CS304 Blog #1 - Co-Star

     Hi everyone! I hope you’re all having a good week, my name is Lydia Goksen and I am a third-year student majoring in communications with a philosophy minor. In this blog post, I would like to talk about the app Co-Star which I find rather compelling. Co-Star’s focus is social astrology, the app uses a combination of NASA data, Artificial Intelligence, and your exact birth time and date to predict and create your own personalized astrological charts and daily horoscopes. The app allows you to add friends to keep track and compare zodiac signs, provides you with daily updates, and builds a customized personality analysis by taking other planets and the 12 houses of the zodiac into account. People have turned spirituality into a cultural change, being “spiritual” have been shown to help with stress and give you a sense of comfort. The daily messages Co-Star sends sometimes seem to align with what you could be going through, today I received a notification that reads “You dont need gold or silver” I still have yet to understand the meaning behind the message. I personally find this app very fun and interesting, many of my friends have downloaded it and it has become a topic in our conversations.

    The app has been featured in Vogue, New York Times, Buzzfeed, and more. I would like to know if you have heard about it or even use it yourself? if you do, what do you like about it?






  




Comments

  1. Ashley Di PernaSeptember 22, 2022 at 12:08 PM

    Hi Lydia, I have never heard of the Co-Star app until now, but it is certainly very interesting. It is marketed as something that claims to be "spiritual" and "enlightening," but comes across as a way to cash in on something popular, in this case astronomy. The app tries to legitimize itself by using NASA data and AI, because these are seen as more serious science, while astrology is often seen as a pseudoscience. The app also gives vague information like "you don't need silver or gold" which makes it seem more like a fortune cookie than hard science. Of course, the idea seems to be less about science and more about spirituality, but even that is shallow. The idea of sharing and following friends takes away from the apps ability to make one feel more connected to themselves and makes it more like every other social media site in existence. While it seems fine just to do for fun, I would be skeptical of adding any real scientific or spiritual meaning to the app.

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  2. KeenanSeptember 23, 2022 at 2:17 PM

    Hi Lydia, like I had never head of this app either, I find it cool, personally I have never put much creedence in astrology or Zodiac signs, but this could be just ignorence on my part. It appears as the this app operates almost like a wearable sports watch that tracks your data and provides outcomes based the info you put in. My only issues with these apps is if their free to use and have offical backing what are they getting in return from consumers, my best guess would be mining data that they store. This type of tracking data would make me nervice as it could showcased to other company's as well. Maybe that sounds a little paranoid but their plenty of communications reasearch paper that dive into the data mining topic. Just something to consider. But if it brings comfort and interest to you and your freinds that is all that truly matters as very view companies would have negative intent like this and it appears this one is just really fun and intreresting :) Great post :)

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