Over the course of week 3, we studied three different texts.
- “A Brief History of Content in a Digital Era” by Kate Eichhorn
- ”Network Effects vs. Switching Costs” by Cory Doctorow
- ”Atlas of AI” Kate Crawford
During our conversation over Eichhorn’s work, there was a lot of talk of what the term “content” meant. For me, my description of content is comparable to a backpack or a folder. Let’s say within this “backpack” ( a representation of content) it holds everything Star Wars related. From the movies, to comics, encyclopedias, series, even toys and games, everything related to Star Wars I describe as content. You have the ability to interact with it, let it impact you, and provide discourse around it. Content is a broad term, used to describe multiple groups of things, in this case digital medias and rhetoric that all correspond and interact with each other.
in Doctorow’s work, the biggest question that was raised was “what is unethical, and will jobs bring ethics back into the mix.” There was a large amount of research revolving around Facebook and its corrupt system all the way to the beginning of the World Wide Web. I posed my job as ethical work space as the representative to what it could look like in today’s time. While I am not on the same level of pay as my boss, we are treated the same, hold many same benefits, and they even move up only within their company to ensure job security for their workers. Many jobs, take advantage of their workers, whether it be major corporations that house warehouses over seas, to simply not paying their employees enough and having terrible hours. Do to the digital frontiers recent advancements in the past few decades, I believe ethics is going to become more scarce in the workforce.
Finally, we dove into Crawfords work. Her idea’s behind the expansion of AI and the idea of intelligence was the main frame behind her work, but in addition to learning about it, we were provided a simple yet intriguing task: have AI walk you through how to properly set up a MLA styled paper. Simple right? While it was a simple task at first, there were flaws that were shown within the process, showing that even as advanced as AI has become, it still holds flaws. I truly believe that AI will be incorporated into our work as it only grows stronger and more reliable, but I think this task showed that the human’s understanding is still far more advanced.
Throughout all three works, they showed that the digital world is only going to continue grow, and with it so we will we. The digital frontier is only at its beginning, and as more “content” is provided and AI machines become more advanced, so will how our jobs deal with employees and how they treat us as a collective, and possibly even as an individual. There are many things that are still to change, hopefully for the better.
Comments
3 responses to “Week 3 Reflection”
I love your analogy of a backpack or folder. It makes it very easy to understand what content is and how many different forms of content can be content within one specific topic. Your insights on AI working with us is while humans remain more advanced is one I agree with. The way I view the relationship between AI and humans is this. Humans think in abstracts and have to translate those into words to be able to communicate with AI. AI will never be (well if it does become able to then the world will be a scarier place) able to read your thoughts and know what EXACTLY you meant. It can get better and better, closer and closer, to giving us what we want, but we will always have to use our own brains as a filter to make sure AI is doing what we want.
I think your interpretation of content was really interesting, especially because you say “You have the ability to interact with it, let it impact you, and provide discourse around it.” Content isn’t just something inside of something else; there must be some kind of interaction with it to make it true content.
In reference to your thoughts on Doctorow’s work, I agree completely. I think that ethics, while already scarce in many workplaces, is going to become more scarce and therefore more crucial.
Overall, I agree that we will have to learn how to adapt our lives – personal and professional – to the growing force that is the Internet and AI.
Your definition of content is very interesting but I would like to test it. You have defined content through the platform it is on. This means that a movie would become content once it is on the internet. Moreover, would a platform like Netflix become a content creation platform, or is it merely a host of content? What about the days before Netflix was a streaming service, and delivered movies through the mail, did it deliver content then? I’m not saying your definition is wrong to be clear, I am just curious as to what your response would be.
Your questions of ethics in the workplace are interesting. I have a fairly materialistic perspective on it. Companies are as ethical as they have to be to get and keep workers. Places like Amazon do not have to be ethical because they embrace a high turnover rate and low-skill jobs (TBH I do not like the term low and high skill jobs but it is useful here). I believe that digital frontiers could end up more unethical, but I also believe that unions have been doing big pushes, so I do not believe it will be.