NYC Media Lab 2019 | Riya Mehta

NYC Media Lab 2019 started with introductions from the people working behind-the-scenes for this year’s NYC Media Lab. Justin Hendrix, the Executive Director of NYC Media Lab and RLab spoke about how this new wave of interfaces is on the way and how Virtual Augmented Reality, Brain Computer interfaces and Neuro Interfaces are going to be the future of technology. He further spoke about how technology and media are a really important part of our economy and play a crucial role in functioning of the city. In order to be ready for the future we need to try to think about the implications of this and come up with creative solutions for the the age old media problems. He also briefly spoke about creating a healthier media environment for our society to function smoothly and how NYC Media Lab will see demos that are pushing limits of these new interfaces and how that’s changing the economics of media business.

Steven Rosenbaum - the new managing director of NYC Media Lab spoke about diversity and complexity being the greatest asset of New York. This diversity makes New York an ideal place to look forward and think about the future of media and build innovative solutions here.  Last year he attended NYC Media Lab as a civilian and was absolutely blown away by the diversity of the teams. Students from all over the world were trying to solve media problems in distinct and collateral ways and that for him was incredibly important. He assured us that the demos in 2019 were going to push the limits of innovative thinking and be incredibly exciting.

Kurt Becker (NYU Tandon School of Engineering / Member of board of Media Lab) talks about how Media Lab provides an opportunity to academic partners build their network not only with the industry, innovators, entrepreneurs but also with people in New York City. The uniqueness of this program is that Media Lab projects bring together diverse perspectives and disciplines and they are highly collaborative. For Kurt, the best part of this event has been and continues to be the new ideas that have been presented and the enthusiasm of people who work on it. He briefly spoke about NYU Tandon School’s one of the major main stage presentations, a project done in collaboration with Viacom where students and faculty come together and find ways to use deep learning to label and rank information that has been extracted from television shows.

James Patrick - President of the NYC economic and development corporation, who is also hosting NYC Media Lab 2019, talks about the work done by economic and development corporation department. They work towards building socially and economically stronger neighborhoods and create many job opportunities in the city.
Four particular areas that they focus on are:

1. Making neighborhoods a better place to live by supporting the community in their social issues and daily problems that they face.
2. Spreading awareness about the next-gen jobs and ensuring that New Yorkers are going to be prepared for the tectonic shift in work environment.
3. Investing in infrastructure so that the economy can be more resilient and better prepared for the inevitabilities of climate change and other factors that may impact this city in the future.
4. Investing in the economy of the future by encouraging innovation.

He further spoke about how every industry is going to be affected by technology and specifically how media industry is probably going to be the first to be impacted. From such talks it becomes quite evident that the best place to initiate a conversation about these impacts and being in the forefront of innovation and media is New York City, because it is the international media capital. New York City is host to big media giants like the New York Times, Viacom and Bloomberg. New media companies like Buzz Feed, Fox and Vice are also located here. As most of the buzz in the media world begins in NYC, this is where we need to be having the conversations about what the future of our media industry is.

NYC Media Lab is focused on new, next-gen and advanced ideas and technologies. But New York City is held up on some really old infrastructure and conventional ideas. In fact it is home to generously engineered infrastructure that’s now decades old. In fact some of the technologies we are relying on right now aren’t engineered for today. There are things that we can do together to think about what infrastructure we would like to put in place. Media 2030 is a new venture NYC Media Lab will be taking on, keeping this goal in mind. A panel was brought in to discuss media and the decade that lies ahead of us and how there is a need to use advance technology to cope up with the overall technology revolution. The panel also discussed future goals that media industry can accomplish, the challenges that this industry will be facing, the research questions that need to be answered and the problems and opportunities within and outside of the media industry.
The members of the panel were:

1. Yaël Eisenstat (Policy Advisor, Center for Human technology)
2. Desmond Upton Patton (Associate Professor of Social Work & Associate Dean of Curriculum    Innovation and Academic Affair, Columbia University)
3. Tony Parisi (Global Head of AR/VR Ad Innovation, Unity Technologies)
4. R. Luke Dubois (Co-Director & Associate Professor, NYU Tandon School of Engineering Integrated Digital Media (IDM)

