Reading George Dvorsky’s, The 10 Algorithms That Dominate Our World” (2014), got me thinking if the algorithms used in dating sites really work. After a while of browsing different articles online, I was quite shocked to find out that most websites were heavily disagreeing with the fact that these couple-matching algorithms actually work.
According to an article by The Huffington Port, “dating site algorithms are meaningless. They really don’t do anything.” From a Northwestern University research published in 2012, these matching algorithms have proven to be only insignificantly better at matching people than those same people are being matched by random chance.
These algorithms are not necessarily successful because at the end of the day relationships stand on much more than just the color of one’s eyes or the fact that he or she may or may not have a college degree. A computer algorithm cannot figure out if your character matches with someone’s else’s, or if you hit it off with that person on your first day because those are things that can easily be affected by many other factors such as the place you chose to go out to on your first date, the mood the other person happens to be in on that day, their smile, their smell, etc., etc.
Even OKCupid’s ability to rate the importance of the data has been questioned by many, in regards to the fact that people can easily get away with either “lying” or just by the simple fact that we are usually bad in rating our own preferences when it comes to relationships. It is therefore unlikely that these date-matching-algorithms based upon simple data collected question will be sufficient enough to identify one’s right long-term partner.
In Fidget Spinners: How Buffer Icons Have Shaped Our Sense of Time, Jason Farman mentions how people are so attached to technology and their phones because they feel connected to them and in a way understand their function.
I had never really thought of the influence a loading icon or cursor can have on our lives, but while reading this article I was put in a position to stop, think and realize how many time I have closed a window or automatically reloaded a page, or just simply given up on something because it was not loading fast enough or because it had no indication of doing so.
People want to know what is going to happen, they want to know that what they want to watch is at least loading by the appearance of a classical circular loading symbol or with the escalation of a percentage counter. People want to know if you have read their texts either with the word “read”, or with two blue colored checks, or if the person you are currently texting and dedicating your time to is about to text you back with the three moving dots. Whatever it is we need constant affirmation that the technology we use in our everyday lives is working and functioning towards our own benefits.
I guess it is a psychological factor that keeps us attached to out technology. How else would we keep watching a video if no one told us that somewhere out there, magical efforts are being made for it to load and play? How else would we trust our phones to tell us that a person has read our text and is not lying to us? So many theories, articles and studies have been done and created around this topic of people’s reactions and emotions if there is a Read but no answer. I guess this is another way of realizing how stuck we are to today’s technology and of course cannot escape it either.
Reaction GIFs capture the physical and/or emotional response and reaction of a person, animal, cartoon, etc. They are usually very descriptive and show a lot of emotion and facial expressions. They are usually used in response to a conversation to express the feeling or thought that derives from what the other person has said. Therefore they need to be very graphic since they embody a whole feeling in just a few seconds. This counter GIF of a woman just starring shows no emotion and could be hardly used as a way to show a graphic emotion or reaction.
Cinemagraph GIFs have started becoming more and more popular as they are being used in advertisements and media. They are usually on the more artistic side and portray one or a few moving aspect of the GIF while everything else remains still, therefore making cinema graph GIFs very aesthetically pleasing. This GIF however, of two kids in a hotel room represents the exact opposite. there is nothing artistic about it nor pleasing. It shows random movement of everything and nothing in this GIF is still.
Sport GIF
Example:
Counter example:
Analysis:
Sport GIFs usually depict highlights of a game, athletes, fans and anything that pretty much relates to a specific team or sport. Basically, Sport GIFs are like fandom GIFs but for elevating anything that has to do with sports. Therefore, Sport GIFs will only be shared if they are of some importance, if they are captivating amount or if they are funny. The counter GIF depicts nothing else but a bad shot of a glimpse of a soccer ball and some sports shoes. This pretty much shows nothing of interest to a sport fan or sport enthusiast therefore making it a useless and counter Sport GIF.
In ‘I WILL DO EVERYthing That Am Asked’: Scambaiting, Digital Show-Space and the Racial Violence of Social Media, Lisa Nakamura discusses the concept of anonymity and online platforms that facilitate this anonymity, which is alive and well, striving in the online world.
According to the creator of 4Chan, an image board and meme-atractor website, anonymity is crucial for the “online ecosystem” as most internet users will anyway place their true identities through the ‘normal’, everyday services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. It is interesting to hear an opinion like this one, when normally online anonymity is looked down upon.
Anonymity might actually be the only remaining mean that “foster[s] creativity” according to Christopher Poole (4Chan’s creator). Even though it is hated by many, I don’t think that people will disagree with the fact that most times humans will show, say, and do the most when they are protected under their anonymity masks, unafraid of their social identity, reputation and place in this world.
