#dylanpoulus

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The Power of Prediction

The word ‘prediction’ carries with it many connotations, fortunetellers, fate and future. Eric Siegel in chapter one of his book, ‘Introduction: The Prediction Effect’ talks about the power that prediction has in big business today. He talks about how computerized prediction has untold power as it analysis big, seemingly incomprehensible, data. “ The truth is that data embodies a priceless collection of experience from which to learn. Every medical procedure, credit application, Facebook post, movie recommendation, fraudulent act, spammy email, and purchase of any kind – each positive or negative outcome, each successful or failed sales call, each incident, event and transaction – is encoded as data and warehoused.” (Siegel, 2013) Through analysis of this immense data computers are able to learn “automatically developing new knowledge and capabilities by furiously feeding on modern society’s greatest and most potent unnatural resource, data”.(Siegel, 2013) I can’t help but think about the terminator movies and Skynet. The machines are learning!

 The thought that everything I have ever done on the Internet has been recorded somewhere and that someone can access this is a scary one. Even more worrying is that the data I am creating when surfing the net is being used to market to me.

 Siegel makes its clear that it isn’t as easy as it sounds to use data to make predictions. “as data piles up, we have ourselves a genuine gold rush. But data isn’t the gold. I repeat, data in its raw form is boring crud. The gold is what’s discovered therein. The process of machines learning from data unleashes the power of this exploding resource. It uncovers what drives people and the actions they take – what makes us tick and how the world works. With new knowledge gained, prediction is possible.” (Siegel, 2013) With this new ability to predict you might ask what exactly it is that the machines are trying to predict, “ Every important thing to a person is valuable to predict, namely: consume think, work, quit, vote, love, procreate, divorce, mess up, lie, cheat, steal, kill, and die”. (Siegel, 2013)

 However Siegel does say that accurate prediction isn’t easy, in that the future can never be predicted with 100% accuracy. He states the Prediction Effect is valuable because “ predicting better than pure guesswork, even if not accurately, delivers real value”. (Siegel, 2013)

 Predictions have untold power as predictions govern the way every organisation interacts with its consumers.  There are five effect of prediction introduced in the this reading and initially it focuses on Predictive Analysis (PA) . “PA leads within the growing trend to make decisions more “data driven “, relying less on ones “gut” and more on hard, imperial evidence”,  (PA) is “technology that learns for experience (data) to predict the future behavior of individuals in order to drive better decisions”. (Siegel, 2013)

This new ability for businesses to access, understand and utilise large amounts of data doesn’t sit well with me and if anything drives me to be unpredictable in my actions and spending’s. Overall this new ability will prove useful to businesses but could be dangerous to those who are easily influenced.

Bibliography

Siegel, E. ( 2013). Predictive analytics :the power to predict who will click, buy, lie, or die. Hoboken : Wiley .

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YouTube and the Mainstream Media

From week 5 I found burgess and greens reading about YouTube and the mainstream media the most interesting. The reading talks about how YouTube has now grown to the point where it is a major player in mainstream media. In doing so, in becoming a part of mainstream media, many assumptions have arisen as to YouTube’s role or purpose. Burgess and Green summarize in saying

  “YouTube is a player in the commercial new media landscape that is (the top-down view) and that YouTube is a site of vernacular creativity and lawless disruption or the (the bottom-up view)” (Burgess & Green, 2009). If we look at it this way YouTube is not just another media company nor is it another platform for user-generated content.

  Something I find interesting about YouTube, which would suggest that it is becoming more of a media company is the amount of advertising we are beginning to see across the site. On the home page we are greeted by a massive ad that plays regardless, then on every other video we are forced to watch either 5 seconds or a 30 seconds of an ad.  I have had an experience with YouTube that I found a little weird. Recently I have been looking for a new car, specifically a 4wd. Now normally the advertising I see on YouTube is random and often doesn’t relate to or interest me. But after many hours on car sales.com and forums every single ad I saw on YouTube was relating to 4WDs, to the point where carsales.com itself was advertising the exact cars I had been looking at on the side bar of YouTube. So in this sense and much to my dislike it is become another media company.

