“Alexa, make me smile”- is only one of the multiple requests one can make to Amazon’s echo assistant. In the present date, one can command multiple instructions to Amazon’s Alexa. These can range from normal requests such as “Alexa, tell me the weather forecast for today” to eccentric food and drink recommendations like “Alexa, ask what beer goes with ramen”. There is one word that constantly reappears when describing the rise of the virtual assistant: ubiquitous. It came out of the blue, and suddenly it was everywhere. The first Alexa was launched in November 2014, and from then until 2017, it has sold around 20 million devices. Competitors such as the Google Assistant have started to make significant appearances, and Apple has started to leave its footprint. Needless to say, the home pods are under heavy demand. The virtual assistant market was valued at $627 million in 2015 and is projected to reach a value of $7.9 billion by 2024 . Given the large sales figures and increasing valuations, one can conclude that this technology is forecasted to become a commodity in a relative future. Therefore, it is important to consider that its widespread adoption could have potential implications on our own human development. How will kids change the way they learn their communication skills when they grow up talking to an algorithm? How will small businesses grow when humans start to rely more and more on gatekeeping recommendation systems? How much will we depend on these assistants when trying to make a choice, whether it’s buying a new house or buying next week’s groceries? These are all questions worth exploring in order to see who are the winners and the losers, and will help shed light on who are the players pushing the growth agenda for Alexa and her friends.
Author: Flavia
Finding Serendipity in Reddit – by Professional_Cherry
For this weekend’s assignment, our focus was to “rewire” by changing our channels of media reception. Since I get most of my news channels and information from Instagram, I decide to erase the app from my phone and migrate to Reddit for a few days.
As “the front page of the internet”, I expected to obtain new perspectives, different sources of media, and forms of discussion different to the ones on Instagram that could shed some light on previous biases. Therefore, I took one of the suggested usernames, Professional_Cherry, and started my voyage through Reddit.
After reading the description about serendipity on “Digital Cosmopolitans” by Ethan Zuckerman, I felt like I had hit the jackpot with the activity. Zuckerman mentions that in order to achieve serendipity “we need to stumble on unexpected influences to make novel connections. This means granting some of our attention to curators – human and mechanical – who can introduce us to unexpected influences”. On Instagram, I tend to follow certified newspapers, fortune 500 companies, consulting firms, etc. – so the curation is very specific with a clear agenda for each of these institutions. News are portrayed in a specific journalistic format, announcements are made in official statements. This forum does not facilitate second perspectives – in the way that it is the companies that post about their news, and not people posting about the news that this company publishes. In addition to that, the medium itself is not designed for discussion, but the interaction modes are inclined towards “tagging”, where these tags normally stay within a first-network interaction of your friends and family – therefore there is mainly one way of receiving their message.
In contrast, Reddit’s model allows for posts to shared from a second perspective, where it is the average user that can get the equivalent attention as the Instagram verified user. Therefore, the curator changes – along with the purpose of the post and the agenda behind it. What is also a main differentiator with the Reddit postings is that it’s main purpose is to spark discussion, whether it’s on a news posting, a question, a recommendation, etc. This allows to build upon the second perspective, and that is where the new insights can come in. Posts are not only made as captions, but in the forms of interactive discussion that can have essay style lengths.
In terms of discovering new content by avoiding biases, I believe Reddit is able to promote this in a particular way. There are subreddits such as r/worldnews (19.9 m subscribers) whose focus is on global news that EXCLUDES US-internal news. There is another subreddit called r/UpliftingNews (13.7 m) that only focuses on providing positive headlines. The top subreddit has 21.3 m subscribers, this places these two subreddits at the top of exposure within the subreddit rank, where they make the top 50 most popular threads. Going back to what Zuckerman said about media biases in chapter 3, where the only news that would be published for Nigeria would be in negative contexts regardless of all the positive potential headlines, Reddit allows for this type of subjective filtering to be left out. However, one may only receive these subreddit postings if they choose to subscribe to it, which is a personal filtering that would not lead to serendipity. But, Reddit poses another platform that can go beyond this – the front end. When one goes to the popular posts, one can see the most upvoted content of any subreddit, leading you to change your filter based on what the Reddit world is currently looking at.
And who makes up this Reddit world? Reddit has a total of 250 million users, 56% are American, and the second largest population is in the UK with 7.3%. Here we can see that the US does make up a majority, which does show signs that the content is curated by a specific demographic. However, it is rescuable to see that the other 44% is broken down into more diverse range, which is indicated by 49% difference between the first and the second top Reddit populations.