Poole founded 4Chan in 2003 when he was only 15 years old as a platform to discuss Japanese pop-culture, a great interest of his. However, one of the website’s boards, /b/ also called “random” board, unexpectedly started gaining more and more visitors and now solemnly constitutes a third of the site’s attraction.
What attracts people to leave their ‘personal’ anonymous touch, is the fact that /b/ does not require the user to register, has no archive and of course, everything is anonymous. So even though this is a place of hatred, weirdness, and blowing off steam, the millions of posts per day, can have such a huge impact that some of the effects can and do leave the 4Chan platform and emerge into the broader everyday internet culture. This ability and chance to discuss and possibly see what really strikes people about the world, might not be possible if anonymous platforms didn’t exist for people to express how they really feel, even if that means hiding behind a mask.
Bibliography
Walker, Rob. “When Funny Goes Viral.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 July 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/magazine/18ROFL-t.html.
In What is a File?, the authors mention the need to find different means to store data and files. A constant problem many of us face with our computers and mobile phones, is overflowing the storage capacity of the device and not having enough storage space. However, people have already come up with some platforms that act as hard-drive disk for much of our electronic ‘baggage’.
Dropbox, is a file hosting service, owned by Dropbox Inc., and is used by more than 500 million people, with an annual revenue of 1 billion dollars, since it first started 10 years ago. Dropbox was founded by two MIT students, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, in 2007 as a startup company.
Drew Houston actually came up with the idea of Dropbox while on the Chinatown bus going from Boston to New York. He, once again, had forgotten his thumb drive (USB), and decided to take out his frustration by starting to write new code which later turned out to be the beginning of Dropbox.
After posting an intro video for Dropbox, his now co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, randomly happened to see it on Hackers News, which made him email Houston with the idea of working together. This was perfect timing as Houston needed a cofounder in order to be funded by Y Combinator, a seed accelerator owned by Silicon Valley legend Paul Graham.
After just one meeting with Houston at the MIT student center, Arash Ferdowsi decides to drop out of school with only one semester left and join Houston in creating Dropbox.
After a weird meeting in a rug shop and and a party for iLike (an early music startup by Facebook) the two new cofounders saw their funding go from $60 to $1.2 million in just one click of the refresh button.
After a couple demo videos online and an offer by Steve Jobs himself to by the company, Dropbox turned out to be ranked as one of the most valuable startups, not only in the US, but also in the world. At the time Dropbox was valued at over 10 billion dollars.
Even though I’m not a big user of Dropbox, it is definitely a tool that is very useful for anyone that has more than one photo on his or her phone or computer. Dropbox makes our lives much easier by storying anything we need without taking up space on our own devices but also by being able to access these files and data from anywhere in the world.
Bibliography
Mazarakis, Alyson Shontell and Anna. “Dropbox Founder Reveals How He Built a $10 Billion Company in His 20s – Even Though Steve Jobs Told Him Apple Would Destroy It.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 12 June 2017, www.businessinsider.com/dropbox-founder-and-ceo-drew-houston-interview-2017-6.
Roy Rosenzweig in Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors and Hackers, mentions how very little is really known to the public, about the effects and the role ARPA played in the Vietnam war.
Rosenzweig mentions Igloo White but yet what was it? Igloo White was formed by yet another secret group of 45 scientists, named the Jasons or The Jason Division all under the pay-roll and influence of ARPA. Apparently, the Jasons were very arrogant and egotistic, yet anti-war and “peaceniks” as Lukasik (deputy director and later director of ARPA), himself, characterises them.
However, they were still the ones who created the idea of Igloo White and who therefore caused all the ‘super-excessive’ bombings on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia. The Jasons thinking was that by bombing every truck that would pass through the trail, they would lessen the supply of the Viet Con and therefore enable them to fight. However, the bombings continued with no results whatsoever and the Jasons came up with the idea of Igloo White, the invisible wall, built with sensors.
All the sensors that Rosenzweig writes about in his article, were thrown out of airplanes one by one by soldiers, as can be seen below.
What makes this more bone-chilling is the fact that whatever these sensors could do was controlled by computers and monitors from the US command center in Thailand, basically giving the US soldiers their first video-game-like war toy.
This idea of an invisible fence that could control, sense and also attack any movement, motion, etc. was extremely interesting and innovative, especially for its time. Of course, as in any other case, it slowly evolved from badly made sensors, that would need Nickel batteries to operate and most likely break right on landing, to a better, newer and more expensive version, that would even come with a vegetation camouflage version.
