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Conclusion post

Trendspotting in digital media is the most inspiring and impressive course I chose in graduate life. The professors always brought us cutting-edge technologies and latest media trend. But what’s more important is that he taught me tools and methods to evaluate trends and enlightened me to consider future media from some perspectives I never thought before. I love the atmosphere that classmates could share new information and thoughts freely, which echoes brainstorming and crowdsourcing, which mentioned in Futuring and The Second Machine Age, as important methods to make breakthrough in any field. The guest speakers from diversified sector of media fields really opened an window for me to learn current digital media situation.

No matter six Supertrends or DEGEST (acronym referring to six broad categories: Demography, Economy, Government, Environment, Society/ culture, and Technology) helps me to form a “paradigm” to notice the latest trends and to forecast their impact and future development. Also, I am provoked to think relationships between single trends and see them in big picture.

The assignments systematically tie my knowledge background and my attempts of exploring digital media field with what I have learned from class and readings. For instance, as my major is media studies my focus used to be media and culture as well as people’s perception of media. So as for Tumblr, I started from this point of view and explored how AI influenced society especially culture section. I found when AI combined social media, its impacts became greater. So I slightly shift my focus to social media’s function when using high technology such as big data and AI. Enlightened by class and reading, I took some wild card events, such as world war, and into considerate, analyzing how governmental policies and economic situation effect development of digital media. By exploring these fields, I not only have a clear focus for my academic research, but also prepare for my startup in digital media.

https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/discursive-versus-immersive-museum-massage/

http://finance.ifeng.com/c/7nGPxNHVVPl

http://media.workercn.cn/sites/media/jlgrb/2018_11/27/GR0709.htm

It is obvious that digital age brings accumulated social progresses while poses thorny problems for us at the same time. One of the most crucial challenges is that less people have interests into those art and culture that has been deposited from a certain period of time in human civilization when attracted by those “cheap” fun with short-time stimulations, such as social-media updates and game reward. When consider human beings as a whole, The futuring regards this problem as one supertrend called deculturation. And a phenomenon embodies the problem is lack interest in art galleries and museums. A report by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), showed an overall 0.8% decline in visitor numbers in 2016/17 compared to 2015/16 were experienced by DCMS-sponsored museums and galleries. Especially, the loss of the splendid culture in some developing countries might partly due to their underdeveloped economy and input cultural products from western countries.

Luckily, tools for solving the problems were invited simultaneously by digitization. The second Machine Age maintains that recombinant innovation is a main force shaping the second machine age. When adding VR, AR and interactive technologies to traditional exhibitions, educational and practical abilities of museums will be captured again. According to a latest Standford research, VR could engage people for longer time compared to other media. Since people are more likely to be fascinated by these fancy technologies biologically, it seems wise to hold exhibitions in a modern way.

By scanning the news, I would summarize several tries of Chinese museums. I mentioned that a combination of AI and social-media app, Tiktok, animating cultural relics, say Terra-Cotta Warriors, popular among young generations in previous post. And there will be an exhibition in Beijing, which create fantasy porcelain creatures, possibly new Chinese IP, basing on Chinese traditional porcelain culture. Customers would have immersive and interactive experiences due to combination of AR, VR and 3D, other technological improvements and exploration of traditional art and culture.

Digital technologies and museums can be thought as a brilliant combination, but there are still many issues to be facilitate. A research shows that visitors believe high ticket prices, full of reproducing content, lack of creativity and poor quality of exhibits are the major problems of immersive exhibitions. Mark Wigley, a professor of Columbia’s University, also suspect this king of show should be acknoledged as immersive or discursive.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

https://hackernoon.com/ai-blockchain-ar-vr-etc-which-one-is-a-general-purpose-technology-9b5510ca25e3

General purpose technologies(GPTs) refer to those technologies “deep new ideas or techniques that have the potential for important impacts on many sectors of the economy” according to economic historian Gavin Wright. When I read this term in The Second Machine Age, I can’t help to consider what cutting-edge technologies we are familiar with could be categorized as GTPs. Computers? Internet? But the author believes economic benefits of information communication technology(ICT) have already been captured and lead to short on the revenue side, which overturns assumption that ICT is GPT. I started to wonder AI, which I am interested in this course, could be regarded as GPTs? I found an article here and would like to share my views.

