COGS 10 Week 5-10 Notes PDF

Postman Chapter 8 - When religion is televised, its content is mutated to fit ideas of entertainment symbolized by the TV - Religion turns from giving us what we need to what we want - Enchantment: purpose of true religions, endowing things with magic to create sacredness - E...

Postman Chapter 8 - When religion is televised, its content is mutated to fit ideas of entertainment symbolized by the TV - Religion turns from giving us what we need to what we want - Enchantment: purpose of true religions, endowing things with magic to create sacredness - Entertainment: means through which we distance ourselves from sacredness, nothing is sacred when it comes to entertainment culture - TV brings personalities into our hearts rather than abstractions into our head, people may stray from worship of God (abstract) and idolize the preacher (blasphemy) - TV preachers are an issue, appealing to emotion rather than intellect and spirituality - If religion isn't safe from being turned into mindless entertainment, nothing is Chapter 9 - Politics is like show business according to Reagan, to appear like it prioritizes clarity, honesty, excellence but is actually mainly to please crowds - Television commercial is the most pervasive form of communication in political discourse, threatening democracy as we are too distracted by images to have clear information - Connection between rationality and advertising is diminishing - One can like/dislike an ad but not refute it because no claims are made - Advertisers need to know not what is right about the product, but what is wrong about the buyer - TV commercials shapes political discourse by: - Requiring its form to be used in political campaigns - We accept TV ads as a normal and reasonable form of discourse, as they offer instant solutions and therapy - Politicians can appear anywhere, anytime on TV, making them celebrities, they can project their image to represent audience - History is has grown indifferent to modern mind, sense of irrelevance about it rather than ignorance - We, not the government, are restricting our free speech and thought by limiting ourselves to the amusement of TV Chapter 10 - TV learning has different requirements than school learning in that it is not social, not interactive, no rules of decorum or attention - TV has by its ability to control the time, attention, and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education - Compares TV to a “curriculum” with its purpose to influence, teach, train mind of youth - TV’s main contribution to education is the idea that teaching and entertainment are inseparable - Three Commandments of TV Education = Entertainment ○ No prerequisites: no previous knowledge required, undermines idea of sequence and continuity in learning  ○ No perplexity: nothing that has to be remembered, studied, applied, ideas are made immediately accessible ○ Avoid exposition: no arguments, hypotheses, discussions, rather just visual and theatrical storytelling - Teachers are increasing use of visual stimulation, reducing amount of exposition, measuring student interest with entertainment - Learning doesn’t increase from information presented dramatically - Reading allows for higher order inferential thinking than print, reading is more tied to stored knowledge and more inferential - Content for TV shows is chosen because it is ‘televiseable’, so TV content is principle carrier of education, dictates the curriculum Chapter 11: Huxleyan Warning - Culture is destroyed when culture becomes a prison (Orwell) or a burlesque (Huxley) ○ Prison: different ideologies can’t create change in society ○ Burlesque: when we get distracted by trivia, entertainment, and people become an audience - America best represents a Huxleyan future, which is harder to recognize and oppose than Orwellian, because there’s no cries of suffering/protest - Technology is ideology, equipped with power of social change - All Americans are Marxists, believing all technological progress is moving us to some paradise - Suggestions ○ Political commercials or show them with warnings ○ Media consciousness: need to ask questions and have a deeper awareness on what information is and the impact of different forms ○ Media consciousness achieved by: - Nonsense answer: explain how a TV show should be viewed, how it is different from reality - Desperate answer: schools, educate students on media consciousness Week 5: Credibility of Information Coddling of the American Mind - Explores the rise of "safetyism" in U.S. colleges and its impact on students' mental health, resilience, and free speech - Three great untruths: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker” (people are overly sensitive to discussing controversy), “always trust your feelings” (sometimes it's important to step out of comfort zone) “life is a battle between the good and evil people” (people shouldn’t be categorized so rigidly and divisively) - Safetyism - Society, especially in education, overprotects students from emotional discomfort, avoiding discussing challenging and controversial topics - Students taught to prioritize emotional safety over intellectual growth, causing decline in resilience, increased anxiety and depression as students lack coping skills  - Victimhood Culture - Increasing focus on students as “victims” of microaggressions, oppression, societal harm - Encourages helplessness, entitlement, censorship rather than constructive and open discussion - Free Speech Crisis - Safe spaces and protests against controversial speakers limit open debate on campus - Creates culture where diverse viewpoints are silenced to avoid offense How A.I., QAnon and Falsehoods Are Reshaping the Presidential Race - Republican Party especially influenced by disinformation, creating distrust in government and belief in conspiracy theories - Intelligent and decent people still fall into conspiracies in times of vulnerability, feeling the need to find community or an explanation for complex ideas and challenges - Fix disinformation by policing platforms, bridging algorithms that allow for safe and productive conversation, and media literacy education - Social media