As you can see, this exercise has allowed me not only to dive into this Reddit world in order to Rewire, but the platform itself sparked a lot of interest in me and therefore I started looking up more into what makes up Reddit. I’m pretty sure I am still not aware of how everything works, since it seems to have a lot of layers, but up til now, I’ve been able to obtain new content. For example this morning, someone posted in r/news about how a US teacher in Mexico was killed by a cartel – and all the comments in the subreddits talk about how the cartel has acted within their scenario. Of course, not all of these stories make it to the news, and I would even say this one did make it because it was a teacher from the US. News like this would not be relevant without this figure since, and publishing regardless would be too repetitive! If it were to be reported without the US component, headlines like this would appear every other day at NBC people would first of all not care since it doesn’t directly prevail them, and even if they did it would eventually be desensitized due to its frequency. However, in Reddit discussions, one is able to see the power of the cartels more in detail. I can take it as alternative news, as it is not hard to believe. And just like this, I am exposed to new corners of the world.
Orignal Post in r/news 
Overall, this has been a positive experience for me. After this, I’m definitely going to continue using reddit, and might perhaps even post content of my own!
mathMaster12 takes on Stack Exchange
Before this class, I had no idea that there was such a thing as Stack Exchange. I knew Stack Overflow was a network, but I had no notion that Overflow was just one part of a larger component. I was surprised to see so many forums, especially ones like “Skeptics” and specific ones like “Role-playing Games”. Since my creativity levels were at -10 because I was also studying for my Linear Algebra quiz (for tomorrow) – I decide to post in Mathematics.
I’ve never engaged in these sort of forums as a “poster”. For Stack Overflow, I always tended to look at questions that were already asked and guided myself from there. Therefore, I was unaware of HOW DEMANDING this forum was. I tried to post a question from my Linear Algebra Homework and was specifically asking for explanations for the answer. Here are my conclusions after this experience:
- Annoying – Its posting requirements are very demanding – If someone is in a hurry and urgently needs something answer but is not familiar with the requirements, it might take a try, two, or five to understand what Exchange wants from this whole post. The requirements of having a question that is minimum of 15 words, a different description AND a tag that HAS TO BE POPULAR really slowed me down when posting.
- Annoying – The People are SO demanding and quite harsh– MY POST EVENTUALLY GOT PUT ON HOLD because it was “off-topic”. Apparently my question was missing context, which includes “my thoughts on the problem” – it was just a math problem question… I also heard from some of my peers that asking the “wrong” question can get some pretty heavy negative feedback, almost jumping into personal attack. This is however more characteristic of normal forums, and therefore expected.
3. Nice – Replies were quick and effective. I got replies within minutes, of people who were not just giving me an answer but were also guiding me through the problem. Some even had some nice LaTex encoded in the question for visual purposes. It seems like people on this forum are really dedicated to providing you with elaborate answers. Even more so, I got to see that this is also a community of very smart people – it’s not just a random dude who does nothing with his life but scrape the internet – in Mathematics, it’s actually people who are well versed in their areas. Pretty sure the rest also applies to other forums.
Going off point 3, as someone who doesn’t really engage with these forums, I always find it bizarre how some people are willing to go out of their way and take time from their own lives to write essay-like answers on a forum full of strangers, to help someone they don’t know. Do they have too much free time? Or are they better people than I am? The nature of these forums is powered by these type of people, and apparently, they make up a significant proportion of this world. Else, there wouldn’t be such a thing as Stack Exchange or Reddit. It really makes me go back to Clay’s description of the organization of masses. During his TED Talk a few years ago, he mentions Flickr. As someone who never used Flickr, I could not fully comprehend the impact of these forums. However, now that I know more about Reddit and Stack Exchange, I can grasp how truly incredible is is that these masses have organized themselves within a medium and have managed to create a massive collection of strangers who are willing to dedicate several hours of their lives to answer random questions that pop up on their feed.
