Connections- Right away, the author had said, “Filter has become an important and far more general concept in today’s digital culture. We filter our images, our emails and our newsfeeds.” I connected to this right away because usually every morning I wake up and go on my facebook to see what’s happening, and I see allll these negative news articles about rape, or racial discremination, or a poor jail sentence and it brings me down for the rest of the day, so when I see those posts, I block those pages, ignore the content or keep it from coming off my newsfeed because it can really affect how your mood is set for the day, and how you view the world for the rest of the day really. Another quote I connected to was when the author said, “Twitter filters out long form writing, requiring us to limit ourselves to 140 characters at a time.” I really connected to this quote because back in middle school I did have a twitter, and used it pretty frequently because my facebook had all my family on it, so twitter was like MY place to express myself fully with little judgement, but clearly if you glance at my posts on here, you see that I am not pleased with a limit of 140 characters.

Commentary- I also had more to comment on with the first quote about filters being important in our everyday lives, like our emails. I think that can also be considered some of that self representation, or presentation where maybe when you’re talking in email to your professor, it’s completely different than emailing your mom about a stomach ache. That’s always sort of been around I think, the author just said it in different terms that we’re used to hearing. One thing I also thought was weird in a way is when the author was giving multiple definitions for filter and then said “Instagram filters are not listed.” (pg. 21) I find that weird because when you use a filter on instagram, first of all you’re applying it to an image, so in terms you’re applying something to take away content? And the second thing is is that usually all an instagram filter does is change the color tones, not necessarily takes things away as the author describes.

Keywords/ Main ideas- One big thing this author implied was that filters are something that take away something from another thing, there’s missing pieces we aren’t able to see, and the narrative may be being manipulated. Another thing that the author focused in on was that when there was that little experiment when people’s news feeds were changed to other more negative, or more positive feedback, people reciprocated the same type of posts they had seen, basically meaning the more depressing posts people had seen, made people more depressed in their posts, and the happier posts made people happier within their own facebook posts.