Data visualization in commercial use

Deb Roy's TED talk about birth 'birth of a word' led me to his later work that is actually using data visualization in commercial use.

In following video, he is describing research studying every single movement of his new born child by cameras placed all over his house. To analyze the audio-video data, Roy and his MIT team developed numerous deep machine learning algorithms designed to uncover the relationships between spoken language and context. Their method led to recording and describing circumstances in learning new words.

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Later, they adapted the analysis concepts designed for child language acquisition and applied them to another massive video data set: broadcast video.

Roy moved to company Bluefin, where he started to implement discoveries from MIT in commercial use. Using deep machine learning to ground the meaning of comments pulled out from social media, by looking at the context of words expressed by individuals, they can use the meaning of these words to connect comments back to the events, people, products, brands, and viewing contexts that caused those words to be expressed in the first place.

Their technology applies language grounding techniques to achieve successful mapping of social media commentary to mass media stimuli on TV, specifically TV shows and commercials. The data produced by this mapping of social media to TV media has previously unknown potential for brands, advertising agencies, and TV networks. They can basically see how the world is reacting to their broadcasted content in nearly real time.

Here is a publicly available example of how people on social media react on some of the Tv Shows.

George Gerbner

"The man who counts the killings"

A young hero & poet

Three years after emigrating from Hungary, he joined the United States Army in 1942 and served in World War II at the age of 23. He volunteered for the Office of Strategic Services which was a wartime intelligence agency, a predecessor of the CIA, where he ended up in group of fifteen men trained in techniques of blowing up bridges and roads.

They eventually parachuted behind enemy lines, under heavy fire over Slovenia. Gerbner personally identified and arrested the fascist Hungarian Prime Minister, who was subsequently executed. He earned a Bronze Star award.


Why the world will remember him

"A researcher who studied violence on television and how it shapes perceptions of society."

In 1964, he built a curriculum and a faculty from scratch at University of Pennsylvania. Gerbner wrote the first-ever master's thesis on the subject of education and television, and began a long career in academia studying the effects of television on its viewers. His mission was to awaken television viewers from their stupefaction.

He founded the Cultural Indicators Research Project in 1968 to track changes in television content and how those changes affect viewer's perceptions of the world. Its database has information on more than 3,000 television programs and 35,000 characters.

Television, Gerbner believed, is a modern-day religion. In 1990, He founded the Cultural Environment Movement, an advocacy group working for greater diversity in media. Gerbner said people no longer learned their cultural identity from their family, schools, churches and communities but instead from "a handful of conglomerates who have something to sell."

He coined the phrase mean world syndrome, a phenomenon in which people who watch large amounts of television are more likely to believe that the world is an unforgiving and frightening place!

What this means is that if you are growing up in a home where there is more than say three hours of television per day, for all practical purposes you live in a meaner world - and act accordingly - than your next-door neighbor who lives in the same world but watches less television. The programming reinforces the worst fears and apprehensions and paranoia of people. There is a pervasive sense of insecurity and vulnerability.

His surveys tell us that the more television people watch, the more they are likely to be afraid to go out on the street in their own community. This conclusion is similar to the documentary's Bowling for Columbine, created by Michael Moore which describes Highschool masacre commited by two boys killing 12 students and 1 teacher. His discovery, based on worldwide statistics for gun possessions and violence rates, was that not a gun ownership produces violence but a culture of fear created by the government and the media generates a fear that leads Americans to arm themselves.

Gerbner's team found out that for every 10 violent characters on television there are about 11 victims; that's basically a tooth for a tooth. But for every 10 women who exert that kind of power - because violence is a kind of power - there are 16 women victims, of young women there are 17; of women of color there are 22.

On the average, there are more than five violent scenes in an hour of prime time, and five murders a night. There are twenty-five violent acts an hour in Saturday-morning cartoons - the programs most watched by children, usually without any supervision.


Children

When his child subjects reached their thirties, he discovered that those who had watched the most television violence at age eight inflicted more violent punishments on their children, were convicted of more serious crimes, and were reported more aggressive by their spouses than those who had watched less violent television.

By the reckoning of the Cultural Indicators project, the average American child will have witnessed more than 8,000 murders and 100,000 other violent acts on television by the time he or she leaves elementary school.

Another study, published in theJournal of the American Medical Association in 1992, found that the typical American child spends twenty-seven hours a week watching television and will witness 40,000 murders and 200,000 other violent acts by the age of eighteen.



Behind the scenes

Television violence is not simple acts but rather "a complex social scenario of power and victimization." The media keep focusing on the amount of violence. But concentrating on that reinforces the message of violence. It concentrates on the law-and-order aspect of violence. Harping on this all the time makes people more fearful -- which is the purpose of violence to begin with.
 
