Learning Goals

1.3. Learning Goals#

Our goals for you in this book is that you can be an informed and active person with regards to social media. Through the book we will ask you practice and use a set of skills to aid you in this. In more detail:

1.3.1. Informed and Active Person#

Our goals for you to become an informed and active person are:

As a social media user, we hope you learn how social media sites influence you, from how your data gets used or abused, to how harassment and spam bots operate, to how platforms manipulate your emotions and mental state. We hope you could then be a more knowledgeable consumer and participant on social media sites.

As a member of a society that is influenced by social media, we hope you learn about the societal impact of automated social media systems, and how those systems are designed under different economic, social, and governmental pressures. We hope you could then be more knowledgeable in what you might advocate for or vote for in how social media sites operate.

As a potential tech worker that might work for a social media site, we hope you learn how to analyze the ethical tradeoffs made in designing automated systems. We hope you could then bring those concerns into how you design and implement automated systems for social media sites.

1.3.2. Skill Goals#

To support you being the informed and active person we described above, we will give you opportunities to learn and practice the following skills:

Social Media:

  • Define terms for social media phenomenon (e.g., viral memes, parasocial relationships, harassment campaigns)

    • Recognize examples of those phenomenon in examples we provide, in pre-internet history, and from your own experiences

  • Understand the ways information and communication is done in different social media platforms

  • Compare, contrast, and critique the design of various social media sites and the behaviors of people and bots on those sites

  • Propose designs and modifications to social media sites, and reflect on the potential consequences of those designs and modifications

Ethics:

  • Define several different ethics frameworks ( e.g., Confucianism, Aztec Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism, Ethics of Care, Ubuntu Ethics)

    • Explain how those frameworks could apply to different ethical scenarios

    • Evaluate what the benefits and drawbacks are for using different frameworks in different ethical scenarios

Automation:

  • Recognize and use key programming concepts and structures (e.g., variables, data types, loops, conditional statements)

  • Understand what example social media bots will do and why

  • Modify code for social media bots to change their behavior, both to do tasks we ask for, and to do tasks of your own design

Additional Research:

  • Research sources outside of this book, evaluating their reliability and their relevance to topics in the book and to your own life

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