New Media Ecosystems
New Media Ecosystems: Amazon and the Emerging Knowledge Economy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eric Freedman
The ongoing industrial migrations of new technologies (game engines, artificial intelligence, augmented and online reality, and 3-D imaging) across commerce, news, entertainment, prototyping and manufacturing, scientific visualization, education and within the military suggest they have broad power for organizing the cultural field. In a multi-million-dollar deal with game developer Crytek, Amazon licensed the CryEngine in 2015 as a codebase for its own proprietary Lumberyard engine; the company's goal was to expand the Amazon Web Services ecosystem by consolidating a suite of products and services for video game developers (tools for building, hosting, and livestreaming). And with its 2017 acquisition of Body Labs, a 3D body modeling startup, Amazon expanded its investments in artificial intelligence; the company's interest in avatar-based technologies is part of a broader visual communications and e-commerce strategy. This paper foregrounds Amazon as a case study model of an emerging new media ecosystem--an industrial arrangement that has emerged to concretize the exchange value of integrated software and hardware mechanisms, with the broader goals of connecting information to e-commerce, pairing knowledge to technobiographic identity models, and shaping the emerging technology trends for communities (no-fault algorithms and conversational computing). With close attention to Amazon's acquisition and build strategy, and its hermetic information systems and workflows, this paper unravels the complex intersectionality of the company's technocentric portfolio.
Of Trolleys and Tesla: Could Trolley Cases Help Us Understand How to Program Autonomous Vehicles?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Basl, Jeff Behrends, Mark Lee
In this paper, we hope to explain how theorizing about Trolley Cases is related to answering ethical questions facing the employees of car manufacturers. We canvas three important accounts of this relationship already defended in the literature. We first consider two instances of Trolley Optimism, views on which thinking about trolley cases bears in an important way on how autonomous vehicles (AVs) should be designed. A traditional form of Trolley Optimism sees Trolley Cases as structurally identical to real-world cases involving AVs and seeks to deploy traditional philosophical resources to inform the design of AVs. A second form, inherent in the MIT Moral Machine approach, seeks to use Trolley Cases to collect responses from a wide audience, aggregate that data, and then apply the insights gleaned from that data to enact our collective preferences in the design of self-driving cars. Trolley Pessimists are skeptical of the value of Trolley Cases, typically because either they doubt the value of thought experiments or think that AV crash scenarios are too dissimilar to Trolley Cases. We too think that deciding how to program AVs is importantly different than deciding what the best course of action in a Trolley Case is. But our Trolley Pessimism is grounded in the view that the machine learning systems that are the foundation of self-driving cars force us to adopt a paradigm on which it is choices about entire training sets that are subject to ethical evaluation, significantly diminishing the value of Trolley Cases.
Twitter as a Journalistic Work-Tool in a "Twitter-unfriendly" Society
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yaron Ariel, Vered Elishar-Malka
Twitter is one of the most popular online social networks worldwide, however, in Israel, for the majority of the population - enthusiastic users of other online social networks -Twitter is an unfamiliar arena. Unlike most Israelis, news media professionals (as well as politicians and PR personnel) are dominant users of the platform. To examine Twitter roles in their lives, senior news professionals with active Twitter accounts were identified as the target population, and were then asked to answer a questionnaire that included closed and open questions. Our findings demonstrate that Twitter use has a professional orientation: 64% of the respondents tweet only as part of their journalistic position, and 77% of those tweets are designated for their colleagues and not for the public. A significant difference was found in the presumed influence of Twitter, with a higher attributed influence for those who used Twitter more than two years and the lowest for those who used it for less than three months. Analysis of responses to the open questions on the questionnaire reveals seven primary reasons for the adoption of Twitter: Self-curiosity, Being innovative, Expressing their unique voice to relevant actors, Supporting work routines: quick updating and expanding the circle of sources, Exposure to additional audiences, "Marking territory" - quickly and effectively being the first to publish information, and, Editorial board pressures.