I totally agree with the article that AI will undoubtedly become a GPT, since it might meet four requirements-pervasive, improve over time, spawn innovation and fundamentally disruptive. In the previous post, I explore using AI in marketing, health care, finance, entertainment, retail and other various fields. As for improvement, the velocity, volume, variety and veracity has greatly grown, thus algorithms and models are becoming more sophisticated and precise fueling by machine learning and incremental data. AI does spawn innovation as image recognition, speech recognition, natural language generation and etc. When it comes to the last , AI has been changing different fields to some extent until now. Take my major, media studies, as an example. The approach of interviewing, investigating, collecting data and analyzing them are all revolutionized by AI. But it might be to optimistic to predict AI will become a GPT, which will be fundamentally disruptive, in 2~5 years in 2017, at least now AI has not challenged everything. I believe it took longer for AI to become mature.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.libezproxy2.syr.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=7b88b902-fbe3-4ed3-b993-8ffaf0c68ba1%40sessionmgr4007&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=131652057&db=cms

In the book The Second Machine Age, the author believes that we are in the era of digitization driven by exponential improvement, digital information and innovation coming from combining existing systems. And another important point of the book is that unstructured data were challenging to process in the past. So the paper I found here explores how AI with these three key factors shaping the second machine age helps both consumers and marketers. Also, it discusses how AI tackle with problems produced by unstructured data.

In the paper, the author discusses how marketers deploy AI in the whole process of advertising along the consumer journey, including need recognition, initial consideration, active evaluation, purchase decision and post-purchase behavior. Now I would like to identify advantages of AI in some processes and whether AI could totally replace human marketers basing on the article and my advertising experiences.

Before purchasing, senior marketers using traditional ways to detect consumers’ needs by knowing industry trends and keeping touch with consumers. Then they could gradually discover patterns and contact their prospective customers. AI now helps gather clients’ online information and traits, including social-media status updates, purchasing behavior, or online comments and posts. Sometimes location information, IP address and searching history, although always cause controversy owing to privacy problems, provide valuable insights on what customers possibly need. Since now AI could not only process structured information, but also unstructured data, thus labeling customer’s needs, evaluating their activities and recommending products in customized ways. As the volume and velocity of information gathering is growing, and machine learning helps models become more and more accurate, it is sure that AI marketers would do a greater job to stimulate customers’ purchasing intent.

During the process of purchase and postpurchase, AI helps improve efficiency in every links through detecting real-time market changes and replying inquires in time. I believe one of the most important virtues of AI is that they are like well-trained staffs with uniform professional quality, politeness and agreeableness, perhaps with other personality characteristics, which align brand images.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.libezproxy2.syr.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=21&sid=ba36b03f-2808-458b-9bbd-e116aae1559f%40sessionmgr4007&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d

If you are concerned about international news, it’s not hard to notice that smoke of the trade war between U.S. and China has permeated. Book Futuring states that change of a system, such as financial system, might influence various systems, including technology and media. Also, it is mentioned that taking account of international and political factors when making a prediction is crucial. Here I found a paper concerning my focus, AI, and how it is constructed in the mainstream media of U.S. and China. It is interesting since it also included comparative analysis about cultural, socioeconomic, and political factors influencing cultural rhetorics surrounding AI and implications such constructions have for intercultural communication and global policies about AI. This paper has been published before trade war began. So I will review the paper and then discuss whether trade war brings some changes to AI and media field of these two countries.

It chose New York Times and China Daily as samples of mainstream media of U.S. and China. I suspect that China Daily, even though it is the mostly circulated English newspaper in China, could not become a counterpart of NYT when considering its influence and cultural implication. Perhaps take Renming Daily, a more influential Chinese Newspaper, is more reasonable. As Futuring maintains, scanning newspapers is one of the most important ways to recognize what is happening around and to forecast trends. So even if China Daily might not be a perfect indicator, it gives us some indication.

