How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Media: New media can be defined as a highly interactive digital technology that allows people to interact anywhere anytime. This has evolved as a non-tangible channel for communication on the preset of growth in Information Technology.
The ability to transform content to a digitized format allowed new-age media to take shape within the internet.
Accessibility through hand-held devices like mobile platforms, personal computers, digital devices, and virtual computing machines has aided the growth of new-age media.
The medium of new media is not just restricted to social networking platforms, blogs, online newspapers, digital games, and virtual reality, but any aspect of communication that can be communicated in real-time, processed, stored, and delivered in formats of data instantaneously.
Accessibility, speed of data access, reversibility & storage capacity are the basic three parameters that characterize new media.
Since new media creates a medium that is basically ones and zeros, representing all aspects of digital data, representing human senses such as seeing or hearing, including video, audio, and tactile data.
In the past decade, the rapid development in Artificial Intelligence has led to the evolution of more intelligent new media in communications.
Machine learning codes can simulate the role of human cognitive abilities; they have the information storage and processing abilities to represent or imitate a human level of communication.
The Evolution of New Media
The growth of new media has progressed through riding the wave of technological progress over the evolution of our species.
Around 500,000 years ago, the migrating human species started representing data through engravings at different geographical locations. And the irony is that the world’s first known drawing from 73,000 years ago looked like a hashtag.
It is thought to be inspired by the urge to communicate, co-operate and share the basic aspects of the human species.
With the advancement of civilization, the cognitive ability of humans expanded along with the invention of more tools and crafts like terracotta, dyes, inks, cotton, etc., allowing us to use improved languages and visual arts.
Special techniques of carving and writing aided in representing data from the environment and expressing creativity in a more refined way.
This advancement in technology subsequently led to the development of paper in 220 AD, China.
The breakthrough in paper processing led to the evolution of books – recording and keeping information, which eventually led to rapid communication with the invention of the printing press in 15th Century Europe.
Further technological breakthroughs in the late 18th and early 19th centuries on sound and video led to the evolution of transmission.
The combination of audio and video revolutionized modern broadcasting.
The invention of the transistor in 1947 and the ultimate integration of the first Pentium processor in 1970 transformed data communication, controlling, and computation.
The data representation and growth in communication eventually led to new media by the early 2000s.
The evolution of technology is shown in Fig. 1 above.
The Composition of New Media
New media encompasses all aspects of digitized data being created, consumed, and communicated over the internet using digital devices.
Even the old media found new ways of expressing themselves within the new media landscape in e-newspapers, e-books, etc.
The mass availability of smartphones has led to a revolution in social and interactive spaces.
Standalone social networking platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have all tried to integrate old chat boxes and advertisement and e-commerce.
Generally, new media can provide more accurate data on different parametric aspects like a user’s age group, digital platform, a communication platform, accessibility, location, content generation, security, computational methods, algorithm, and the number of users.
Since it is an ever-evolving technology-based phenomenon, it is difficult to categorize new media under one specific parameter. A more scientific classification would be based on semantics and user interfaces.
Some of the recent trends in new media are listed in Fig. 2 below.
The list also includes video games, virtual reality, real-time chat interfaces, and dating sites with digital interactivity like Tinder.
The new media of today can be characterized broadly based on the following parameters.
- Digital (Extend of digitization)
- Interactivity (Number of users/transaction)
- Hypertextual
- Virtual (Integration of Virtual /Augmented reality)
- Networked (Accessibility and reach)
- Simulated (Flexibility and usability)
The Future of New Media
Self-learning, self-controlling, and self-communicating standalone intelligent systems have enabled entirely different paradigms in recent years.
Virtual reality and gaming use programming abilities to create totally new environments or replicate existing environments.
This is enabled through users being able to interact and interface virtual objects and spaces in that environment.
Graphics, games, and simulations have flooded open the gates wherein each individual recreates their imagination in the virtual world.
For example, according to TV[R]ev Magazine, the online P2P game Fortnite has become the most preferred social media experience for teenagers.
Similarly, augmented reality has enabled users to directly or indirectly view the real environment and at the same time interact with it, using computer-generated audio, video, or touch. How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Media
Future new media will use computer programs to supplement real or virtual world environments with digital objects.
In a broader sense, virtual reality, intelligent systems, and automation could slowly replace different aspects of the industry, human interaction, and the progress of the human species at large.
The Role of AI and Machine Learning
The human-based content generation will be taken over by machines and software algorithms capable of imitating human cognitive abilities.
This is already happening with some old media companies using Artificial Intelligence to turn their data into news through services provided by companies such as Narrative Science, which has even received an investment from the funding arm of the CIA.
This leads to a new way of generating, communicating, and consuming data (mass communication).
