Midterm: In your opinion, current technologies: positives and negatives
I think Streaming Multimedia has the most positive impact on society. The streaming of the video and audio totally change the ways we watch TV or videos. Once you get into the streaming site, the whole world becomes small and we can find the movies, music or TV news without being bounded by countries. This opens the world to everyone. Our American youngs can enjoy the singing of Korean pop groups through youtube. This would be unthinkable twenty years ago. This is a big impact to our society.
The streaming site allows us to watch right away on the computer through the internet without storing in the hard drive. It's very convenience. We can take full control to watch whatever you want, may it be movies, TV shows, audio or dramas, on your own schedule. Moreover, you can also use any device to watch it. You don’t need to download. There are many kinds of streaming multimedia such as BBC, Iplayer, Youtube, Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music, Napster, and Netflix. There is also a couple of free streaming site just like Soundcloud and Roku. I used “iFun” to watch some movies and dramas from Asia. I really enjoy and like streaming multimedia. It totally changes the way that I watch movies. I don’t need to buy any DVD, just go online and watch whatever, whenever and wherever I want. The streaming multimedia sites have many features to satisfy the audience. And the contents cover almost everything, from movie, drama, TV show, documentary to news, music, fashion, sport. Some sites, such as Roku, have the basic services for free with advertising on it, while other sites, such as Netflix, need subscriptions to access almost unlimited programs. I will definitely recommend my friends to use streaming videos.
https://theconversation.com/us/topics/video-streaming-24372
https://media.thinknum.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-video-streaming-by-the-numbers/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/magazine/streaming-race-netflix-hbo-hulu-amazon.html
I think Deepfake Videos have the most negative impact to the socity. Deepfake video that shows the audience the real people, the real face, the real voice, but use artificial intelligence to manipulate individual image close to photorealistic footage to make an entirely unreal event looks realistic. It hard for me to distinguish whether a video is deep fake or not. The world is changing very fast and technology is developing very quickly. The digital technology causes the rise of “deep fakes”. With the help of AI, the digital manipulations of audio or video can be highly realistic and are difficult to detect. It is easier than before to create somebody saying or doing something in a video that it never actually happened. This artificial manipulation not only creates the risk and fear in society but also challenges our human instinct to trust what we see.
The deep fake contents also raise the digital ethics question. How can we recognize the deep fake information? Different ways to protect and recognize the deep fake have been explored by many scientists and educators. For instance, they tried to use technological solution-discriminator to tell whether a given video was fake. Some suggest using a form of digital watermarking on videos to prevent manipulation. However, it seems that it is still hard to remove the risk of deep fake entirely. Educators think that critical thinking and digital literacy will be important. They suggest teaching critical thinking skills at school. But it seems most people who cannot recognize the deep fake are seniors with less internet experience. Children most likely grow up with the internet and digital technology are easier to recognize fake video than others. Moreover, since currently social media platforms are not held responsible for their content, Congress is now considering change this situation and require them to identify fake content and be responsible.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/23/what-do-we-do-about-deepfake-video-ai-facebook
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/11/deepfake-zuckerberg-instagram-facebook
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2018-12-11/deepfakes-and-new-disinformation-war
