Category: interactive media

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What’s up with GameStop?

In case you haven’t heard, the video game store GameStop has been the talk of the town, especially if your town is an “online reading club” called Reddit. If you’re wondering what that quote is all about, enjoy this short video tweet.

Okay, that was fun, but seriously, what’s going on. Without getting bogged down in the complexities of wall street shenanigans, one lesson to take away from #gamestopgate is the enormous power of collective action organized by online forums (in this case Reddit) and the larger social media communities that jumped into the pool.

Here’s a more detailed explanation…

Robinhood democratized stock trading for the masses, and social media gave them a way to communicate and organize around a trending topic. This kind of power, rarely available to the average consumer, will become more and more common as the internet becomes injected into every area of life. Last year it was crowd-sourced journalism and police reform. This week it is “short squeezing” a video game stock and the hedge fund investors who were betting on its demise. Next month it may be decentralized healthcare and vaccine distribution. Every service that was formerly controlled by titans and elites can be disrupted by internet-empowered citizens with either a common goal or grievance. Hold on to your hats.

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Bernie Sure Gets Around

Have you seen Bernie Sanders recently? How could you miss him? He’s everywhere…including in my classroom.

Bernie Sanders sitting in on my Media & Society class

Of course Bernie wasn’t a student in my Media & Society class from last fall, but that’s what’s so fun about this meme. It is instantly recognizable, relatable, and can be adapted to almost any setting. And Bernie’s body language is also open to interpretation. His pose could be read as bored, sad, or grumpy. And don’t forget the mittens.

According to RollingStone magazine, the photo was taken by Brendan Smialowski, a former sports photojournalist from Connecticut who documents politics for wire service Agence France-Presse. And according to Wired magazine, the Bernie meme is an indication of a “cultural reset”… a defining moment when you can feel a change or shift is happening. And this change came with a bit of levity. According to Wired, “The internet has had some good ones [memes] over the past four or five years, but often, amidst the political bickering, it’s been hard to know when to interject with a joke. On Wednesday morning, people let ’em rip—and suddenly the thing keeping everyone warm was laughter.”

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Big Tech, Political Polarization, and the Assault on Democracy

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Zuboff and Why We’re Polarized by Klein

I’ve been catching up on some reading over the holiday break and two books that caught my attention are proving to be quite helpful to understanding the recent events in our nation’s capitol. What we’re witnessing is shocking, but not surprising, to those who have paid attention to the ever-increasing power exerted by Big Tech over every detail of our lives, including our political identities.

Big Tech is shorthand for the companies that control much of our everyday lives through their use of software and hardware designed to capture and hold our attention. And speaking of attention, if I were to add another recent title that addresses this concern it would be The Attention Merchants, by Tim Wu.

By gathering the massive amount of data generated every minute of every day by billions of users, these companies have tapped into a resource that they have turned against us to predict and control our future behavior. Siloing, creation of filter bubbles, nudging users towards certain behaviors, shadow-banning (and now more overt actions to disenfranchise users) are just some of the ways that Big Tech is meddling in the political process. If that sounds like a radical conspiracy theory to you, I urge you to read these books and then we can have a conversation.

And while all of us can agree that what transpired this past week in the halls of congress was both dangerous and disgusting, reasonable people continue to disagree about how to respond to controversial political speech on the leading tech platforms. The ban of the President of the United State by numerous platforms, regardless of your opinions about Trump himself, is cause for concern and should not be taken lightly.

Similarly while the attack on right-wing alternative platforms, e.g. Parler, by Amazon, Apple and Google, may feel like a reasonable and perfectly legal response to unhinged speech that calls for political violence, the danger is to further marginalize and force underground a movement that has enormous popular support.

I’m not suggesting that racists, white-nationalists, and anarchists should have a seat at the table, but I am suggesting that unelected leaders of a few massive tech companies cannot be trusted to make decisions about who gets to participate in our political discourse. This time they may appear to be on your side, but what about when the tables are turned? We’ve given these tech platforms enormous power over the future of our democracy…and that makes me very concerned.