This has enormous political fallout. It's impossible to run an election campaign without advocating more jails, harsher punishment, more executions, all the things that have never worked to reduce crime but have always worked to get votes. It's driven largely, although not exclusively, by television-cultivated insecurity.
 
Heavy viewers believe the world to be much more dangerous than do light viewers. Thus heavy viewers tend to favor more law-and-order measures: capital punishment, three-strikes prison sentencing, the building of new prisons, and so forth. Politicians exploit this violence-cultivated sensibility by couching their favored policies in militaristic terms: the War on Crime, for example, or the War on Drugs.
 

Gerbner said: "The disempowering effects of television lead to neofascism. That kind of thing is waiting in the wings. Nazi Germany came on the heels of a basic sense of insecurity and powerlessness like we have here now. I don't want to oversimplify, but that is the direction we might be heading."

What to do

There is one thing needed to be said. There is nobody to blame. The whole mechanism is forced and driven by the existing system of global marketing. Its rules are set and it is just matter of time it will shape society.

Of course, in case there are no restrictions made to system. For example, in France there is a tax on theater admissions and video tape, which funds loans for independent production, magazines, newspapers, and television programs and motion pictures. In some Scandinavian countries, there is a law that requires government to support opposition newspapers.

So what should we do to prevent our stupefaction? Be aware of three principles of media literacy:

1. Identify the techniques used to create the "reality" of the image. There could be nothing real in television nowadays.
2. Second, understand that the media are businesses with commerical interests. Ask yourself how the program is tailored to increase profits?
3. Third, recognize the ideologies and values that images and techniques project.

Sources
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2881

http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC38/Gerbner.htm
 
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97may/gerbner.htm

Thoughts after reading Seven Traditions in the Field of Communication Theory

I would like to express connection of some theories mentioned in the Griffin’s chapter about exploring territory of communication which are well presented on the Internet.

Cybernetic tradition  is undoubtedly presented on media communication where the editors choose how much and what kind of information will be presented. Similarly as within the example of small, regional televisions or newspapers, which influence only small number of spectators, same principle works on the Internet. Small sites, small blogs have little or none influence to society. As websites gets bigger they can more easily affect masses on daily basis, even if the ideas that they present is not exactly what would person look for, they will read it with more probability on big sites than on smaller ones. That’s way the powerful websites can more easily shake the attitudes and thoughts of masses than tiny blogs whit maybe more valuable content.

A little, not really pleasant example could be the difference in USA's biggest media’s, CNN website at the same time compared to smaller, but still well known world media, Al jazeera.

Source: http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=48547

It is quite obvious that the most people, consisting of audience of news seekers on these competitor's websites, had at the same day thought more about iPads, than about newly released footage of US’s faults in mistakenly killing reporters.

In this same example, there is also a connection to a Critical tradition, where the change doesn’t come just from 'outcast-ed individuals' but also, these days, from a so-called hive mind of virtually connected people, on social websites, which seems to be a powerful tool to deliver and back up maybe just a doubt or an attitude of an individual to a masses with the same, maybe yet unrealized same view of reality. On regard of the Egyptian uprising mainly allowed by Facebook.

Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-most-powerful-photos-of-2011

Critical theorists see the media as some kind of manipulator. But in fact, it is just a service that is delivered to people just because of the demand and numbness – masses of people want it. They want to see rather news about iPad than about some conflicts and faults their country has done. This idea was first expressed by Aldous Huxley:

Source: http://cinderellainrubbershoes.tumblr.com/post/7484031625

Insight to Flichy’s New Media History

Nowadays media communication and society in general is undoubtedly driven by key historical events of technology development. At the very first point of designing new idea into working technological piece, stand only few persons participating in the developing process. It seems that number and mainly the diversity of initial first creators highly influences usefulness and future potential of invention, since first prototypes are highly bounded by limited knowledge and experiences of initiators.

On the other hand, real users and especially mass media who are presenting product to others are responsible for vision of usefulness of creation. At this point, end users became innovators who affect and tweak new boundaries of product by the range of their experiences.

‘Recent’ technologies have great impact not only on economic part of society with creating new job positions and allowing companies to get through physical constraints of geography. It has also great impact on private life of persons by erasing boundaries of ‘private’ and ‘public’ worlds of individual. This is allowed by bringing possibility of getting nearly any required information instantly anytime and expressing more personalities of a man at the same time.

Internet is forming society. Like a mastered creation of an artist that have an undoubting impact on the artist himself, the Internet is forming itself while at the same time it is shaping society. Reveling hidden parts of society, discovering unthought needs and new boundaries of information sharing and communication abilities of the society.

Iconic cartoon of financial trouble spreading

Source: http://www.uclick.com/client/nyt/po/#

Art of visualizing data

Found on: http://infosthetics.com/archives/2011/05/ted_talk_aaron_koblin_is_visualizing_humanity.html