Innovations Challenge Personalities - Essay Example

Innovations challenge personalities Media are commonly blamed for changing mass opinion and influencingmass behavior. Despite the traditional factors like a social environment (family, friends etc.), education and so on, media are what affect modern humans’ personalities. With the ongoing scientific and technological progress, media are now more and more personal and are embodied in a variety of digital devices, usually connected to the Internet. World Wide Web has its specifics comparing to more traditional media (TV, magazines etc.), because it provides users with almost unlimited access to information, and vice versa, users are providing Internet with information about themselves. This process naturally is making influence on humans’ personalities. Humankind choice of a more digital way is best put in words by Wakefield, who calls the process “the transition to digital” (Wakefield). What is mostly transited to a digital form is a real life, and with a view of this goal new apps are constantly invented. For example, recently the app named CamFind was invented. Its main aim is to help user to find a digital analog of a thing from a real life on the Internet by analyzing the photo of a thing (“Camfind app”). Another similar app, the Periscope, was invented by Twitter recently. Its aim is to share a stream video with other users, making a real time digital translation (Stenovec). Already on the example of CamFind and Periscope it can be observed how real social relations are changing due to the transition to digital. When noticing someone reading a book or wearing a nice bag, a CamFind user would more likely to take a photo of that book/ bag and search for the thing in the Internet, than asking a person about book’s topic/ or quality of a fabric. The same is with streaming: why leaving apartment for a real event if there’s a possibility to watch that event in a digital form? However, neither of described apps does mean people neglect a social communication, and neither those apps are revolutionary new things. They are one of a kind, and modern people are using a lot of digital devices with such apps for the same goal – the connectivity. The ways which connectivity is going, are constantly modernized. It’s becoming easier to use and now involve a wider audience. Reviewing recent studies, Wakefield says, “Children aged five to 16 spend an average of six and a half hours a day in front of a screen compared with around three hours in 1995” (Wakefield). Remarkably, that youngers spend less time in the virtual world than teenagers, who may spend up to eight hours a day in front of a screen. It’s mostly fair for boys playing computer games (Wakefield). Meanwhile, a teen age is a period when an individual discovers him/ herself, and form many individual preferences and learn norms of social behavior. Thus, Stuart’s concerns on virtual games, which provide users with poor psychological feedback, are understandable. In modern computer games it’s easy to do a right thing, or a bed thing. “Designers have toyed with the idea of culpability and consequence, of getting players to consider their actions in moral terms” (Stuart). At the same time designers have less succeeded with emotions conveying, and it’s hard, for example, to convey a feeling of guilt. There are mostly only moral and social obligations for a player, and only few games consider a psychological effect of users’ actions (Stuart). Therefore, a digital version of reality in computer games is very simplified, and needs for a better convention of reality, but Yann LeCun, who studies digital systems on possibilities of a deep learning, thinks the emotions potentially can be encoded, and a machine may understand and react on human emotions (Hardy). LeCun says, the point is that human emotions are a system, and therefore can be predicted (Hardy). By a better analysis, a machine can predict a particular human reaction on a stimulus, and response. Thus, while encoding emotions is a long term goal, what firstly should be done is a better studying of users’ personalities (Hardy). Golbeck says, Internet itself gives a great possibility for such a study, because there’s a lot of personal information users put on the Internet (Golbeck). Nowadays’ Internet is primary consists of personal information: social network profiles, textual search results, photos and videos, etc. Even when thinking on previously discussed apps, CamFind and Periscope, they are made for improving possibilities for users to put personal information online better and faster. Meanwhile, the more data on a particular user exists, the better he/ she may be analyzed. Golbeck says, it’s already possible to predict one’s political, gender, sexual, religious and etc. preferences with a high probability, despite a user have never mentioned them directly (Golbeck). Also it can be predicted how much someone trusts his/ her mates, and even how intelligent a user is depending on his/ her “likes” (a revelation of preferences) and friends from digital social environment (Golbeck). However, there are not only scientists who study that amount on personal data, but also other professionals, and thus personal data can be used to advise the contend with a view of commercial and other goals. LeCun confirms this trend by own example. Scientist has created a “character recognition technology” which is widely used by commercial enterprises too. Working for a commercial enterprise Facebook LeCun says, “we have to know your interests, what you want to do, who your friends are in different situations” (Hardy). The goal is to provide users with a more appropriate content depending on earlier preferences. The next step would be to create a personal digital adviser who would “work on” a particular user, helping him/ her to act in a digital world more successfully. In this way, LeCun is talking about kind of artificial intelligent for everyone whom users will trust with their personal data and emotions. “There will be a single point of control that knows and respects your private information” (Hardy). However respectful that future intelligence may be, it would definitely bring a challenge on what is commonly considered a special characteristic of the Internet – being not tied to the offered content. Nowadays, despite being widely analyzed and advised by different web professionals, average users still have a possibility to choose and explore what they are interested about. Vice versa, it only depends on average users now what information to put on the Internet for professionals to analyze. Despite the personal intelligent advisers are expected to be personal indeed, basing their advices on specific preferences of a particular user, there’s no guarantee they will be non-commercial enterprises. And in any case, those advisers would cause changes in humans’ personalities and models of behavior due to a delegation of users’ some personal responsibilities to a machine. Works Cited “Camfind app: The “Google” of real things?”. BBC, BBC. 5 March 2015. Web. 2 Apr. 2015. Hardy, Q. “Facebook’s Yann LeCun discusses digital companions and Artificial Intelligence (and emotions)”. The New York Times. 26 March 2015. Web. 2 Apr. 2015. “Jennifer Golbeck: The curly fry conundrum: Why social media “likes” say more than you might think”. TED, TEDxMidAtlantic. Oct. 2013. Web. 2 Apr. 2015. Stenovec, T. “Why you should care about Periscope, Twitter’s new Live-Streaming App”. The Huffington Post. 26 March 2015. Web. 2 Apr. 2015. Stuart, K. “Why don’t we feel guilty in video games?”. The Guardian. 20 March 2015. Web. 2 Apr. 2015. Wakefield, J. “Children spend six hours or more a day on screens”. BBC. 27 March 2015. Web. 2 Apr. 2015 < http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32067158> Read More