What We Covered

21.1. What We Covered#

We covered a lot of topics in this book, and we hope you learned something and found it valuable!

21.1.1. Social Media#

We covered a number of topics in relation to social media:

  • Bots

  • Data

  • History of Social Media

  • Authenticity

  • Trolling

  • Data Mining

  • Privacy and Security

  • Accessibility

  • Recommendation Algorithms

  • Virality

  • Mental Health

  • Content Moderation

  • Content Moderators

  • Crowdsourcing

  • Harassment

  • Public Shaming

  • Capitalism

  • Colonialism

We hope that by the end of this book you know a lot of social media terminology (e.g., context collapse, parasocial relationships, the network effect, etc.), that you have a good overview of how social media works and is used, and what design decisions are made in how social media works, and the consequences of those decisions.

We also hope you are able to recognize how trends on internet-based social media tie to the whole of human history of being social and can apply lessons from that history to our current situations.

21.1.2. Ethics#

We covered a number of ethics frameworks and you got practice applying them in different situations:

  • Confucianism

  • Taoism

  • Virtue Ethics

  • Aztec Virtue Ethics

  • Natural Rights

  • Consequentialism

  • Deontology

  • Ethics of Care

  • Ubuntu

  • American Indigenous Ethics

  • Divine Command Theory

  • Egoism

  • Existentialism

  • Nihilism

We hope that by the end of this book, you have a familiarity with applying different ethics frameworks, and considering the ethical tradeoffs of uses of social media and the design of social media systems. Again, our goal has been not necessarily to come to the “right” answer, but to ask good questions and better understand the tradeoffs, unexpected side-effects, etc.

21.1.3. Automation#

We also covered a number of topics in automation, such as:

  • History of Programming

  • Python Programming Language

  • JupyterHub and JupyterNotebooks

  • Variables

  • Data types (e.g., numbers, strings)

  • A Social Media API library (for posting, searching, etc.)

  • Other code libraries (e.g., time)

  • For Loops

  • Conditionals (if/else)

  • Lists

  • Dictionaries

  • Functions (calling, and writing our own)

  • Sentiment Analysis

  • Recursion (for printing tweets and replies)

We hope that by the end of this course, you have a familiarity of what programming is and some of what you can do with it. We particularly hope you have a familiarity with basic Python programming concepts, and an ability to interact with Reddit using computer programs.

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