The purpose of the article,
"The Stupidity of Computers" by David Auerbach is to explain the way
computers work, how far they have come, and how far they haven't while
highlighting that effect on the human world. They are helpful and useful tools
but only in certain ways when processing data. We learn from Auerbach that
computers have no ability for inference and if it is not explicitly laid out,
errors in analysis can occur. We also learn how much about us is collected
and used to analyze things from what we will purchase to who would be our best
match for a date. Auerbach’s article is a cautionary tale to the effect
computers will have on our future as humans, and how we will begin to define
ourselves by the ontologies that have been created through our online personas.
One can apply the knowledge gained from the article and previous course readings to see the relationship between the struggle of computers to understand things with deeper meaning and the duality of information. We know that formal information is “noncontextual, standardized, and is a universal language for communicating” (Haque, 2015, p 4), and that informal data demands context and an understanding of values. When thinking of informal and formal data, computers excel in every area of formal data but hit roadblocks when having to understand the informal. As complex as computers are they are not complex enough to understand the deeper workings and meanings of the English language.
Auerbach then walks us through the
use of ontologies in our many of the popular site we currently use. Ontologies
help us to keep things organized, similar to a category, helping us to simplify
the world around us. They show up in places like Wikipedia, who is struggling
to perfect the use of ontologies simply due to their high volume of
informational pages; to Amazon who have profited on the almost perfect utilization of ontologies for
the purpose of shopping, simply due to the fact that this use to a computer
makes more sense.
With the introduction of social media
and sites like Twitter and Facebook, we started to submit data and categorize
ourselves through the platforms, providing tons of data to those in charge with
much less work on their part. This article’s information was important because
computers and the internet have become such an intertwined part of our lives it
is important to understand how it is shaping us while we are shaping it.
Since this article was published in
2013, Facebook has created their own system for hashtag usage along with other
platforms like Instagram (originally separate but now owned by Facebook). I
feel like they were led to this decision after witnessing the powerful affect
the hashtag system had for Twitter and the ability for its users to categorize
each of the millions of tweets that go out each day. As mentioned in the
Auerbach article, Twitter was able to recognize “the value in the metadata of
relevant tags”, and created trending topics as a result of this.
Facebook also stepped into the
world of trending topics, but faced backlash from users who felt there was a
bias in the topics that were showing up as trending. The trending topics on
Facebook were at once personalized and interest based but after controversy
following the election, trending topics are now determined by geographic region
and appear the same for all those found there. According to an article by CBS
news, more than 40% of American adults receive their news from Facebook. This
made Facebook an alleged contributing factor to the spread of “fake news” and
misleading articles (Nieva, 2017). Topics were also at one time based on the
amount of engagement, but now are based on the amount of articles being
published on that topic (Tech Desk, 2017).
Another example of the use of
ontologies and the sorting of metadata is the shopping site for hand-made items,
Etsy. You can use the Etsy site to shop for multiple items that have been made
by other users, similar to shopping on Amazon you can select the items you are
looking for and favorite others. Based on items and shops that the user
favorites, Etsy will make other shopping suggestions.
To conclude, while computers assist
us more and more each day, it is up to us as practitioners to make sure that
what they are doing is correct and that we learn from the data we have gathered
to better achieve our goals.
Links that inspired this blog:
Facebook Makes Changes to Trending Topics to Fight Fake News by Tech Desk
Also mentioned:
Haque, A. (2015). Surveillance, transparency, and democracy: public administration in the information age. Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press.
Also mentioned:
Haque, A. (2015). Surveillance, transparency, and democracy: public administration in the information age. Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press.
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