I’ve tried to visualize the data I collected using Excel but I only succeed in visualizing one section. So I am attaching the visualization and the link to the cleaned data here.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1r5QUq76QCrn2AjU3_s8wY7VpK3eCRY2iJRJHR0Pcvhw/edit?usp=sharing

The data I collected is about the “Free Food Events” I had been to during the semester. As a poor international student whose meagre income earned by working under 20 hours per week and occasional translation gigs rarely make ends meet , I go to free food events to save money on fundamental costs of living and to ensure the quality of food I eat, as well as to learn some new knowledge about what is happening in academia and elsewhere in New York. Free food events has become a part of my life and I have gained tremendous food for the body and food for the soul attending those events. Therefore I collected data on the free food events I had been to during the semester and the meta data are as follows: the name of the events, the starting and ending time of the events, how long the events last, the dates when the events happened, and what food was served during those events. I have attempted to use Excel to visualize the data I collected but I only succeed in visualizing the “hours” column, which shows how long the events lasted. I attempted to use the “map” function of Excel to visualize the locations of the events but somehow Excel couldn’t recognize the  addresses in the coloumn. I also used Voyant tools to visualize the data in the “food column” and below is what I have. Through my investigation, I think the food I eat is mostly nutritious and the diet I have had through the free food events is balanced. I can lower the hours of the free food events so I can have more time to deal with other commitments in life. I also hope that I can visualize the locations of the free food events with a map so I can learn more about the places I go to for free food events and save more time on commuting to free food events.

Oppression can take many forms. Algorithms of Oppression reveals how modern technology exerts detrimental influence on the oppressed. As is demonstrated in other readings, Algorithms are not a neutral tool composed of numbers and mathematical formulations. It is full of human biases that are harmful to other people. When used as a tool of power, the harm becomes true. This reading focuses on the intersection of some of such biases – race and gender. It discusses in detail how algorithms reduces a racially and gender minority group to sex objects and capitalize on it, helping the oppressing to keep exploiting the vulnerable oppressed. The reading reveals that the classification of the oppressed as exotic sex objects, which is deployed by the most powerful search engine in the world, is actually from pornography in the U.S. Racial and gender prejudice, discrimination, and injustice are all at the core of it. It is unbelievable and outrageous that such abhorrent human biases are coded into the algorithms of the most powerful search engine around the world. Such invisible power that the oppressed are subject to is overwhelmingly prevalent that social injustice is increasingly exacerbated with the development of technology and an increasingly connected global economy. Resisting such vicious power is an onerous task for everyone in the society who cares about the public good.   

The inequality discussed in this piece is like that in “Weapons of Math Destruction”, which make unsystematic categories to fit people in. This reading points out a very important danger of using data and algorithm as a tool to solve social issues: the algorithm, or the technology dominates the whole process and human beings have to fit the technology. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? With the high failure rate of technology in solving social problems mentioned in the article, how is it possible that people still believe in technology as a “neutral” and “objective” tool that can reduce human errors? The “automated” inequality and “quantified” “weapons of math destruction” have revealed the flaws of using data. When you need to deal with large amount of people, you kind of have to reduce them to a certain extent and sacrifice some of the individualism, which is important in solving such problems. As is mentioned in the infrastructure article, system thinking or relationality is important in studying media infrastructure. It is also important in studying human beings, who are themselves unique related systems rather than the aggregation of a bunch of segregated and meaningless categories. The organic systems of human beings are cut into unrelated pieces which people who interpret the data look for “correlations” that are may or may not mean anything in solving the problems. In addition, a lot of the readings on data speak about the dangers and flaws of data and algorithms, and they point out that data has dominated human beings’ lives instead of assisting them. But how do we solve the problems? How to implement data and algorithms to assist people to address the various social issues we are facing today since it is unlikely that we are going to drive data out of our lives because it is prevalent. How to make it a useful tool rather than coding biases into it and using algorithms to sabotage marginalized people and sacrifice their most urgent needs in favor of those of the richer middle class? Using data for real “public good” is a complex problem requiring various aspects of efforts from different disciplines and social organizations.  

In this book, examples are shown to demonstrate various types of risks of privacy posed by technology. The first is the police accessing someone’s data through a list on the phone and making incriminating interpretations; the second is knowing a suspect’s potentially criminal behavior and accessing technological device of the suspect; the third one is accessing data of a suspect while gaining access to other user’s data of the same technological service. A key question discussed in these examples is under what circumstances can the government access individual’s data, to what extent, and with or without permission (such as a warrant). This question is sometimes taken for granted or oversimplified because, as is said in the article and previous readings, data is not as tangible and visible as other objects that are considered as connecting to the privacy of someone. In my opinion, this is another reason why it is important to study and bring to the front the materialistic aspect of data and the mechanisms of how data works. Otherwise, data will stay in the minds of the laypeople who constitute the majority of the public as something that works mysteriously in the clouds, as is promoted by big corporations. Being aware of the materiality of data and its prevalence in people’s everyday life can help people realize its positive and negative impacts – some of them may not even be known. Only when the public have more understanding of data and start using it to serve their life can it really “serve for the public good”. Or they will be some other fancy tools manipulated by the rich and the powerful to exploit the people.

