The world is more connected today than ever before. Some might like for this to mean that each human being is emotionally more connected to others. However, the recent mass shootings in Aurora and Newtown, as well as a national shift towards emphasizing behavioral health may actually suggest that people feel more lonely and depressed, even though we are supposedly more “connected.” In my opinion, to be connected in today’s world means to be connected in cyber space. It means to constantly be connected to a gadget, such as a smart phone, tablet, or laptop; it means to receive alerts and notifications every few minutes about what is happening in everyone else’s world; it means to befriend people you have never met before on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn; it means to share your life with them through photos, messages, videos, and emails. Ultimately, it means to be connected to the world through cyber space, while actually being connected to nobody in the real world.
This phenomenon has resulted in a massive amount of data stored in cyber space, created when one user shares information with another. Facebook users, for example, had stored 40 billion photos on the site by the year 2010. This number continues to grow each day. The website then takes this immense data mine and uses complex software programs to analyze it to a degree no human being can. This software finds user trends and patterns, areas of opportunity for the website, user preferences, and future trends. They use these findings to be able to get the right advertisements and the right information to the right person, thus maximizing their profits and the advertiser’s profits. However, this concept is not unique to Facebook, and is in fact used by numerous industries, including linguistics, where corpora, or collections of electronic texts, are analyzed using computers.
Electronic text analysis allows us to manipulate language data in various ways to suit a particular research purpose. The use of software tools in this process leads to more accurate and consistent results in a very short amount of time. Once the data has been sorted in an accessible way…we can carry out further analysis on the data. This analysis again helps to identify patterns that we might not be able to describe purely on an intuitive basis. This includes the analysis of whether a word carries positive or negative connotations. (Introducing Electronic Analysis)
This field of electronic analysis is especially important to me, as I regularly use the internet and social networking sites. At the same time, I believe virtual connections are much weaker than personal ones. However, it often feels like a necessity to have access to social networking sites in order to stay connected to on-campus activities, student groups, and class acquaintances. When searching my name on search engines like Google, five to six different links show up being related to my name. Was I the one to post them? No, but this world of cyber space.
On the other hand, I did not realize that there was an entire industry behind what I thought was amazing when advertisements began appearing on my Google page that were specific to my search terms. Websites such as Facebook are able to create a unique experience by customizing what the user sees based on what it feels would be of most interest to that particular user. As seen in the movie, Social Network, the rudimentary basis behind Facebook was to create the college social experience online for people.
Even more personally, I recently learned that the Santa Clara University student body petitioned for an honor code. There is sure to be verbiage in this honor code specific to plagiarism and academic integrity. Electronic text analysis would crucial to properly enforcing this entire honor code, as the software would critically analyze each student’s work and find matches in diction even when text may be summarized or changed slightly. The field is extremely vast, and I am eager to see how it will continue to develop in the coming years.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB95KLmpLR4
Great Job! Your philosophical insights are very applicable to today’s society. However, I do find small inconsistencies in your argument. You argue that “In my opinion, to be connected in today’s world means to be connected in cyber space. It means to constantly be connected to a gadget, such as a smart phone, tablet, or laptop; it means to receive alerts and notifications every few minutes about what is happening in everyone else’s world”, while simultaneously saying “This field of electronic analysis is especially important to me, as I regularly use the internet and social networking sites…Websites such as Facebook are able to create a unique experience by customizing what the user sees based on what it feels would be of most interest to that particular user”. In your first argument you denounce these social media sites for making the individual impersonal and cold, yet in your later arguments you praise Facebook for creating applications which promote the individual to increase her or his interaction with this social media site. Maybe using social media is something we love to hate, maybe the American youth culture we exists in acknowledges how the use of technology sucks our souls, yet refuse to close down our accounts, refuses to give up our Iphones, and acquiescently consumes every bit of technology that the rest of our culture buys with blatant hypnotism.
-trollin hard
from your classmate Ezequiel
Hi, Prutha! I love the angle you took–I hadn’t considered electronic text analysis & social networking sites! Reading Adolphs made me envision the world like its depiction in The Matrix; a black screen with a bunch of binary code raining over it. That’s how FB made me feel after its first generation of hyper-targeted advertising, like I was being harvested. I focused on Adolphs’ list of what ETA can apply to, particularly modern scholarship. I’m generally wary of technology’s pervasion through society, but this excites me, I can imagine ETA uncovering a whole new dimension to our collective intellect! With tools that create a smidgeon more objectivity, we’ll be able to understand ourselves a little bit better. Great minds won’t have to wade through each others’ biases and stubborn opinions to develop new insight. Great post, Prutha! It reads like an answer to a Googled question!
Your post gives great examples as to how we use data mining. I really like how they give a different perspective to the information in Adolphs’ book that makes it applicable to today. I especially liked your opening paragraph, where you give your opinion on how we are connected not exactly with each other, but with people in cyber space through our different technologies. Very interesting!