However as Burgess and green state it is still a site for creativity and lawless disruption. This is because you can upload almost anything to YouTube from cute cats, to tributes the Soviet Union. In a way its power to the people, as we choose what we upload and then what we like by liking and sharing those videos through other social media. Many famous names today owe their success to YouTube and contribute to the bottom up view of media. The 3 main guys from workaholics used YouTube to gain support in LA’s cutthroat comedy scene. Taking them from a little know imporv. group to having their own show on comedy central. Daniel Tosh’s show Tosh.O is completely reliant on video clips, most sourced from YouTube. But most notably of course is the discovery of Justin Bieber. On a more personal note YouTube allowed me to receive feedback from someone I follow. Elliot Hulse runs a channel called strength camp with close to 900,000 subscribers that I have been following his channel for years and he has responded to me via video and through email. Elliot’s channel started with him filming workouts in park. He now has multiple channels and close to a total of 1.5 million subscribers. This is a prime example of what Burgess and Green describe as the bottom up view of media.

Bibliography

Burgess & Green, J. (2009). Youtube : digital media and society series. Cambridge UK: Polity Press.

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One Online Identity

    José van Dijck in her article ‘You Have One Identity” talks about how social media is bringing about an end to the days of having multiple identities “the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly” (Dijck, 2013). Facebook creates a blending of these identities “Facebook and other SNSs (social network services) favor the idea of people having one transparent identity that they disclose online” (Dijck, 2013). I’m not sure if I agree completely with Van Dijcks idea of ‘transparency’, as I believe Facebook creates a toxic and superficial society where people project an online image of who they think will be accepted by their audiences not of who they actually are. Nevertheless, the more truthful people are on their social networking sites are the more beneficial, this is to advertisers, “Platform owners have a vested interest in pushing the need for a uniform online identity to attain maximum transparency… because advertisers want users ‘truthful’ data” (Dijck, 2013).

  It irritates me that everything I do online is documented and subsequently sold, this correlates with Fuchs idea of unpaid labor, “Corporate social media use capital accumulation models that are based on the exploitation of the unpaid labor of internet users and the commodification of user-generated data and data user behavior that is sold as commodity to advertisers”(Fuchs, 2013). I can relate to this as, recently I have been looking for a new car, spending many hours on car sales and car related websites. All of a sudden every ad on YouTube or Facebook was car related. But what was even more alarming was that the ads I was seeing weren’t just car related ads but ads that related exactly to what I was looking at and in some cases the exact cars I was looking at on Carsales.com. Essentially we are making other people money by using a free social media site. But back to Van Dijcks article, she proceeds to talk about how social media facilitates a battle between ‘Self-expression and self-promotion’, “platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and twitter offer crucial tools to galvanize the performance of online identity. From the earliest days of social media, platforms were presented as tools for making connections, prompting human connectedness” (Dijck, 2013).

  Now we are seeing a move from social media enabling human interaction to becoming an advertising driving corporate entities that harnesses its users for profit. Personally, I went down the road of social media obsession, I had well over a thousand Facebook friends and uploaded posts daily about how seemingly good my life was. Eventually I had an epiphany and this all changed, now I’m glad this change happened because I feel as if I contribute a lot less to the corporate entities using my online activity for profit.

  Bibliography

Dijck, J. v. (2013). ‘You have one identity’: performing the self on Facebook and LinkedIn. Media, Culture & Society .

Fuchs, C. (2013). Social media: a critical introduction. London, UK: Sage Publications.

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Consumers and Producers

In week 3 we were introduced to the idea of spreadable media and how anyone who joins the media landscape are both consumers and producers. With the introduction of web 2.0 the mass audiences have been set free from the traditional top down hierarchy of receiving information. Effectively web 2.0 has lowered the barriers to entry when it comes to user-generated content “Powerful new production tools and distribution channels are enabling the mute to speak and the invisible to be seen…” (Green & Jenkins , 2011).  the reading by (Green & Jenkins , 2011) talks about “how value and worth get appraised and ascribed through circulation” and this I believe is true, on morning television there are often sections about what is ‘trending’ online. This is where the ‘spreadability’ of user-generated content or media can be seen as valuable. This because, the content being shown on national television is only being shown because it was first spread throughout the web. This is best summed up the quote, “the concept of "spreadable" media as a way to understand how contemporary audience practices produce value” (Green & Jenkins , 2011)

  Another interesting concept that was raised in week 3 was the idea of ‘Hybrid Economies’, “The hybrid is either a commercial entity that aims to leverage value from a sharing economy, or it is a sharing economy that builds a commercial entity to better support its sharing aims.” (Lessig, 2008). The idea works when the two entities use each other or create a link between one another for mutual benefit. However, this link can only be sustained if a distinction remains between the two economies. “Maintaining a conceptual separation is the key to maintaining the value of a hybrid” (Lessig, 2008).

