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Predicting The Future With The Past

Darryl Woodford presented this week’s topic New Media, Big Data and Telemetrics. It was very interesting, as I had not looked into data before. It made me realise just how much information is out there and how much of it is mine. It reminded me a lot of an exercise we did in the first few weeks of tutes where we wrote down all the social media interfaces and online accounts that we had. I think we came up with at least 25 that a majority of people had opened since being active online. Whether or not you use all the accounts the data is still out there somewhere, which is a scary thought.

I was really interested in the idea of telemetrics and utilising to find out where your audience is. It really relates to my career in the film industry and how I can incorporate it into transmedia marketing for my third year films and into the future (Woodford, 2014).

In Seigels paper, The Prediction Effect, he explores what is predicable with data collected though internet statistics. The answer is pretty much anything you want! Some examples I found interesting were: Energex predicting the energy demand, personalized shopping coupons by UK supermarket giant Tesco and those super awkward online dating sites (Seigel, 2013). I've always known through eHarmony ads that they use some form of compatibility scheme to match people with their "soul mate" but it never occurred to me that they would actually use“real" data to make these matches. They actually have a copyright name for their data prediction programme: eHarmony Compatibility Matching System™(eHarmony, 2014).

  An interesting point that Seigel also raises is that predication of the weather, which had been around for years, well before the Internet is only 50% accurate. Predicting data relating to humans is much less accurate. However we can eliminate these inaccuracies and risks by directing the data to the right people through marketing. The two go hand in hand with each other.

Because this is my last blog for Internet Self and Beyond (and probably forever) I guess I should sum up a little of what I've learned but Im just going to leave you all with my favourite viral goat video because what I've learned in this subject is that anything can happen on the internet and that everyone needs more goats in their lives :) Till next time!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IuRzJRrRpQ

Woodford, Darryl. 2014. “KCB206 Internet, Self and Beyond: New Media, Big Data and Telemetrics.” Accessed May 12, 2014. 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_5232451_1

Siegel, Eric. 2013. “Introduction – The Prediction Effect.” In Predictive Analytics, 1-16. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons Inc

eHarmony Australia. 2014. “Company History". Accessed May 1, 2014. http://www.eharmony.com.au/about/eharmony/

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/25719819.jpg

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Slacktivism is the new Activism

This week’s topic is New Media Politics and Engagement. I’m going to be looking into activism through social media and the way the way the audience creates and interacts with political content.

In Theresa’s lecture on New Media Politics and Engagement she talked about web 2.0 being the next wave in social media engagement. Particularly relating to political activism.

People are now using new media to stand up for what they believe in by getting their message out to a wider audience, creating a network of activists coming together to fight for a particular cause.  By forming these activists groups through social media, the community comes together bringing hope and motivation to the cause. This new media is giving us access to the truth and to real time information which is key to political activism. (Sauter 2014)

An example of social media playing a huge part in political activism is the Arab Spring uprising where people used social media sites such as facebook and youtube to spread the word of organised protests about their mistrust in their government and concerns about living standards in their country.

A particular video that caught my attention was one that a young Egyptian woman posted to Facebook a week before the beginnings of the uprising in Egypt. Her name is Asmaa Mahfouz. Her video asked people to come down to protest with her on the 25th January 2011. On the 24th, the night before the protest she posted another video commending the efforts of those who had answered her call. She said:

“Tomorrow’s the day we’ve been waiting for. The day we all worked so hard for. The most beautiful thing about it is that those who worked on this were not politicians at all. It was all of us, all Egyptians, we worked hard for this.” (Shirky 2011)

I have an example of activism and slacktivism. It was a post by an animal activist group called Oscar’s law who protest against factory farming of puppies in Queensland. Basically they posted a picture  of a beagle who had a bandage on it’s leg. It was in its glass display cabinet in the pet shop. They posted where the pet shop was and people were clearly outraged by the fact that the puppy was in such bad condition. I admit when I first saw it I wasn’t too happy. But then I found out that the shop was owned by my friends father and she told me her side of the story. What happened was that the puppy got a fracture from playing with other puppies so they took him to the vet where he got a cast. My friend’s dad couldn’t take him home until he closed the shop so he put it in the cabinet where he could keep an eye on it to make sure he was ok. He took the water out so the bandage wouldn’t get wet. He also put a sign up explaining the situation and that the dog wasn’t for sale. This sign was conveniently left out of the photo that Oscars law put up.

  Basically from this I learnt that even though everyone posting on this had the puppy’s best interests at heart I think we as social media users need to think about the implications of our actions more on the internet.  Because this was posted with misinformation, there livelihood could be damaged by this, not to mention the emotional pain that it caused them. It just seems very odd to me that people are ok saying horrible things on Facebook but I’m sure they wouldn’t have gone down there and said those things to their faces.