Flavia’s Ideas for Analysis Paper 1
The Telegraph as a Symbol for Innovation
From the 1840s until the 1860s, Paraguay was known to be as the most emerging and innovative economy of South America. Under the reign of President Carlos Antonio Lopez, there were several projects that placed Paraguay ahead of its surrounding countries. Some of these projects involved the inauguration of the first railway of South America, the push to send Paraguayan scholars to study in European Universities, and the creation of the first Telegraph in South America. However, in 1964 Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina allied against Paraguay and the Triple Alliance War began. This was a catastrophic event for Paraguay, given that there was a complete destruction of the population and multiple infrastructures, which eliminated the positive growth outlook it had in its future years. In this analysis paper, I want to explore the effects the creation of the telegraph had in placing Paraguay as an innovation and technological hub, but also how this method of communication was used during the times of war that followed. Finally, I want to analyze the effects of the destruction of the telegraph lines in regards to the flipped perspective on Paraguay by the time the war ended. However, I do believe that I cannot fit that much content in 5 pages, so if I were to choose any of these topics, I would like to focus on the importance it was given at time of development and progress [TBD].
Guarani: The Spanish Translation of A Phonetic Language into a Latin Alphabet
The Guarani language is one of the only surviving native languages in South America. It is so frequently used that, without Guarani, you can’t understand half of conversation between two Paraguayans. It is the only native language that is taught in school and spoken by people of all social classes. One of the components that make these teachings possible is the fact that there was an alphabet created around a phonetic language. For this paper however, I would like to explore the agendas and the process behind the translation of Guarani into the latin script. Given that the Guaranies did not have a written version of their alphabet, it was only during the 1600s, the times of the Spanish conquest, that the church developed a latin alphabet that would represent the Guarani language. Of course, this was under the agenda of spreading the Catholic religion and providing the natives with catechism education in their local language. However, they created a very specific dialect called “Missionary Guarani”, that was eliminated after the expulsion of the missionaries in 1767. For this essay, I would like to explore the process of decision to create an alphabet and the levels of adoption from the natives. If I get the time and enough resources, I would also like to keep exploring the development of this alphabet, the agendas around it, and the impact it had on the natives perception of their own language.
Resources (Both PDFs):
Flavs & Her Paraguayan Emojis
For this week’s assignment we were asked to create three emojis from our hometown and ask for feedback from our friends and family. I took my time to draw them out and then pass them on to Illustrator in order to refresh myself on how to use the tool. Once I was done, I decided to share it in a group chat of close friends, on a one on one conversation with a friend who’s also a graphic designer, and with my parents and directly ask for their feedback. Most of the feedback was done through voice notes so it wouldn’t really make sense to post them. With all three groups, I received a similar response for each. In the following paragraphs, I’ll describe the context each emoji and give their respective reactions.
Mongarú:
Mongarú is a word in Guarani (the native language of Paraguay) that literally translates to “feed”. However, as most of the words in Guaraní, it’s social connotation is completely different. This emoji describes the action of the mongaru, which goes as follows: When someone is telling a friend of an achievement they’ve recently had, the friend would say something along the lines of “come here” and would put his hand in the shape of the top hand with an up and down motion of the wrist. This is an invitation for the person telling the story to put his hand as shown in the bottom hand in the emoji. Put together, they are supposed to create the shape of a bird feeding its babies, hence the literal term. Nevertheless, it is an official demonstration of congratulations that is demonstrated through physical action. I chose to draw this emoji because I don’t think I use any for congratulation purposes. I understand that there are a lot of celebration bells and bows, but that is not how we express congratulations in a daily context. I felt that doing it through Mongarú would go along the common use of hand gestures in emojis.
My friends however stated that these two hand gestures could be done in two separate emojis, since they are actions from a sender and a receiver. In it’s current state, the sender is already taking the action of the receiver. If they were to be split, the sender’s emoji would connote the same intentions as the live action, an invitation to come forward and send the bottom emoji. This action would have a context of connection. Nevertheless, there is a problem when taking perspective in consideration. Senders and receivers don’t share the same perspective when texting. Senders normally see their own bubble appear coming in from the right of the screen, while receivers see the senders message coming in from the left of the screen. This would distortion the perception of the images, because both wouldn’t be able to meet and create the shape. The only way to fix this change in perspective is for Unicode to automatically reflect the perception so there would be a “bird-feeding” image for both the sender and the receiver.
Un Tere:
Some of you will understand that tereré is the colder (and better) version of the Argentinian Mate, a sort of unique herbal tea. However, the context of tereré is very particular in Paraguay. People are constantly getting together for breaks and hangouts to sit in a circle and pass around the tereré. Therefore, this invitation would also be an invitation to hangout and drink some tereré. It would be used for people who are too lazy to ask someone to hangout and would instead just send them this emoji. In the context of Paraguay, this action would be very self explanatory, which therefore means that people would understand right away that this was an invitation to hang out. This then means that it fits the enclosed context of “universality” stated in both “The Jump for Universality” and “Person in Lotus Position”. As the 99% invisible podcast recommends, it is also not a trend, since it is a traditional event that has been happening for centuries in the country. Given these two reasons, I believe I could actually make a very arguable case in the hypothetical Unicode Paraguayan Emojis Competition.
