Ellen Paasch

Ellen Paasch is originally from Elkhorn, Nebraska. She graduated with her BS in biological sciences from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln in 2011. This spring, she graduated from the University of Iowa Master of Public Health program in the Department of Community and Behavioral Health. During the next few weeks she will be attending the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) conference in Dublin, Ireland, to present the results of a study on Facebook Use and Disordered Eating among College Women.

This student blog is unedited and does not necessarily reflect the views of the College of Public Health or the University of Iowa.

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Rights of an individual -- communication policy

The first session I attended this morning was on Media & Law, and here I will present some of the insights I gleaned from the presentations.
Sandra Braman spoke on the political consequences of the "Wikileaks Complex" and I took away two keen points from her presentation.  First, the fictive personhood of corporations makes them subject to the law -- in this regard, she meant that it is actually better for corporations to be treated as a person so they can be held accountable for actions.  Another interesting statement she made regarded informal associations and prosecution.  In this regard, even an association as indirect as following the news on a social networking site such as twitter could make an individual subject to prosecution by following IP addresses of users.
Lemi Baruh spoke on digital literacy and the awareness paradox, which can relate quite well to Facebook and thus the research I've conducted.  The premise of this paradox is that as users become aware that they are being profiled by "Big Data" they may become scared and withdraw from the market. (an aside: a fellow attendant  compared this issue to Lord of the Rings, between the Eye & the Ring)  I think we can all relate to this issue -- we note the advertisements we see on Facebook are tailored to our internet usage and the data that we input to Facebook to share personal details of ourselves.  In this regard, big data predictively targets a user based on self-disclosures regardless of if they are true to an individual.  In essence, big data doesn't care if the information is true, it is essentially unbiased based on user internet use, and all it cares about is targeting an individual.
So here's what I'm thinking... Based on this, college women with negative body image and high bodily dissatisfaction may be more likely to seek information related to disordered eating and unhealthy weight loss methods.  Thus, big data may profile them in this way and selectively predict an identity based on  these search attributes.  How does this hinder an individual's health when the decisions big data makes about a subject are not in the best interests of a person's health?  My research shows that women are using Facebook as an outlet to discuss body image and weight. Big data may actually be using this communication to promote and highlight unhealthy measures of weight control and disordered eating to a high-risk portion of the population.

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