Why would I ever need that?

Wow. The class is already over. It seems like just yesterday that Jim and I first introduced ourselves to our students, and last week we said goodbye. Of course, we both hope it is not really goodbye, but the first of many different interactions that we will have with them over their time at Harvard and then later in life as alumni of our institution. But that’s probably getting ahead of things, since they’re still working to finish their first semester here!

For the last seminar, we had the students pick the topic, choose the readings, and lead the seminar. The topics that rose to the top of their minds were: the impact of the Internet on the election, in retrospective; and the way that the Internet is viewed in developing nations. We just scratched the surface of the latter topic, and all of us brought a lot of emotion to the former.

In my reading, I was most struck by Issie LaPowsky’s article titled “The 2016 Election Exposes the Very, Very Dark Side of Tech” where LaPowsky wrote:

A Buzzfeed analysis of partisan Facebook pages found that often, the more a page shares false or misleading information, the more viral its posts become.

In particular, the Buzzfeed article said:

The review of more than 1,000 posts from six large hyperpartisan Facebook pages selected from the right and from the left also found that the least accurate pages generated some of the highest numbers of shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook — far more than the three large mainstream political news pages analyzed for comparison.

What causes so many of us to share such pages? I’m far from an expert on human behavior, but it seems like we still have a lot to learn about what drives people to do what they do on the Internet, and what that behavior actually means. This reminded me of the work Jim and I did for our privacy class the first time we taught it many years ago. It surprised many in the early days of social media that people shared some of their most mundane information or activities, and some of their most personal ones. I still don’t understand why some of my friends post some of the things that they do, even though I’ve known them for decades. Or I thought I knew them well because I had known them for decades.

So, here I am ending my last blog post for this fall’s class with more questions than answers. Not surprising given the fact that Jim and I enjoy our classes most when we’re learning as much as the students. And we did learn a great deal from these students. To each of them, thank you. Thank you for your faith in a class with a title that we obviously weren’t going to be able to answer. Thank you for your engagement in the material. And thank you for your spirit, which made each and every day a gem.

Good luck, and stay in touch!