There were no recommendations for change in this emoji, most of my friends told me that this was their favorite one since they say “Who’s up for a tereré” on a daily basis, so I therefore decided to keep it as it is (despite the design criticism of “the herbs look like avocado” and “the hand looks like feet”).
Sombrerito Piri – “Que Paraguay”
This last emoji caused most of my reflection on the whole culture and thought process that goes behind emojis. I did all of them and sent them for feedback, and only then did I do the readings and hear the podcast. It was very interesting to see how a lot of the feedback I got resonated with what was being discussed in both assignments. As you can see, what I have here is a Paraguayan hat, mostly known as Sombrero Piri. When I sent it to my designer friend, his first reaction was “I love the first one and the second one, but the third one doesn’t have a clear meaning. It looks like you just did it to complete the task”. I must admit, I did have a lot of trouble coming up with a third emoji. With all of the previous emojis, I had a clear idea of the interactions I wanted to portray. However, for my last emoji I wanted to encompass a common phrase we use Que Paraguay, that is SO Paraguay. When I explained this to my friend, he was more understanding of what I wanted to portray. We took a while to think about when we would use this emoji and he finally came up with the situation: “Hey dude, my car window just shattered because a mango fell on it”, and then he would send the Que Paraguay emoji. My parents had a similar reaction to the one of my friend, at the beginning they didn’t really know what to make of the emoji. It was not similar to the previous two, which were clear actions that we see at a daily basis. In David Deutsch’s essay “The Jump to Universality”, he mentions that changing the phonetic representation of the word “treason” to a symbol of its own would be tedious. Whenever you are embodying a specific term to a symbol and want to use that symbol to communicate, he said “one would somehow have to inform all intended readers of the meaning”. The same thing applies to my Sombrero Piri, it has a symbolical meaning rather than the action meanings found in my previous emojis. This therefore makes it harder for people to interpret it without asking “What does it mean” or “when would I use it”.
Self Reflection and Experiment on Social Situations – 8 Detox Hours for Flavs
After going through and 8 hour technological detox and reading “Reclaiming Conversation” and “The Machine Stops”, I’ve obtained a hit of awareness of my own behavior and my surroundings.
Regarding my moments of reflection in the single chair, I’ve come to realize that these moments (when I am not in detox) happen whenever I’m going from one place to another, when I don’t have access to wifi, or when I’m going to bed and leaving my phone on the side. During my detox, I was going through a mental debate about some interactions I had over the week that demanded some reflection. I realized that without my distractions available for a long period of time, I just wanted to get out of my own head because it was mentally tiring to constantly think about the same thing without a solid conclusion. However, when I inevitably pushed myself to keep thinking about it, I realized I came to clarity with my thoughts when I further thought of who I was as a person and my own values exclusive of any situation.
I normally consider myself as a person who is not into the world of social media of mass exposure (anymore, I’ve taken this approach for about a year now after realizing the superficiality of many posts). However after this excersise, I’ve realized how large my contained use of social media is. Even if I interact with top 15 people on a daily basis, the amount of media content is large.
My friends and I have this common behavior of getting together hanging out in my living room, which I feel leads to a lot of the conversations that Turkle states as meaningful. We tend to engage in complicated debates, understand expressions, and develop empathy through hours of just sitting around in our couches. However, we do have our phones, and sometimes our laptops (because we’re supposed to be working) with us, and there will be points where all of us are just quietly surfing the web. I’ve also come to realize how used we are to sharing pictures, videos, and links. These are either conversation starters, research for validation, or just sharing funny memes. Given that 90% of our group lives in the same building (and we meant it that way), we tend to get together on our free time as opposed to having conversations through chats. Nevertheless, something similar as the “rule of three” tends to apply, where we’ll be 10 of us in a room and at least two people are on their phones at points in time. I’ve also come to realize that when a debate gets heated, those who don’t want to get involved hide behind their own screens. In this case though I don’t believe it expresses a “keep it light” but more of an “I don’t care about this argument, let me go to something that will grasp my attention”. The search for something that will grasp our attention is always there, the only reason we stay together half-working for so many hours is because we’ll eventually engage in a conversation that will last for a while and then we’ll go back to work or to our phones.
