Overwhelmed viewers spend 51 minutes per day searching for shows to watch – The i newspaper online iNews

A sign that the signal-to-noise ratios in media are declining. Merely finding something to watch in the scroll-and-click/tap user interface is a burden that reduces actual engagement. Note, too, that the article mentions that by 2020 “only one in 10 consumers will be stuck watching TV only on a traditional screen.” Other data released today reaffirms this projection. This doesn’t mean people will watch only on the mobile screen. When they want to share an experience, a net-connected big screen is more useful and, though the data isn’t here to prove it, may be the actual destination for sports and entertainment consumption.

Mobile searching may lead to big-screen binge watching.

The total average time viewers spend searching for content increased by 13% to 51 minutes per day over the past year, the 2017 Ericsson ConsumerLab Media Report found. Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/essentials/overwhelmed-viewers-spend-51-minutes-per-day-searching-shows-watch/

Source: Overwhelmed viewers spend 51 minutes per day searching for shows to watch – The i newspaper online iNews

Russians took a page from corporate America by using Facebook tool to ID and influence voters – The Washington Post

One elemement of media that needs to be disclosed consistently: When is the media reading you to target your cognitive biases? It’s a practice that reinforces the impact of fake news and deceptive marketing.

Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election.

Source: Russians took a page from corporate America by using Facebook tool to ID and influence voters – The Washington Post

Forget Killer Robots—Bias Is the Real AI Danger – MIT Technology Review

Bias in artificial intelligence is more pernicious than threats to labor, according to Google AI lead John Giannandrea argues. Storytelling, as a practice of deconstructing complex technology to expose the underlying assumptions driving algorithms, is a potential remedy.

Many of the most powerful emerging machine-learning techniques are so complex and opaque in their workings that they defy careful examination (see “The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI”). To address this issue, researchers are exploring ways to make these systems give some approximation of their workings to engineers and end users.

Source: Forget Killer Robots—Bias Is the Real AI Danger – MIT Technology Review

‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | The Guardian

We live in the midst of our own creation, a hurricane of information that threatens to overwhelm useful knowledge, cultural values, and cognitive abilities. It is also the greatest opportunity for humanity to share the stories of life, personal and social needs, great ideas, inspiration, and so much more.

“One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,” Rosenstein says. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, Pearlman and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls.

Source: ‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | Technology | The Guardian