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Computer Bang for the Buck

The phrase “bang for the buck” refers to performance relative to cost. Higher bang for the buck means that you get more performance for less cost. For computer technology, this has been a logarithmic curve of greatly increasing performance with a falling price tag.

The increasing performance has largely been attributed to the gains in processor speed and reduction in size of integrated circuits, aka microchips. You may have heard of Moore’s Law, named for Gordon E. Moore of Intel. Moore predicted in 1965 that processor speed would double every 1-2 years for the foreseeable future. It has been said that if automotive technology followed the same trajectory as microchips, the average car would travel at 300,000 mph, get over 2 million mpg, and cost only $0.04 to make.

I recently decided to organize my many hard drives and was reminded of how the cost of storage has fallen at a remarkable rate over the years. My first external hard drive, purchased in the early-mid 1990s, held 1 GB (yes, gigabyte) of data at a cost of $1,000. Here’s what more than 100 TB of storage looks like today.

More than 100 TB of removable storage

If this amount of storage was purchased at early 1990s prices, it would cost $100 million! If you look back further, the numbers are even crazier.

Now, think about your smart phone and the processing power that it contains. Your phone has millions of times more computational power than the computers used in 1969 by the Apollo scientists when they put a man on the moon. If you were to pay for that much computing power at prices from just 30 years ago, you’d have to spend 10s of millions of dollars. I know the cost of a new smart phone is pretty steep when you’re trying to pay rent, tuition, your streaming media subscriptions, and an occasional trip to Chipotles…but it really is a bargain when you look at it through the lens of computer history.

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Beginning of the End for Video Game Consoles?

This week Sony and Microsoft are launching their next-generation consoles in the form of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. It’s been 7 years since the last major upgrade, and this one is shaking things up with serious gamers. Some of the new technologies include: ray tracing, 3-D audio, ultra-fast frame rates, and a controller that incorporates vibration-based haptic feedback.

At the same time, some industry analysts are wondering if this is the beginning of the end for consoles with the rise of cloud video gaming services as the next big thing. Google’s Stadia (“no console, no download”), Amazon’s Luna, Apple’s Arcade and Facebook Gaming are all vying to be the future of video gaming.

To keep things in perspective, the video game industry is three times as big as the Hollywood movie industry. Yes, that’s right…video games generate three times the revenue as Hollywood blockbusters…and that doesn’t even take into account the hit that movies theaters have taken with the pandemic. But even with success measured on this level, the gaming industry needs to be nimble and quick to respond to consumer demand. Whoever comes up with the next big development in video gaming will be richly rewarded.

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Section 230 is Under Attack

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law passed during the Clinton administration, is under attack from both the left and the right. President Trump wants to revise Section 230 because of what he believes is unfair throttling of conservative news by liberal tech platforms. And liberal legislators want to revise Section 230 to make it more difficult to post “hate speech” on these same platforms.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been blamed for everything wrong about these leading social media platforms. We could debate whether they deserve the blame, but we can’t deny that they are caught between a rock and a hard place. One one hand, they love Section 230 because it removes corporate responsibility for content published on their platforms by users. On the other hand, they worry about the future of a platform that could becomes a free-for-all without any ability to control the most poisonous content. They want to be free to limit obscene pornography, dangerous speech, libel, and other content not protected by the 1st Amendment, but they don’t want to be responsible for damage that might be caused by speech that comes close, without crossing, the line. According to the Recode website…

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced that his agency would “move forward with a rulemaking to clarify” the meaning of Section 230, which gives internet platforms like Facebook and Twitter immunity from lawsuits over content their users provide. That is to say, if someone defames you in a tweet, you can sue the Twitter user but not Twitter itself. This 25-year-old law is what allows websites that rely on third-party content to exist at all. It also allows those sites to moderate that content as they see fit, which has been a source of ire for conservatives who believe they are being censored when Facebook bans them, YouTube demonetizes them, or Twitter appends fact-checks to their tweets.