Another issue highlighted in this article is the actor infringes upon the privacy of the public through accessing data without one’s consent. The information of the public is thus not only subject to risks posed by corporations from the private sector, the goal of which is seeking profit, but also to those posed by agencies and organizations in the public sector, such as the government. To what extent can the government represent “the public” and having the right to take what is the public, however intangible that is, for their own purposes. In an age where data has become so closely intertwined with individuals, it is time to redefine what is an individual’s “possessions” and who may have access to them under what circumstances. The role the government plays is not only a guardian angel for the public. It may also violate people’s rights in ways that could never have been imagined. The nature of data as a new form of asset derived from human beings and its potential misuse by power should be aware to ordinary people so that they can be more conscious about protecting themselves in ways they may have not even imagined.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/16/tech/alexa-child-development/index.html

In Weapons of Math Destruction, one of the issues discussed is the transparency of algorithms, especially those that are deployed to “measure” human beings and have wreaked havoc on them. This reminds me of a very vivid example that I saw on the New York Subway. It is advertisement for Seamless, an online food order service. In this interestingly funny advertisement, there are several pictures with words that describe the characteristics of New York neighborhoods based on the data Seamless collected through their services and their interpretation of the data analysis results. For example, one of the picture says “The most tender neighborhood- Fordham, Bronx Based on the number of orders of chicken tenders”. In this picture, there is a macho guy who holds a piece of chicken tender in one hand  while holding a cute little kitty in the other hand. Obviously, this interpretation of analyzed data is completely for commercial purpose. It uses the play-on word of “tender” to achieve a humorous effect so that viewers of the advertisement can have a deep impression of their service through exposure to this unreasonable but funny connection they make between data analyzed by algorithms and their product. The company is transparent in revealing the way in which data and algorithm are used to draw conclusions, which may impose a stereotype on a neighborhood. For people who do not agree with this conclusion, they will know how it is made through such transparency. In this series of advertisements, chelsea is named “the most homesick neighborhood” based on the order of a home-made dish and another neighborhood is named “the neighborhood with the most hot yoga” for having the most orders kumbacha. Every one of those names could have an impact on the perceptions and images of these neighborhoods. If such perceptions and images have detrimental effects on the people living there, as what the algorithms did to the math teachers who were labeled “incompetent” in the elementary school mentioned in the reading, then the methods through which those images and perceptions were created are of major significance as they are the keys to solving issues of injustice and inequality.

However, transparency of algorithms is still at the mercy of big corporations who keep them as top secret in spite of the harm they can cause to individuals who are subject to unfair “measuring” based on such algorithms. Naming or categorizing individuals is of high risk because there are millions of implications such names or categories are associated with that may change one’s life tremendously. A socially responsible approach to algorithms should be adopted by corporations, the government, and individuals to make sure that we are not hurt by what we create for a better life in the first place.

In The Googlization of Everything, the author raises an intriguing issue: the googlization of memory. In this chapter, the author discusses a very important issue that is difficult to notice – the importance of forgetting things. There are several examples about how forgetting plays a more significant role than remembering to human beings in spite of the efforts they have spared to remember things all through history. They all demonstrate that in an age of information explosion, where “the scarcity has become plentiful”, it is more important to learn how to filter out what might become a burden to our thinking and our mind and forget about it, because or we will get lost in the ocean of details and feel overwhelmed and anxious. As a long time sufferer of anxiety issues, I have tremendous experience in not being able to forget things – things that hurt me in the past and left trauma in my sensitive memory. It is the inability to forget the past that impinged my ability to focus on the present. I kept seeing triggers of my traumatic experience and they were constantly exaggerated by my memories and my mind. Finally, unable to cope with such disorders, I turned to therapists and psychiatrists for help. Through medicine and training, I made tremendous improvement in focusing on what’s important in life.

Even worse, we will lose the ability to take in anything new into our minds if we do not know how to properly forget. The author gives the example of his grandfather who does not have any mental space for new things because the memory of the past has been rooted too deep in his mind. Therefore it is more than necessary to train, or “discipline” our minds to choose and select what is useful for us and filter out what is not. In addition, it is important to forget because unforgotten information has the propensity to be “misused and abused”. Seemingly minor details can “come back and haunt us” in ways we would never expect.

Indeed, it is of great importance to forget than to remember in such an information age where an abundance of information is accessible to us through tools such as google. But the key questions here is: what should we remember and what should we forget? Who can decide it and how it can be decided? According to the author, in an age of googlization, Google does it for us. As the author says, it opens up an abundance of information to us and filters out even more. What we need to learn is how to keep our judgement and work with Google to make the optimal choice. The author says although google makes it easy to both forget and remember things, he is the one who “choose(s) what elements to remember and comfortably ignore the rest”. “What matters is how we choose what to consider in our daily judgements and choices”.

However, the author also mentions that it should be cautioned that google is doing this for us-the right to decide what to take into our mind and what to filter out transfers from our parents and other adults to google. However, do we really know how google does this? What is filtered out for us by the algorithms and what, in the information that is filtered out, is valuable to us? Should we just easily transfer this right to google? In other words, is google reliable and capable of assuming the role that used to be played by the parents and perhaps should be played by ourselves? In education, how do we teach students what to remember and what to forget? Although teacher are usually taught in teacher training classes that they need to ask students to critically filter and interpret the information. It’s hardly clear what those required skills are and how to teach them. The author says in “It feels somewhat liberating that I don’t have to remember to remember very much”. All through my education in China, it is filled with memorization of everything. It is hard to transition into this new mode of learning and teaching mode in the Information Age, where an abundance of information makes me feel nervous and intimidated when I read. I don’t know how to select or filter when faced with tons of readings because I have developed the habit of reading everything very carefully for meaning behind the text. To adapt to the new trend requires special and step-by-step training.