 Shirky, Clay. 2011 “The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90:1. Available at:http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67038/clay-shirky/the-political-power-of-social-media

 Sauter, Theresa. 2014. “New Media Politics and Engagement”: Week 8 lecture notes.” Accessed April 22, 2014.

https://www.facebook.com/OscarsLawAUS/photos/a.168260726535442.39581.135173789844136/807104392651069/?type=1&theater

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English (US) English (UK) English (Internet)

This week whilst listening to Theresa’s Lecture, I realised that the Internet is first and foremost a communication tool. It revolves completely around getting information from one human to another through computer-mediated communication or CMC for short. It is communication through tools and technology just like writing with a pen. (Sauter, 2014)

I was really interested in the way that CMC has changed the English language (and other languages no doubt) forming a new way of communication that outdoes traditional speech and writing by transmitting it out to the ether. Anyone and everyone has a voice on the internet. Whether it’s funny, serious, political, personal or academic, content is out there for you to learn from and enjoy.

In Baron’s article: Email to your brain, she discusses how “the more we write online, the worse writers we become.” (Baron, 2008) Arguing that because of Internet language, writers have become used to the short hand and consequently the quality of grammar and proper punctuation has dropped and that “even good writers are themselves becoming less certain about rules for word construction and sentence mechanics.” (Baron, 2008)  I do not agree with this statement, as I believe that English is a fluid language and if it isn’t open to change as it has been in the past, then we could all still be speaking Latin or Old English. While Internet English may not be a traditional language of influence like German or French, it still is a huge part of culture and our daily lives and is hard not to accept that it will have an effect on the written and spoken language.

As someone who was a little late in entering the online world I have never been one for using Internet language such as abbreviations and symbols. The most I do is a smiley face and the occasional haha, so I though I’d try a challenge and write an entire sentence in emoticons and abbreviations because let’s face it: as much as this week’s readings expressed concern about the affects of the Internet on the English language, it will never get to the stage where we only use abbreviations and symbols to speak to one another. It will hopefully just enhance our ability to communicate in out online future.

OMG IMHO TGIF. JFTR YOLO (oh my god in my honest opinion thank god it’s Friday. Just for the record you only live once.)

I can’t really do any better than that. I challenge somebody else to have a go!

  Sauter, Theresa. 2014. “New media Communication: Week 6 lecture notes.” Accessed April 12, 2014.

 Baron, Naomi. 2008. “Email to your brain: language in an online and mobile world.” In Always on: language in an online and mobile world, edited by Naomi Baron, 3-10. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 Wiktionary. “Appendix: English Internet slang” Last Modified April 11, 2014. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_internet_slang

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Crowdsourcing and Gamification

This week I will be looking into the concept of crowdsourcing, in particular the exploitation of people’s free labour.

In the lecture this week Theresa expanded on the crowdsourcing ideas that were intensively explained in Zittrain’s lecture for the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard. I found a lot of the crowdsourcing ideas that Zittrain put forward very interesting and had not come across a majority of these new media enterprises before. Theresa mentioned the idea of crowdsourcing as a “workforce on the cloud” (Sauter, 2014) which got me thinking: why is it ok to use virtual labour with little or no reward when in the real world, this type of labour would be seen as inhumane and unjust?

Can we turn a blind eye to this exploitation because it is all in the unseen land of the ether, so we put it out of sight, out of mind? Or has it got something to do with people “willingly” giving up their free time to essentially work for free for big business corporations, without knowing that they are helping these businesses to get something done for a tiny amount of the actual cost?

The latter question can be improved on by discussing the idea of Gamification. Again in Theresa’s lecture she discussed this idea that companies like Google have designed simple, addictive games such as Google Image Labeler that get people organising things that computers can’t do as easily in order to improve their products. This particular game got 2 people to identify images and type in key words that matched the picture at the same time. The players would receive points if they guessed the same key word for the image. Therefore making it fun way for people to accurately identify images, which is why Google images are so successful now. In this case Google are harnessing the collective resources (Sauter, 2014).

People that participate in these games are known as Turks (Zittain, 2009) or Mompreneurs (Sauter, 2014). The name Turk comes from a device called the Mechanical Turk which was a machine created to fool the user that the artificial intelligence was working by itself when in fact there was a small person inside the machine doing the work instead. This is where the concept of artificial artificial intelligence came from. Mompreneurs is pretty self-explanatory; Mums at home all day, use these “games” to work from home and earn a living (even though it is only a very small fraction of money).

While gamification may be all just a little bit of fun, when you step back and realise the exploitation that goes on here with people’s time, its hard not to wonder how these big corporations are getting away with essentially exploiting free labour. To add to this point I would like say that it’s not only through games that this exploitation takes place but also through open innovation and the creative cloud where anyone can ask for a specific creative or scientific answer and receive thousands of entries to their “competition”, only the winner receiving the prize money.

To me this all seems a little wrong. I feel that if someone is doing a job in the ether they should be getting the same benefits as if they were in the real world. After all time is money!

 Sauter, Theresa. 2014. “New Media Enterprises”. KCB206 New Media: Internet, Self and Beyond. (Lecture Week 4).

 Zittrain, Jonathan. 2009. Minds for Sale (video, 1hr 16mins). Accessed 28 March 2014. Available at: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2009/11/berkwest