  Green & Jenkins reading also goes into what it means to ‘go viral’, the term describes something rapidly spreading through the web . Average users with no agenda, unlike professional sharing, facilitate this spread. “Viral media captures the speed with which new media circulate, while at the same time seeming to account for the perceived randomness and unpredictability of things which capture the public imagination” (Green & Jenkins , 2011). Anyone who has spent 5 minutes on YouTube, Facebook or any MEME site would have witnessed something that has ‘gone viral’. From funny cats to toddlers making funny faces, anything that can captivate an audience has the potential to go viral.

  Take Susan Boyles rise to stardom, “the original Susan Boyle video, depicting her initial performance on Britain's Got Talent, was streamed more than 86 million times on YouTube” (Green & Jenkins , 2011). And that astonishing figure is just people who have viewed the original video on YouTube, which doesn’t take into account the millions of illegal copies and recordings that would have circulated.

Overall the week’s readings have given good insight into what is happening when we use social media and how important the click of a mouse or choosing to share something really is.

  Bibliography

Green, J. a., & Jenkins . (2011). Chapter 5 :Spreadable Media: How Audiences Create Value and Meaning in a Networked. In V. (. Nightingale, The handbook of media audiences. Wiley-Blackwell.

Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York : Penguin .

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New Media and Society

Week 2’s lecture and readings highlighted New Medias immersion into our everyday lives. Technological and digital convergence has allowed anybody with a smartphone 24/7 accesses to social media platforms. Deuze believes that this new world of media integration can be labeled as a “‘mediapolis’: a comprehensively mediated public space where media underpin and overarch the experiences and expressions of everyday life.” (Deuze, 2011). I can identify with this concept as checking my Facebook has become a habit, each day would spend a combined total in the hours just scrolling through my news feed.

  New media blurs the “boundaries between people as producers and consumers of information” (Deuze, 2011) and I believe this has its positives as it allows for more people to share their opinions and showcase themselves.  This is best highlighted by the discovery of Susan Boyle and her rise through talent shows and social media. A negative of Social Medias immersion into our everyday lives is the blurring of what is public and private leading to what (Pearson, 2009) described as “the Glass bedroom”. Through the use of social media private interactions are now made visible for all to see. Which begs the question, is anything private online? Everything we do and say is being monitored buy an unknown mass. Boyd refers to this unknown mass as the “Invisible Audience” (Boyd, 2011) ands once you do something online it’s there forever; everything we do online is searchable, replicable, and scalable. (Boyd, 2011) This is a scary reality, thinking that anything I have said or posted will be recorded in some form forever.

  For me the most interesting concept that was raised throughout week 2 was the idea of “self-formation”, how people form their online personas and are then defined by it. It really got me thinking about social media and I came to the conclusion that Facebook was no more a way to connect with friends then to show off how good ones life seemingly is. I think it creates a superficial culture whereby people define their self-worth on how many likes their photo has or by how many friends they have. Social media immersion leaves us seeking validation from hundreds of people we don’t care about or who we have never actually met. The quote “its better to have a few real friends than to have hundreds of fake ones” springs to mind and I think when social media becomes an addiction people can lose sight of this. I see the whole idea of online self-formation as a dangerous one, creating superficial people who aren’t happy without the approval of the invisible audience

  Lastly, something that has stuck with me from this week was the question posed at the end of the lecture “What’s the thought process behind posting, what does it give you?” (Sauter, 2014) I couldn’t come up with a straight and simple answer. Do I want people to ‘like’ it? Do I want to show off? Do I want to persuade others to think the same way?

  What do we get out of posting something?

Bibliography

Boyd, D. (2011). Social networked sites as networked publics. In A Networked Self (p. 49).

  Deuze, M. (2011). Media, Culture & Society. Sage.

  Sauter, D. T. (2014). New Media and Society New Media and Identity. Retrieved from QUT Blackboard: http://blackboard.qut.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_4_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fcontent%2FlistContent.jsp%3Fcourse_id%3D_108110_1%26content_id%3D_5232444_1

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