companies should monitor trends and prioritize connection over division, quality over clickbait Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds - Impressions are remarkably perseverant, even after their beliefs are refuted, people fail to make revisions to their beliefs - Humans’ biggest advantage over animals is our ability to cooperate - Reason is an evolved trait, reason was developed to resolve problems posed by living in collaborative groups - Confirmation bias: tendency of people to embrace information that supported their beliefs and ignore contradicting evidence, biggest flaw in our ability to reason - We can easily spot weakness in others’ arguments, but very blind to our own misconceptions - Historically, more was gained from winning arguments than reasoning clearly - Illusion of explanatory depth: people overestimate their knowledge of the world - We divide cognitive labor and have different domains of knowledge, but this often leads to incomplete knowledge, which gets us into trouble when forming baseless beliefs and making important decisions Unmask the DeepFake: Defending Against Generative AI Deception - Record your voice, tell generator what you want it to say, generator can create audio or video of you speaking - Risks - Grandparent scam: deep fake someone’s voice, makes call to grandparent saying their child is in trouble and asks for money, grandparent sends money to scammer  - Disinformation: can make it seem like presidential candidates are saying dangerous things - Extortion attack: extorting money from you threatening to release videos or audios of “you” (deepfake) saying or doing something damaging to your reputation - False positive: identified something as a deep fake but it wasn’t, false negative: identified something as real but it was deep fake, which creates doubt - Defense - Ineffective: using software to detect deep fakes (~50% accuracy) because deepfakes are quickly improving, authentication label doesn’t work because no standardization and hard for compliance - Effective: education, healthy skepticism, out of band communication (reaching people through various means like text, email, call), agree on a code word to see if its really them Week 6: Internet Lecture Barbara Tversky - Mind in Motion book: how we think about space and use space to think - Principle of Correspondence: content and form of representation should match content and form of targeted concepts - Principle of Use: representation should promote efficient accomplishment of targeted tasks Space is Special - We create spaces in the mind, in words, in gesture, on a page, in the world - We talk about ideas using space: raise them, pull them together, tear them apart, turn them upside down, toss them out - Conceptual activity: collage and a place to think - Graphics schematize, selectively eliminate irrelevant and exaggerate important, - In cartoons, time and space are used in framing Stewart Brand - Library was a shipping container, spatial thinking for supporting writing process, his library doesn’t need windows because it is a window Challenger Disaster - Spaceship explodes because leakage from O-rings - Tufte publishes book of visualizations, shows that leakage increases as temperature decreases, inverse relationship - Tufte claims had the data been presented, the Challenger wouldn’t have been launched Gessner: father of scientific bibliography Paul Outlet - Library of cards containing information sorted in drawers, collection of information - Mondotheque: his idea of a machine that was a space for sharing and organizing knowledge through various media like image and text (like our phones and laptops now) As We May Think: Memex by Bush  - Bush impressed by the collaboration of scientists and their achievements in the Manhattan project (atomic bombs) urges that scientists should turn to the task of making accessible the massive and growing storage of knowledge - Memex: Bush’s idea of a future device for individual use, a mechanized library where an individual stores all his books, records, etc., he saw the web before it was created Licklider - Man-Computer Symbiosis: let computers facilitate formative thinking as they currently facilitate solution of formulated problems (computers were thought of as a calculator device at this time) - Aimed to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions with flexible dependence - Imagined computer as communication device/personal assistant Sutherland - father of computer interaction/graphics Engelbart - “Mother of all demos” introduced many principles of modern computing such as the mouse, word processing & document editing, new ways of organizing information, real time collaboration, video conferencing Amplification Effect - Software bots create fake engagement to amplify certain content to viewers to produce real engagement - Bottleneck: Difficulty in disinformation not creating it but spreading it - Rather than writing a new message, it might be easier to find a human written message you support and use bots to amplify it Arpanet: Precursor of internet, funded by ARPA Internet - How to design a network of networks? - How to design a network to link networks you don’t control and applications you can't envision/predict? - Design Principles - No central control - Network should be simple as possible with no optimization for any particular application, focus on moving information not what’s in it A Volatile Election is Intensifying Conspiracy Theories Online - Social media platforms profit from outrage creating engagement and therefore advertising revenue, so they are unwilling to alter algorithms preventing spread of toxic content - Disinformation works by playing on our emotions, creating a response, often heightened by times of distress/vulnerability (ex. Followers of misinformation account spikes after assassination attempt) - Changes in algorithms, which are very secretive, can impact what goes viral, ex. More political content goes viral on X than Instagram because of differences in algorithm The Spread of True and False News Online - Analyzed diffusion of tweets, verified them as true or false - Falsehood spread