reflection 4: Dead Drops

The idea behind the Dead Drops project is basically putting usbs into walls, poles, etc in public where other users can then use to share files and see what other people have shared onto that usb and this project is open to anyone, if you do decide to join the creators of this project ask you on their website to follow their instructions on how to join and submit photos and location of the usb. The website also has a section with a map that shows you where every single registered dead drop usb key is. Immediately from the start of this project I could sense a lot of security issues that this project has, if any user, registered or not can use these usb keys, what's stopping any one of them from attaching a virus of sorts that is hidden within a file that collects any users personal data onto these usbs? However I also see the flip side of this that a user shouldn't be so willing to just whip out their personal laptops and connect it to a usb thats sticking out of a random building and if you do you should know that getting a virus on your device is a potential risk you're taking doing that. In someways I can see this being the whole point of the project, do you trust random strangers to not put dangerous things on those usbs or do you keep it moving and not participate in the project.