It is a different thing to be forced into a detoxification than to read about the effects of technology and having to use your own awareness and power of will to act upon the knowledge you just obtained. Somehow, the detox is easier. You know it’s a goal you know you can achieve, but more of the fact that you know that it will end after a short period of time. With awareness, you have the choice of keeping your life the way it is, which is easier, or pinpoint behaviors to work on. As Turkle said, there shouldn’t need a tower of phone games to make us interact, and there ideally shouldn’t be an 8 hour detox in order to realize how deeply embedded these technologies are in our day to day. However what matters most is what we do after this period of reflection, how we improve our interactions, and most importantly, how we make sure this awareness doesn’t fade away
What Does Communication and Technology Mean to Flavia
Before I go into the depths of the meaning of Communication & Technology as a joint concept, I’m going to first explain a part of my background that can provide context to my answer.
My parents moved away from Peru before I was born, so it has always been only the five of us, my parents and two sisters, living in Paraguay. Since I can remember, my dad has always been traveling for work as well, whether it’s for three days or three weeks at a time. When I was 11, my older sister left for college to Argentina, 7 years later I left to the Middle East, and 2 years following my last sister left for Europe. Today, there are points in time where all five of us are on different parts of the world working around multiple time zones.
I remember as a child, when there was no such thing as free instant messaging or Wifi on mobile phones, that my mother would tell me “send a line of text over to your father so he knows you’re thinking about him”. Just a line, because he was on roaming and that costed more money.
As soon as my mother got her first computer, we would switch to emails. Now we also had to email my grandma, who was living on Peru. Before the email, we would only communicate with my extended family on each other’s birthdays, and we would have to do this over the landline phone. When we were together, we would sing Las Mañanitas at 7 am and walk into the birthday person’s room, and if someone wasn’t present, we would make sure to call them so they could sing along.
But now times have changed, it’s the year 2018, I’m pretty sure we don’t own a landline phone and my grandma has a better iPhone than I do. Every other Sunday, the five of us plus my grandma would connect through ao six way call on Facebook Videochat, which always ends up with all of us putting on filters on our faces (It’s surprisingly my dad who starts with the filters). That is now how we celebrate our birthdays whenever we cannot be together, and as soon as the call starts, have to yell “1 2 3” and then we would start to sing Las Mañanitas. We communicate on a daily basis through WhatsApp, and I was also now recently added to my extended family group chat, along my 20 other cousins and uncles. On my nuclear family chat, my dad has become the master of selfies, and he sends them over so we can see how he’s doing, my mother loves sending links to interesting articles, my grandmother lives off voice notes, and my sisters and I take any advantage to send memes that everyone can understand.
In his book “The Information”, James Gleick first mentions that, “Each new information technology, in its own time, sends off blooms in storage and transmission”. If the printing press caused dictionaries, encyclopedias, and almanacs; the creation of internet caused phenomenon such as messenger, voicenotes, videoconferences, and filters (and of course, much more). He continues to say that “every new medium transforms the nature of human thought”, which is true. Now we can share experiences in a variety of forms that allows for multiple levels and types of interactions. Levels vary from singular comments, constant messaging, and video chat. However, the push for continuous and deeper forms of communication only reach the closest nodes.
However, I do believe that regardless of the modification of interaction that came with technological development, the core of communication has remained constant. Humans still want to send the same type messages. A birth announcement in Bolenge, a village of the Belgian Congo, used to be announced through the thump of drums that could carry six or seven miles, a distance measure that reaches everyone within a physical radius. Now some births are announced through Facebook posts, with a bunch of cute baby pictures, and these announcements are able to reach up to the furthest node in a virtual network. I currently have 2,257 “friends” on Facebook, which makes me incapable to locate where this last node would even lie. But the point here lies on the fact that, regardless of the dimension of reach, the message is still the same: someone has been born.Love letters and heart emojis (in a specific context) still reflect the same emotion. A text saying “I miss you and I hope everything is going well in your trip” to my dad, means the same thing as him taking a selfie and sending it to us through Whatsapp – to us, both convey the same type of “I’m thinking of you”.
Therefore, in this context, I would conclude that technology has allowed us to transmit the same essence of communication in multiple platforms, with ever changing dynamics that will keep morphing into different forms as new ones come across. And as these keep developing, we will still want to display the same type core of messages, since these lie within the human essence. At the end of the day, regardless of how many devices we have at hand, it is us humans who have control over our forms of communication.