According to the paper, while the Trump administration decrease fundings for research in 2018 and 2019 , China promised to invest 150 billion USD in the next few years to help develop its AI industries. This could somehow indicate that the different focus of two countries and imply varying forecasts of future technology center. During world intelligence congress taking place last month, Chinese experts claimed that AI should be subjects and tools for all kind of majors and classes as revolutions that computer has led to education revolution in China 20 years ago.

One intriguing finding is that NYT contained commercialization of AI technologies while CD does not, which could backcast the reason. China has a shorter history of AI development, therefore AI does not step into commercialization phase totally. But whether China has opportunity to catch up with development of U.S. depends on both economical, technological, governmental and other factors. U.S. has an edge in education system and cultivating experts in university while China has its own advantages in larger population basis and policy support for AI leading companies, such as Huawei.

I believe the war trade will definitely influence AI development of U.S. and China, since today’s world economy globalization is based on international division of labor to some extent. I expect a deal benefiting both countries, especially in technology field will be achieved in the near future.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

https://www.wired.com/story/pokemon-go-quiet-steady-dominance/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises

There is no doubt, Pokemon Go is the hottest game in 2016. Until now, it still plays a dominant role in the mobile game market and it has adopted the idea of virtual reality into this game. Unlike other mobile games, to play this game you have to walk out to the real world and use your phone to encounter Pokemon. This game has encouraged people to go outdoors, which is much better than staying home all day long just for playing the game.

I think these types of game will have a place in the mainstream market in the future, and it is possible that it could be a new trend of the game market. The conceptual part of these types of game is those valuable "intellectual property. (IP)" To make it easier to understand, those famous Marvel's cartoon character like Spiderman, Captain of America, X-men could all consider as intellectual property. If you are a big fan of the marvels and you know there is a related game, it is possible that you would like to play it.

That could explain the success of the Pokemon Go game. Base on the “list of highest-grossing media franchises,” Pokemon theme is the number one on the list and it has generated 90 billion dollars in revenue. It could prove that the Pokemon theme is really popular in the world. By combining the idea of virtual reality, which finally led this game to succeed.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

It’s all media era.

Nowadays, media components play important roles in every aspects of a business, including advertising, marketing, sales, customer service, product design, employee recruiting and development. Recently I noticed a milk tea company astutely making use of new technology and social media app to win a big success.

When people buy a cup of milk tea from this milk tea shop, they could write a question on the bill. After that, they will get a cup of tea with foam answering the question. In the process of marketing and advertising, the company takes advantage of KOL’s streaming and short video app which reached millions of views. And after testing various short video app, they found the population using Tiktok mostly overlap with milk tea shop consumers. Also, the secret of its success is to create a scenario of using AI, which could recognize the questions, and 3D print, which provide the answers in daily life. The emerging media technology in this way applies to product development process.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

https://m.weibo.cn/detail/4346653236883527

The power of the media is often beyond our imagination. Many cultures and arts that were once considered outdated have been reborn through the media. In the age of television as a medium, movies and TV series have had a profound influence on a generation. More than ten years ago, a Japanese cartoon themed on play the chess made millions of children dreaming about becoming master of chess. With the prevalence of "new media" today, such influence is further strengthened.

On youtube, in addition to the already beloved content, a classic music channel called TwoSetViolin has more than a million followers. The million channel, which is run by two Chinese- Australians violinists Brett Yang and Eddy Chen, has changed the way people think about classical music. One of the most popular shows is use a professional violinist's assessment to judge the characters in movies are actually playing the violin. Their shows wondering why people on a Chinese TV show didn't actually play the instruments has been widely discussed on Chinese social media.

In an age without social media, their life are just as the orchestra's chief all the time. But as youtube subscriptions grew, they quit their jobs to become full-time youtuber，and began their own world tour. The change of communication mode has brought revolutionary changes to many industries, and some traditional industries have the opportunity to be reborn. It is not enough to be conservative. The courage to change and seize the opportunity will often bring an unimaginable future, which is also the charm of new media.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d5b0/61e6565ce421b4b0b7d56296e882085dc308.pdf

Artificial intelligence can be divided into two parts according to philosophy of AI, Strong AI and Weak AI. Strong AI means that the machines could be made to think or in other words could represent human minds in the future. If that is the case, those machines will have the ability to reason, think and do all functions that a human is capable of doing. If this happened, people may be faced with a large number of jobs being replaced by machines, resulting in many people losing their jobs.