The most recent fuss over Section 230 involves Hunter Biden’s laptop that was left with a computer repair shop. The shop owner turned the contents of the hard drive over to an attorney with connections to former NYC major Rudy Giuliani, who turned the information over the the New York Post, a tabloid newspaper with a less-than-sterling reputation. The last-minute release of Hillary Clinton’s emails by Wikileaks, (amplified by James Comey and the FBI), just days before the 2016 election is believed to have been a factor leading to the election of President Donald Trump, and social media platforms don’t want to facilitate a repeat of that outcome. Twitter prevented sharing of the New York Post’s stories based on the idea that the data was obtained by hacking, (not technically accurate), but a few days later apologized for not communicating more clearly and then reversed their policy. Facebook continues to restrict sharing on their platform because they claim that they are unable to verify the accuracy of the claims alleged by the NY Post.

As you can see, there is no easy solution to this dilemma…and many other current debates. Facebook just recently announced they will take a tougher stance on holocaust denialism, anti-vaccine posts, and QAnon conspiracy pages. But this is a slippery slope for platforms. Once you begin deciding what is true and appropriate and permissible, you open yourself to criticism from all sides.

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Is Twitter’s Cropping Algorithm Racially Biased?

Recent reports are suggesting that the algorithm that controls image cropping on the Twitter app does not respond to images of dark-skinned people in the same way it does for light-skinned people. According to the TNW website, people have been noticing cropping anomalies that may have to do with the color of the featured person’s skin-tones. If you read the article, you’ll see that the jury is still out on accusation of bias, but it does raise interesting questions about our reliance on AI (Artificial Intelligence) software and how the results may reflect unconscious bias of the programmers.

While the concern about bias by Twitter’s algorithm may be unfounded, it raises additional questions about AI and facial recognition software. According to The Next Web, “Light skin bias in algorithms is well documented in fields ranging from healthcare to law enforcement.”

If you want to know more about implicit bias, see this website and take a test (I recommend the Skin-tone IAT). You may find that the best place to begin the war against bias is not Twitter’s AI software, but our own “natural intelligence.”

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The Social Network: 10 Years Later

Ten years ago today David Fincher’s movie about the founding of Facebook hit the theaters. The Social Network was a box-office success raking in nearly $225 million worldwide and earning a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Movie poster from Wikipedia

According to Wikipedia, ” At the 83rd Academy Awards, it received eight nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Eisenberg, and won three: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Film Editing. It also received awards for Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Original Score at the 68th Golden Globe Awards. In 2016, it was voted 27th among 100 films considered the best of the 21st century by 117 international film critics.”

If you’ve never watched the movie, here’s the storyline from its IMDb webpage…

On a fall night in 2003, Harvard undergrad and computer programming genius Mark Zuckerberg sits down at his computer and heatedly begins working on a new idea. In a fury of blogging and programming, what begins in his dorm room soon becomes a global social network and a revolution in communication. A mere six years and 500 million friends later, Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in history… but for this entrepreneur, success leads to both personal and legal complications.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/

The main characters involved in the early days of Facebook have gone on to make their fortunes in the tech business. Some have denounced Zuckerberg and what Facebook have become. You can read more about their exploits here.

The Social Network is a movie, adapted from a 2009 book, about social media, that you can watch on your TV (via Netflix)…oh, and it won the Academy Award for Best Original Score. What could be more illustrative of media convergence than that?

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Uh, This is Cool!

If you’re like me and think that your audio recordings could use a bit of polish, this new podcast editing program Descript may be just the ticket.

https://twitter.com/andrewmason/status/1283837951277850624

Using AI (Artificial Intelligence), the software not only allows you to automatically find and remove filler words, it can also fix a misspoken word or phrase by learning, and then creating, the correct word or phrase from your own voice…making for a seamless patch. Think of it as an audio deep-fake, but in this instance it is used to fix errors, not deceive or misinform listeners. Here’s a video that is designed to get you to part with your money…

And yeah, the title of this post has officially been edited to… Uh, This is Cool.

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