Going into the Big Data project not knowing much about it besides the two TED talks, Alessandro Acquisti’s “Future without Secrets” and Glenn Greenwald’s “Why Privacy Matters”, I believed that Big Data was a bad, privacy invading thing. After looking through the “Big Data Resource” page I saw that it wasn’t bad or good, but I very complex topic. While I still intend on leaning towards Big Data being a negative thing, I found some good naysayers with good points. One such source was Kenneth Cukier’s TED Talk, “Big Data is Better Data”, which opened up all the positive thing’s big data does and can do. Cukier’s speech was mainly positive, but it also brought up points that interested me and made me uneasy, such as machine intelligence challenging human’s jobs. Also, another route I am considering exploring is how some people are more apt to have their privacy invaded by Big Data as brought up in Christopher Soghoian’s TED Talk, “Your Smartphone is a Civil Rights Issue”. It was interesting to find that Apple products have better security in protecting your data, but are more expensive. While Android products are more affordable but have less security and protection of your data, meaning that low income people are hence more vulnerable. The Big Data sources I found really interesting, eye opening, and varied on the sides they took. Since I did not know much about Big Data before this project the sources were an overload of information. I plan to think about what direction I want to take my paper in and to revisit these sources.
Tag: media
I found Alessandro Acquisti’s TED Talk, “Future without Secrets” very eye opening. I would agree that we as a society often put forth information about ourselves without consideration of where it might end up and the possible consequence. This was backed up by Acquisti’s example of the college students who answered the questions about their behavior on a college campus, including “Have you cheated before?”. Their answers could possibly have detrimental effects upon their college careers, yet they still volunteered information without much of thought. I believe that we so easily put forth information about ourselves on the internet because we are unaware of how it could be used in the future and also that we are unaware we are putting forth information; Acquitsi’s TED talk was effective in bringing awareness to just how our information could be used. A couple the future scenarios he brought up particularly put me at unease “ strangers around you will look at you through their Google Glasses or, one day, their contact lenses, and use seven or eight data points about you to infer anything else which may be known about you” and “So next time you are looking for a certain product, and there is an ad suggesting you to buy it, it will not be just a standard spokesperson. It will be one of your friends, and you will not even know that this is happening.”. It was scary to my how much information company’s can figure out about you just by what you online shop or who communicate with most on social media. Furthermore, how they can use it to manipulate you as shown by the friend replacing the spokesperson; “it already vastly underestimates the amount of information that organizations can gather about you, and how they can use it to influence you in a way that you will not even detect.” Despite all the statistics and possible scenarios, Acquitsi ended his speech in an optimistic light that assured the listeners that the scenarios put forward could be, at least somewhat, prevented.
Sherry Turkle in her TED Talk “Connected, but alone?” discusses how technology is negatively impacting how we engage with others and how we view solitude. While she argues early on that “technology is taking us places we don’t want to go”, Turkle’s talk isn’t about giving up technology completely; rather that we need to be more self aware of our relationship with it and ourselves. She goes further to claim that technology is so “psychologically powerful” because it provides a constant companionship – a false empathy – but without the risks of intimacy. This controlled connection is always there and allows us to retouch, edit, and carefully plan out what we text, tweet, or post; thus giving us more control than traditional conversation. Turkle says that this is leading us as a society to expect more from our smartphone than our friends as it appeals to us when we are vulnerable and lonely: “being alone is becoming viewed as a problem to be solved”. The TED talk is concluded with the idea that if we are never able to be alone, we will become more lonely; Turkle’s solution to this is issue is that we need to come to recognize our vulnerabilities and value solitude.
I am choosing to use the software Audacity to do my Literacy Narrative Presentation. I have chosen to use this software primarily because I have used this software in the past.
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