Today, however, more research is done on weak AI which’s data is previously fed in to the computer by a human and that is how it is ensured that the software will make the right moves at the right times. For example, playing games against a computer, witness expert systems, drive by wires cars and speech recognition systems are all identified as weak AI. However, not everyone believe in AI. Actually, many deem that the accuracy of AI is suspected. They do not think the analysis from AI is correct. That makes sense, because the data in the system is from human, in another word, the analysis is from human.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/data-brokers-selling-personal-information-60-minutes/

Every time when people set up an account, the web always asks them to fill out personal information and to sign a bunch of agreements which they seldom have patience to know what they exactly are. Most people thought by signing those agreements, the secure of their information is guaranteed. However, by reading this article, I understood that there is always someone can collect your personal information no matter how hard you want to protect it.

I’m wondering is it legal for those company trading our personal information? Is it legal for the company who shares one's location information to another? Do we have laws to protect a person’s privacy from being shared and traded? I think all these questions are worthwhile for us to discuss and the legislature should also strengthen privacy regulations and laws.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

https://m.weibo.cn/detail/4371291266555592

Why do makeup YouTuber quarrels all the time? In the past, public figures tried their best to avoid negative messages and scandals. Once such things appeared, they always said "we are fine" "it is not true". And once the news was confirmed, the their commercial value would have been badly influenced. But YouTubers welcomes quarrels nowadays. For instance, Jeffery Star, who has thousands of followers on Youtube always loves dramatic conflicts.

With exponentially growing makup YouTubers producing similar content and more and more fierce competition, how to attract more fans to maintain their influence? The answer is making trouble. Every fight brings them more supporters, expands their influence, and leads to more subscriptions. For them, fans are everything. As a YouTuber, if they cannot attract fans they would be nobody. Content homogenization of beauty makeup channels is very serious, therefore fans has already begun suffering from visual fatigue. In order to cater to people, some makeup YouTubers use drama performances to attract people.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/phone-listening-facebook-google-ads/

It is understandable that company collecting user’s information for analyzing user’s preference, which could help company to serve users better basing on their needs. But I think the way companies collecting users information requires further consideration. From my perspective, collecting information through the search history is more acceptable than listening through the laptop or phones.

Once I talked with my friend about my trip to Shanghai, and a few minutes later I received an email from Airbnb including accommodation advertisement in Shanghai, which is creepy, since I have never search it online. If you intentionally search something and it comes out later from the advertisement, it is more reasonable and accepted. But if you just talking something via phone and it pops up, it is like someone is spying on you. I mean I would like to sacrifice little bit privacy in exchange of convenience, but the way of collecting information now raises serious ethnic problems and should be assessed carefully.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

https://medium.com/utopiapress/will-artificial-intelligence-steal-your-job-196e57ebdda1

From the capitalist’s perspective, if there is a way could reduce their cost they would definitely adopt it. In certain industries, since artificial intelligence is more productive and controllable than human beings, companies would tend to use AI which could make their company more profitable than using human labors. In Michael's article, he points out two things: AI will form a trend in various industries and it would threaten people to get jobs. I think most of his argument is correct, but we should also consider how the government would react to the potential crisis.

Under the system of free market, it is believed that the government better not interfere with market activity, only if it's necessary. For example, to avoid the monopoly on certain industries, the government may stop companies merge and acquisition activity. In this case, the government tries to find balance between big and small companies, which could ensure the long range development of the industries. If one day the unemployment rate rise sharply due to the increase in the use of AI, the government will try to find a balance between AI and human labor. The goal of developing technology should benefit human, not threaten. We should be more confident for the future and our economy's self-healing ability.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00521-010-0362-z#enumeration

Many different methods have been used to facilitate financial trends, simulating financial and investor’s behaviour, goal evaluation, asset portfolio management, pricing initial public offering, determining optimal capital structure, detecting regularities in security price movements, predicting defaults and bankruptcy, etc. One of the methods is soft-computing approaches (e.g., artificial intelligent algorithms and rough sets) which are the most popular tool used in financial markets. There are three famous artificial intelligence techniques, Artificial neural networks(ANN), Expert system(ES) and Hybrid intelligent systems(HIS).