faster, deeper, farther, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, but especially regarding political news (terrorism, natural disaster, science, financial) - Bots spread true and false news at same rate, so humans are the ones responsible for the accelerated spread of fake news Week 7: Web, Wikipedia, and now AI Lecture Internet v. Web - Impact of internet was larger than impact of the web - Internet: communication system for delivering bits, set of standards for interconnecting networks - Web: collection of interconnected documents linked by hyperlinks and URLs, made accessible as a service on the Internet TCP/IP - TCP (transmission control protocol): shipping and receiving of packets - IP (internet protocol): specifies format of packets and addressing scheme Dumb Network - Network doesn’t know what's moving through packets, only acts as shipping device - Internet Philosophy: any functionality requiring more thinking than movement of packets should go to more powerful computers - Issue of Network Neutrality: principle that Internet service providers should treat all data that travels over their networks fairly Layered Abstraction - Each layer doesn’t know internal details of other layers, only knows how to talk to it using interface protocol Internet is Special - Special because it is a powerful enabler of disruptive innovation, a surprise machine for good, bad, and indifferent - Web is a surprise enable by the Internet - Impact: Internet > Web The Web Required - URL: unique identifier, machine readable address - HTTP: protocol allowing clients and servers to communicate, ensures delivery - HTML: language for marking up pages, structure web content - Hollan argues Web was fundamentally an HCI interface achievement Personal Computers - Altair: First personal computer that was affordable and attainable - Bill Gates and Paul Allen start Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Wozniak Apple - Viscalc: first spreadsheet program, could do calculations, ran on Apple II PC World Wide Web  - Dial F for Frankenstein: science fiction story about telephones communicating with one another, inspired Tim Berners Lee in starting Web - NeXT: Steve Job’s invented computer, had grayscale not just black and white - Web built, no changes needed to be made to accommodate Internet nor permission needed General Magic - Had visionary ideas ahead of their time - Despite being a commercial failure, it led to significant innovations in the tech world based on their ideas of pocket devices, touch scree, etc. Beauty Filters on Young Girls - Face filters may be the most widespread use of augmented reality - Young girls are more subject to experiment on how tech changes the way we form our identities, represent ourselves, and relate to others - Filters have little oversight and guardrails on use, little education - A lot of companies like Facebook working on AR and VR products - Artistic and funny filters are popular, but people still mainly use filters to enhance beauty - AR filters are technologically advanced, powered by neural networks and AI face recognition - Visual representations of the self influence our attitudes and behaviors, people as VR avatars act differently based on height, outfit, gender, etc, filtered world will cause people to do the same - Concerns over how much data is stored from people using Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram (ex. Facial recognition) Wikipedia Article on Wikipedia - Collaboratively written encyclopedia where volunteers contribute their information to share content and make information accessible - Praised for accessibility and breadth but criticized for bias and reliability concerns ‘A Turning Point in History’ - Harari says AI isn’t necessarily bad but its inorganic and moving inorganically quickly - Question is not do the benefits outweigh the risks but will the risks undermine the foundations of society so that we can't actually enjoy the benefits - Consequences of AI are often unintended, no repeatable experiments in history and there is no way to test history in a laboratory, especially when AI agents are learning and changing - We are going to live in this kind of new hybrid society in which many of the decisions many of the inventions are coming from a non-human consciousness - We are about in this sense to face the biggest immigration wave in history coming from AI agents with new ideas, cultures, beliefs - They can enter into every human relationship not just families like just to get one example like people writing emails  - Companies should be responsible for the actions of their algorithms not for the actions of the users - We need institutions that can understand and react to changes - There's a thousand to 1 spending gap between the amount of money that's going into making AI more powerful than in trying to steer it or make it safe - Humans will become overly dependent on AI for critical thinking and decision leading to our disempowerment as a species - Collective human intelligence has to scale with technology and AI, otherwise machine intelligence will overpower us - AI will be extremely empathetic, threatening human relationships as AI can understand our emotions better than our friends Week 8: Social Media Lecture Ed Langstroth - Nissan and Volkswagen for strategy and innovation creation of cars - TeachForAmerica: aims to reduce educational inequality - Advice: make silly goals, be open to new experiences Nate Bolt - Calfresh/SNAP: food assistance programs, main recipients are teachers - Researching people is all about behavior - Facebook was interested in qualitative data, not just quantitative Beyond Total Capture: A Constructive Critique of Lifelogging - Book by Bell and Gemmell outlined idea of a technology that could enable “total recall” of our lives through “total capture” of all the documents, online and physical activities, and emotions - Lifelogging: Seeks to be effortless and all encompassing in data capture - Total capture - Goal is a complete record of everyday life, with as many kinds of data as possible and as continuously as possible - Ex. images, location, temperature, light levels, biosensor readings - Devices: tracking