Social networking platforms and personalized communication will become more intelligent and sophisticated.
In the immediate near future. Machines will equally contribute to human emotions, which are being conveyed as data and communication by humans.
Combined with virtual and augmented reality, self-learning systems or intelligent systems will percolate mass and personal communication.
Artificial intelligence is a broad name suggesting concepts developed over the years, implemented even more rapidly at the time of writing due to improved computing power like microprocessors, graphical processors, and microcontrollers which can compute large volumes of data short duration. How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Media
With the introduction of quantum computers, the information processing capability of automated systems will become yottabytes per second.
According to ZMEScience.com. “In 2010, it would have cost $100 trillion to make a yottabyte storage system made out of the day’s hard drives.”
AI can be roughly defined as the ability of artificial computing devices to replicate and perform the cognitive functions of a human brain.
The ultimate vision for AI is to achieve complexity and flexibility like human brains. The formal methods to achieve these visions are statistical methods, computational intelligence, and traditional AI tools.
Role of AI and Machine Learning
The traditional AI tools are symbolic approaches to computing problems. The most commonly used symbolic approach has been expert systems.
Whenever symbolic representations failed to achieve a good decision-making ability. It led to a modified representation using fuzzy logic and artificial neural networks to be developed.
Modern AI tools have become more human-like tools with a progressive integration of the higher-level intelligence aspects of a human brain’s cognitive abilities. How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Media
These abilities include slow and steady progress towards myth emotions, creativity, imagination, dreams, higher philosophy, and ultimate consciousness. But though these utopian abilities are long-term, great progress is being made towards achieving them.
The methodologies include cybernetics & brain stimulation, symbolic intelligence, machine learning, cognitive simulations, logic programming, knowledge-based computing, embodies computing, computational intelligence, machine learning or self-learning systems, and other forms of intelligent computing.
Now the question arises of how to achieve these ultimate goals. The complex process of cognition can be achieved only through integrating different methodologies.
The two most common approaches are agent architecture and cognitive architecture. Describing each and every aspect of AI is beyond the scope of this article. So it’s more time-worthy to explain the tools required to implement these methodologies.
The tools include machine intelligence to search large databases and optimize solutions (search algorithm, mathematical optimization, evolutionary algorithm), logic-based programming (automated reasoning, logic-based decisions), probabilistic tools (Bayesian networks, kalmann filtering, decision theory, utility theory), classifiers (classical mathematics, machine learning, statistical classification), neural networks (Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), connectionism), deep feed-forward neural networks (deep learning, image processing, computer vision, speech processing, natural language processing), deep recurrent neural networks and intelligent control systems with a hierarchy based approach. How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Media
The aspects of these AI tools are shown in Fig. 3 above.
The Impact of New Media
The impact of new media on human life has become more complicated in recent years.
The societal impact and individual personalized impact are beyond question.
As a species, the content generated by users conveyed through machines is the norm. But whether it has an evolutionary impact is debatable.
The recent social and political revolutions in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas are a direct result of new media’s social networking platforms. The most recent example is the Telegram application being used by protestors in Hong Kong.
The gender equality revolution happening around the world is the pure magic of new media.
The chains that couldn’t be broken down in the male-dominated centuries before the 21st Century are undone by new media in a matter of years.
New media has directly impacted financial transactions and commercial activities.
This has enabled the evolution of banking systems without physical infrastructures, elevating billions of people out of poverty in Asia, Africa, and America.
Nation-states are more concerned about security, and social media has been playing a viable role in complicating and finding solutions to new security-related issues. As a result, social media have further strengthened globalization.
New media’s transformation between communities, societies, and nations is largely based on technological breakthroughs.
The detailed study of the impact of new media on individual human behavior, emotions, and aspirations are beyond this limited article’s scope.
Conclusion
In the story of our evolution, new media is one aspect of our current progress, enabled through technology.
Technological progress cannot be stopped, which will directly impact how humans consume, share, and communicate data.
The current progress in computational platforms will have a deeper impact than what happened with the Radio, Television, and Internet.
The wireless world will be more interesting with virtual reality, communicating machines, and, more importantly, emotional and intelligent machines.
As an off-shoot of this cognitive technology development, new media will give way to intelligent media.
References:
[1] Lev Thackara, “The language of new media, Leonardo Book Series, MIT Press, 2002.
[2] John Carey and Martin C. J. Elton, “When Media Are New: Understanding the Dynamics of New Media Adoption and Use,” Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2010.
[3] Rabinder Henry, Lecture notes “Science, Engineering and Technology,” PPCRC, 2014.
[4] Bebo White, Irwin King, Philip Tsang, “Social Media Tools and Platforms in Learning Environments,” Springer New York, 2011.
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