ANN could be seen as information processing systems which use learning and generalisation capabilities and are very adaptive. ES is defined as a computer system, which contains a well-organised body of knowledge that imitates expert problem-solving skills in a limited domain of expertise. HIS is a system that integrates intelligent techniques to problem-solving. HIS not only represents the combination of different intelligent techniques but also integrates intelligent techniques with conventional computer systems and spreadsheets and databases

AI does not look very reliable, but in fact, as long as the choice of artificial intelligence for different needs and categories of data analysis, will greatly improve the accuracy of data analysis results.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

http://nuffieldbioethics.org/wp-content/uploads/Artificial-Intelligence-AI-in-healthcare-and-research.pdf

AI technology has been widely used in health care field. However, it raises as many social and ethnical problems as other application of new technology. Now I would like to discuss issues mentioned in the article. The safety and reliability of using AI to detect sickness could not be guaranteed now. AI might make mistakes sometimes and require too much tests and giving too many treatments. But these are problems human doctors have, so they should not be stumbling block of employing AI. Better solutions are enlarge database and better model of it.

Another problem is AI used in health care might reflect and reinforce data biases resulting from data used to train them. Some commentators have appealed increased diversity among developers to help address this issue. It is stated that less data for disadvantaged groups in society might lead to unfair decisions when using AI. But discrimination against gender, ethnicity, disability, and age is an issue that widely exist in society. Therefore the long-term solution to this problem is to improve sense of equality and policy protecting rights of disadvantaged groups.

#http://newhouse.syr.edu

Technology creates virtual idol

It is not hard to understand that Japanese are crazy about their idols, such as AKB 48 who fascinates most people with their live shows. But it seems to be inexplicable that people loves Hatsune MIku, a virtual idol so much. After watching the video, are you curious about how a girl developed by software could win world wide popularity?

Affection of AI idol used to be seen as a kind of Japanese subculture. But 2018 might be a year that fans of virtual idol growing with exponential rates. Hezi, created by a variety show, is the first virtual idol appeared on Chinese television. Later, supported by AR technology, virtual idol Luo Tianyi performed a song with famous Chinese singer at New Year Eve’s Gala, which was watched by millions of Chinese. Then think about the euphoric atmosphere at Hatsune MIku’s concert in the video. You can’t deny virtual idol is becoming a part of mainstream culture and a future trend.

So what are the edges virtual idols over real idols? They never feel tired, so they could have a four-hour show without a break. They hardly have mistakes such as singing off key or falling down on the stages. They would not be involve scandals so their fans would not “break up” with them because of that. And most importantly, virtual idols induces participation of fans, which includes creating derivative stories and videos.

#http://newhouse.syr.edu

https://editstock.com/blogs/all/artificial-intelligence-and-your-editing-career

Will computer be able to create art?

With the development of technologies, the line between human and digital labor seems to blurred. In media industry, robots have taken place of some news reporter to write news and AI now could undertake task of editing films. Based on my experiences, editing video is time-consuming and burdensome. There are two major steps of editing film. The first one is create a storyline and decide what is the sequence of shots. And the second one is to find the specific shot with best emotions and graphics.

While this two steps seem similarly tiring for human beings, the second step may be simple for AI. By creating model and making Al learn what kind of scenes you want, whose faces it is and what emotions the shots convey, AI could found the shots rapidly. These tasks are what current technology can do. I believe, with good model, AI could do it better than human.

But what is difficult for AI is the first step which involves much creativity. The sequences of shots not only base on logic of events which might be easy to learn by creating models of language and actions, but also ground on its creative narrative style. There are a thousand ways to edit Hamlets from a thousand editer. So what it to expect with AI editing is how it will develop its own styles of editing.

http://newhouse.syr.edu

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