Networked Communications
In the movie, Blue Book is the largest internet company in the world. Its CEO builds the world’s first artificially intelligent robot based on the database of the company’s search-engine. This setting of the movie raises a point that communication data throughout Internet provides lots of information about the real world just like Nathan said,
"Here's the weird thing about search engines. It was like striking oil in a world that hadn't invented internal combustion. Too much raw material. Nobody knew what to do with it. You see, my competitors, they were fixated on sucking it up and monetizing via shopping and social media. They thought that search engines were a map of what people were thinking. But actually they were a map of how people were thinking. Impulse. Response. Fluid. Imperfect. Patterned. Chaotic. "
The quote emphasizes on the products of networked communications. It is very accurate to use resources as a metaphor for the raw data online. The textbook, Ethics for the information age, hasn't mentioned this aspect of networked communication. Networked communication is very different from the traditional communication methods. For example, if two people are just talking to each other, the content of the chat only remains in their memory. Even if they use letter to communicate, the letters are still private until they publish them. In contrast, the Internet offers a very easy way for people to publish their thoughts and usually their words will be available to a large amount of people. Even a simple tweet with comments from friends will stay in the server for a long time. Thus, such records gradually accumulate and finally become a large oil field containing tremendous amount of information about people’s emotion, thought process, opinions, and needs. People is actually starting to realize the power of such resources
For example, in search marketing field, keyword research is an important steps. By understanding the meaning and purposes of each keyword people used, businesses could attract more and right kind of visitors by adding related information to their websites. Without the internet, this could have never been done easily [1].
In addition, researcher are also using communication data as a measure of public emotion. An interesting study is about the relationship between public mood and stock market [2]. From large-scale twitter feeds, researcher are able to predict the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the DJIA at an accuracy of 86.7%. The emotion of public is difficult to measure before. However, with the help of internet, data related to emotion are everywhere and there are many tools to analyze them such as OpinionFinder that measures positive vs. negative mood and Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) that measures mood in terms of 6 dimensions (Calm, Alert, Sure, Vital, Kind, and Happy).
It is the networked communication that generates unlimited resources waiting for people to mine. To be noted, the utilization of them should follow the regulations and laws.
References:
[1]. Keyword research, https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research (2015/09/22)
[2]. Johan Bollen, Huina Mao, Xiaojun Zeng, Twitter mood predicts the stock market (Journal of Computational Science, 2015)
"Here's the weird thing about search engines. It was like striking oil in a world that hadn't invented internal combustion. Too much raw material. Nobody knew what to do with it. You see, my competitors, they were fixated on sucking it up and monetizing via shopping and social media. They thought that search engines were a map of what people were thinking. But actually they were a map of how people were thinking. Impulse. Response. Fluid. Imperfect. Patterned. Chaotic. "
The quote emphasizes on the products of networked communications. It is very accurate to use resources as a metaphor for the raw data online. The textbook, Ethics for the information age, hasn't mentioned this aspect of networked communication. Networked communication is very different from the traditional communication methods. For example, if two people are just talking to each other, the content of the chat only remains in their memory. Even if they use letter to communicate, the letters are still private until they publish them. In contrast, the Internet offers a very easy way for people to publish their thoughts and usually their words will be available to a large amount of people. Even a simple tweet with comments from friends will stay in the server for a long time. Thus, such records gradually accumulate and finally become a large oil field containing tremendous amount of information about people’s emotion, thought process, opinions, and needs. People is actually starting to realize the power of such resources
For example, in search marketing field, keyword research is an important steps. By understanding the meaning and purposes of each keyword people used, businesses could attract more and right kind of visitors by adding related information to their websites. Without the internet, this could have never been done easily [1].
In addition, researcher are also using communication data as a measure of public emotion. An interesting study is about the relationship between public mood and stock market [2]. From large-scale twitter feeds, researcher are able to predict the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the DJIA at an accuracy of 86.7%. The emotion of public is difficult to measure before. However, with the help of internet, data related to emotion are everywhere and there are many tools to analyze them such as OpinionFinder that measures positive vs. negative mood and Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) that measures mood in terms of 6 dimensions (Calm, Alert, Sure, Vital, Kind, and Happy).
It is the networked communication that generates unlimited resources waiting for people to mine. To be noted, the utilization of them should follow the regulations and laws.
References:
[1]. Keyword research, https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research (2015/09/22)
[2]. Johan Bollen, Huina Mao, Xiaojun Zeng, Twitter mood predicts the stock market (Journal of Computational Science, 2015)