Overall I thought that the lecture by Robyn was very interesting. However, at the very beginning of her presentation, I found myself getting lost as to what she was focusing on. She was speaking very broadly as to what media, data, and users meant to her and the internet she sees. Only at the very end of her lecture did I start to understand the work that she actually does. I think that it’s really interesting what kinds of internet communities are out there and getting to understand some of the dark corners of the internet.

I was particularly interested in the part about the fake news and the facebook scandal from the 2016 election. The idea that there are internet societies who are feeding into this fake news in order to deceive people into thinking that some crazy news story is real was pretty surprising to me. It’s also scary to think that there are click farms whose sole purpose is to like and comment on certain videos in order to give the impression that a majority of people actually support a certain idea.

Something I found ironic is that she herself feeds into social media in every single platform where people can share ideas and shared her @ usernames with us at the end of the lecture. A point she made to us was that perhaps we were giving too much of ourselves to applications like Facebook and Instagram so that’s why I found it interesting.