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SXSW panel: Social Media is Science Fiction
Time/Date: 9:30 a.m., Sunday
Panelists: Annalee Newitz (io9.com), Charlie Jane Anders (io9 Gawker Media), Matt Thompson (NPR), Maureen McHugh (No Mimes Media), Molly Crabapple (Dr Sketchy’s Anti-Art School).
The gist: Futurists and science fiction writers speculated on the future of social media, the ways in which it might evolve and the ways in which it might change us.
Quotes: “Right now we have the illusion that we control our avatars. More and more as Google becomes an artificial intelligence, our avatar is going to be created by what we do,” — McHugh. “We can’t reach artificial intelligence without collective feedback. As we use Google voice, we’re mutually training the machine to know us better,” — Thompson. “These avatars that we think we create are actually creating demands on us; the machine is pulling our strings,” — Thompson. “We’re seeing a society that eventually is going to devolve into the same kind of Pavlovian lever-pushing mentality as a casino. I see no-one having jobs anymore, but having games and challenges. You will go to Walmart and participate in the box-lifting challenge. You’ll see who can lift and stack the most boxes and the prize will be what used to be your salary. It’s ‘game-ification.’ I would extrapolate a future where that’s what all work is,” — Crabapple. “One of the unfortunate delusions we have had is that only cool people would be reading our updates. China or our employees or police are reading things we meant to write to show off our cool, rebellious selves and using them against us.” “I imagine typing a query into a Google search box and receiving a reply ‘why do you want to know that?’ or ‘This is what your friends are searching for. Wouldn’t you rather search for that?’” — Anders. “As we have all of this social media dating we’re sharing, how will we negotiate who has access to what? You’ve got scary people and scary bots reading your stuff,” — Newitz.
Takeaways: Science fiction hypothesizes us that social media can head into two directions: a dark, dystopian future where our personal information is compromised, accessed and abused by governments and corporations; or a more benevolent future where the hive mind creates a sort of artificial intelligence that can be used to comfort and accompany us in our lives. But probably the former.
Social media has produced a byproduct of tons of ephemera that, hopefully, will be archived for future accessibility and not just become digital waste.
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