devices, sensors, body cameras - Not widespread in use - Situation-specific capture - Goal is to capture rich data in specific domains involving complex information, recording data as completely as possible for specific activities/places the activity occurs - Ex. recording activities during meetings, lectures, work conversations, pen strokes - Devices: cameras, microphones, whiteboard content, software to summarize data  - Benefits (5 Rs) - Recollecting: help us relive certain experiences (retracing steps to find lost objects, remember details from meeting) - Reminiscing: relive experiences for sentimental/emotional reasons for pleasure - Retrieving: helps us find desired information - Reflecting: facilitate review of past experience for learning (make conclusions on health, see events w/ new frame/angle) - Remembering intentions: remember prospective events, things that we need to remember to do in the future - Concerns - Not capable of supporting long term recollection - Records may be less useful/valuable than we anticipated - Goals - Selectivity over total capture for maximized utility - Provide cues to trigger memory rather than capturing experiences - Rather than replacing human memory, it should supplement human memory’s weaknesses - Produce systems that better fit intended purpose (specify which of the 5 Rs it aims to help) How to Record Everything on Your Laptop Screen Without Microsoft Recall - Recall - Microsoft tool that allows you to retrace your steps on your PC, search anything you’ve seen by giving computer clues or use timeline to see past activity - Uses regularly taken screenshots where text and images it contains are made searchable - Pushback from users regarding privacy concerns as Recall requires everything you do on a PC to be recorded - Wind Recorder (snapshots, video, search, and summary) and Rewind.ai (search thumbnails, daily recap/summary, ask rewind) are alternatives that do similar tasks Windows Recall — a ‘privacy nightmare’? - Safety measures: user picks what apps to exclude and can pause Recall when they want - Recall is turned on by default and doesn’t do content moderation, so won't conceal any confidential information like passwords or financial information - Could be used as a simpler way to steal sensitive data than tactics like keylogging or screen recording - Warning to businesses not to use Recall - Calls to Recall to forget more of the actions it has recorded, suggestion to store for shorter time/reduced scope to gain trust Week 9: Social Media Lecture General Magic - Failure because ideas were ahead of the technology at the time Internet - A surprise machine and enabler of disruptive innovation - Most of the technology on the web was designed already, Berners Lee just put it together Sony Betamax VCR - You can tape TV shows and watch them later - Studios argued recording a TV show is copying so it needs to be banned - Sony’s defense: VCR is just a tool that has both legal and illegal uses, shouldn’t ban technology just because it might be used illegally - Initially consensus to ban VCR, SCOTUS changes mind - By 2000, half of movie industry revenue is from video rental Napster - Started to share music on the Internet - You can request music and get connected to people with that music, and share your music -> peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing - Sued by music industry over copyright, loses in court because while Betamax had no control over what users did with VCR, Napster was involved in infringement acts SONY CD Player - Digital rather than analog recorder, quality isn’t lost with recording Digital Convergence - Computer becomes a universal machine, digital data drives the machine Multitouch - Hann and Buxton worked on it - Shift to depth cameras that track where people touch IPod/Long Nose - iPod releases in 2001, became the “must have” gift - Long nose: shape of distribution of inception to big industry of digital technology in about 30 years - Design - Designers understand history - Kodak designed 5 different colors of the camera to sell more to women - iPod designed smaller version and 5 colors to sell more to women Misunderstanding the Harms of Online Disinformation Exposure to Misinformation - Misinformation is rare for most users and concentrated among small groups - Public discourse often overstates its prevalence/impact Research Limitations - Much of the existing research on social media’s harms relies on correlational data, more experimental studies for causal are needed to understand its true effects Non-Western Contexts  - Most research focuses on Western countries, while non-Western nations face greater misinformation challenges due to limited media freedom and higher government control Overstating Impact of Harmful Content - Neglecting Denominators: Harmful content is a tiny fraction of what people see online out of all the content they digest - Engagement vs. Exposure: Engagement metrics (likes, shares) is not an accurate reflection of actual exposure - Overstating Algorithms’ Role: Audience demand, more than social media \\algorithms, drives exposure to harmful content - Conflating Content Types: studies group exposure to misinformation with engagement with extremist content, misleading conclusions on how content spreads as they are different types of content Recommendations - Focus on measuring exposure in extremist groups and reduce demand for false content, especially by media and political elites - Platforms should enhance data transparency and support research into social media’s impacts - Laws should improve platform transparency, and more research should be done in non-Western countries where social media harm is more severe. Has Social Media Fuelled a Teen-Suicide Crisis? - Teens find ways to bypass restrictions parents set on their social media and phone use - Schools and parents suing social media platforms over harm and danger towards children - Issues with social media use: teens internalize their problems more, making it harder to cope, have worse body images, fosters comparison with others -> feeling of inadequacy - Social media works on the same neurological pleasure circuitry involved in substance addiction