Where the Jasons and everyone else went very wrong, was that any type of technology, especially when used for war, can completely sidetrack. Igloo White was the first of its kind to show the world how powerful warfare (and the US) can be. However, the US had spent $1 billion per year, for an operation that in the end did not show any actual results, and the Air Force definitely did not want to admit its defeat. The monitors didn’t categorise vehicles, which meant that any type of movement sensed or vehicle that passed through the trail, whether that was an animal or an actual war truck would be blown up to pieces. According to the Air Fore, they managed to destroy 75,000 enemy trucks, yet what they didn’t know was that the CIA had estimated that there were only about 6,000 enemy trucks in all of North Vietnam, so what were all the rest 69,000 “vehicles”? And those sensors, now mines, that were left in the ground have killed thousands of people throughout the years since they were planted. This is another example of how man-made technology can turn against the human kind.
Bibliography
Novak, Matt. “How the Vietnam War Brought High-Tech Border Surveillance to America.” Paleofuture, Paleofuture.gizmodo.com, 24 Sept. 2015, paleofuture.gizmodo.com/how-the-vietnam-war-brought-high-tech-border-surveillan-1694647526.
“War by Any Means: The Story of DARPA.” New Scientist, www.newscientist.com/article/2125337-war-by-any-means-the-story-of-darpa/.
“Operation Igloo White.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 18 Aug. 2017, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Igloo_White.
In The Forgotten Kaleidoscope Craze in Victorian England, Farman mentions how technologies go through this journey of “early adoption to mass adoption to domestication”. And in many ways, that is what we see happening every day around us. However, Farman also mentions a few other inventions that followed the kaleidoscope, and one of them being the phenakistiscope.
The phenakistoscope showed similarities with the kaleidoscope, not in terms of outcome, material and production, but in the sense of how it was a creation of “new technology” that combined a variety of creations, ideas, theories and previous inventions.
In 1832, Joseph Plateau and his sons launched to the public, what is seen above, the phenakistiscope. This was the very first device that portrayed an illusion of a continues flow of motion. Similarly to any of today’s technological advancements, when one gadget inspires the next, Plateau was able to combine the works of scientists and inventions that were created before his. He was influenced and helped by the primary works of Greek mathematician Euclid on the motion principle, Newton’s work that followed after that and Michael Faraday’s Wheel, which basically gave him the idea behind the construct of his invention, seen below.
The Phenakistisope was consisted of two disks basically aligned one on top of the other or on the same surface. The first disk one saw, was normally blank or as it later appeared with smaller decorations on it, had cuts or slots around its perimeter, and the second disk had small drawings in continuous action (imagine a short film made out of consecutive photos) drawn around the surface each in its own “designated” area. When one would hold the phenakistiscope in the mirror (as is seen in the first picture), he or she would look through the cuts of the first disk, the drawing of the second disc would create an illusion of movement.
Finally, like with the Kaleidoscope, the phenakistiscope became a great success and gained popularity in the market. But of course, like with any other invention and technological advancement, the phenakistiscope was shortly replaced with a newer, better version of it known as the Zoetrope created by William George Horner.
As I was reading Remediation by Jay David Bolter, I noticed certain patterns that connected the article with concepts found in Neuromancer. Even though William Gibson writes in the early 80s’, it is interesting to see how he manages to write about technological advances and ideas surrounding artificial intelligence. Combining the “old science” with the uncertainty of time and with the futuristic gadgets and implants, Neuromancer is therefore strongly related to Bolter’s and Grusin’s argument; “remediating relationships never end” and that “(n)ewer and older media forms continue to bore from one another” (Bolter).
The article also mentions that “(i)n every act of remediation, there is an implicit, if not explicit, claim of improvement” (Bolter). Similarly, in Neuromancer, Gibson discusses the theme of the new and improved technology present in Case’s world. Molly’s improved eye sight and ‘super-claws’, Case’s new and improved pancreas which prevents him from getting drunk or high, his super advanced new gear and even the (questionable) toxic sacks attached to his liver. So their experiences and bodies are more developed and more extreme than a ‘normal’ person like Case or a street samurai like Molly, could not have gotten in an earlier day and without the money and mysterious connections that Armitage provides.
What I struggled mostly with, were the ideas of “immediacy” and “hypermediacy” that arise in the article. Where does Neuromancer fit in these notions? On the one side, there is obvious transparency when it comes to the exact time the plot is set or even Case’s life story yet, is the concept of “hypermediacy” even present?
