Respond: Todd Zwillich and Christian Rudder, It’s Not OK Cupid: Co-Founder Defends User Experiments
RESPOND •
1. What issues does this interview raise about Big Data, social media sites, research, and ethics?
2. Characterize the stance that Christian Rudder takes with regard to the issues raised in question 1 above. Based on his questions and comments, what do you imagine the stance of Todd Zwillich to be? If you cannot characterize his stance or are not sure about it, do you see that situation as a good or bad thing, given Zwillich’s role as interviewer and radio host? Why?
3. At one point, Rudder comments:
There was a day in 2013 when we turned off all the photos on the site, for, uh, about seven hours and kind of, uh, let users use OkCupid without being able to see who they were talking to. And then so if you compare that against a normal day, uh, you see that the site is actually a lot healthier in terms of how people reply to messages, and kind of like length and sort of velocity of conversations is actually a lot better when there’s no photos.
Why might it be the case that the site was “healthier” when there were no photos? And why don’t people want to use a dating site without photos, even one that might be healthier?
4. Characterize the ethos that Zwillich and Rudder create for themselves in this interview. How would you describe Zwillich’s performance as an interviewer and radio host? How would you describe Rudder’s ability to respond to Zwillich’s questions and to support the claims he makes? (Information from Chapter 3 on arguments based on ethos, or character, will likely be useful in answering this question.)
5. Examine the contexts in which Rudder uses “sort of” or “kind of.” (The best way to do this is to underline or highlight each occurrence of it along with whatever occurs after it, e.g., “And the goal was kind of to test our estimation of how compatible they were.”) When does Rudder tend to use either of these expressions? (Certainly, his use of them is not conscious or intentional.) If we treat them as hedges, which seek to soften the impact of whatever follows, what might Rudder be weakening the force of? How does such a pattern of use influence the ethos he creates for himself? Why?
6. As noted, unplanned spoken talk of the sort that occurs during interviews is quite different in many ways from highly planned and edited written academic discourse even when the topic is the same. Write a one-page summary of this interview as if you were planning to use the summary, or part of it, in an academic research paper. If you wish to use direct quotations, you’ll likely want to choose them carefully or edit them carefully to avoid passages that contain fillers like “um” or repeated words; you’ll also need to incorporate any quotations, whether phrases or sentences, into your text correctly. Paraphrases may prove especially useful precisely because of the spoken nature of this selection. (The section on synthesizing information in Chapter 20 will help you with this task. You’ll need to use the information in Chapter 22 on documenting sources to help you determine the correct format for citing the interview.)