The first question put forward to the panel was: If you had to go down the line what do you think is the most important technology trend that’s gonna shape things for the next decade?
While everyone agrees that AI (Artificial Intelligence) is the answer, it also scary to see the destruction it can cause if used for the wrong reasons. What’s interesting is not the technology that we will have but more so the questions we will ask with these technologies. More than leveraging AI we need to be concerned about the surveillance caused by the use of it. We have to critically think about the extent at which we use these technologies and how we create and ask questions using these technologies.  Although AI is a concern, the more terrifying thing is the idea of a future where not everyone has access to engage with the technology. There isn’t a level playing field when it comes to harnessing the future technology. We need to make sure in the coming decade we really think and work on who gets to publish the content, and how right voices can get a good platform to share the ideas. Yaël although had a completely different point of view when she says “It’s not about finding the right technology but the removal of human critical thinking and human analysis from the future of all these things that concerns me.”

In continuation to this, the second question that was asked was: If we are going to make progress, what questions are we gonna have to answer over the next decade?
Desmond was of the view that more than the questions, we need to focus on who gets to be human. He has been studying young people and their experiences on social media and genuinely believes that it is taking an unprecedented turn. Young people are seeking help and emotional support on social media, while most people have been dehumanizing social media and looking at it as a negative tool. He strongly believes that we need to bring in young people to help us understand the potential of social media and make sure that their thoughts and opinions are taken into serious consideration. Tony added to this by saying that technology has really depersonalized everything. We are living in this world where we have forgotten that we are humans first. There is more violence, racism and this is because we don’t think of these  people as real people of the society. Hence going forward it is really important for us to understand what it is to be humans and reconnecting with that is probably the most important question we need to answer. Yaël again brought in a very fresh perspective, which resonated well with everyone in the audience too. She says “I think one of the things for the future to get to a healthier media status to a point where we could both trust media again and start having the kind of media we want for a healthier global society, three things have to change - Being First, Being Fast and Being Free cannot be a sustainable model if we want a healthy media environment and unfortunately I know everyone wants their information for free now. If you want actual journalism you can trust, you can’t just expect it to be free. It’s not just the free business model, we are forcing journalist to be first and fast and not necessarily accurate and clickbait-y on order to get that show that they need on the social media platforms. First-Free-Fast is not sustainable.”

When further asked about disinformation and ways of how it can be handled and controlled, Yaël spoke briefly and touched the topic of how propaganda, information warfare were not a new concept. The difference right now is the scale at which this disinformation can be spread. The biggest concern is how we are vulnerable to being easily manipulated. The answer to this is media and in particularly social media. Social media has given people a platform to voice their opinions irrespective of whether it is right or wrong. Yaël summed this up by saying “Everyone has got the right to freedom of speech, but in my opinion freedom of speech should not equal freedom of reach.” She further added that it is a fact that these social media platforms are deciding what they want amplified, deciding how they will curate content, how these algorithms are programmed to keep our eyes on the screen. Its all about user engagement, which results in spreading of salacious content, clickbait or any content that keeps us glued to the screen. This is where social media ends up breaking down our ability to reason and to differentiate between fact and fiction. Good journalism cannot win in this environment. Tony stressed on the point of how we are fundamentally in place where we have celebrity but we no longer have leadership or judgement. We have lost the ability to have people curate contact with an actual point of view. It is less about media and education and more about public media literacy and education. Luke Dubois made a strong point about the importance of Media Literacy. He further added “We really need an inclusive conversation where everyone could be a part of it. We need an unbiased system to see what content is being promoted and put out there.”

In conclusion, the panelists were asked about being hopeful given all the problems like climate change, soaring inequality and innumerable challenges facing the media industry. All of them were of the view that the young generation has immense potential to come up with solutions. This existential emergency is going to stir a lot of conversations. They were of the view that the current awareness about being manipulated by social media will help the future generation to rationally decide about falling prey to this. They will realize that it is imperative to focus on matters of societal issues.

After the discussion, there were main stage presentations by students and faculty followed by demos of the same and many more. While almost all the presentations had some brilliant ideas, I personally was interested to see the one done by Antonio Guimaraes, Emily Lin and Rashida Kamal who were students of the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). They came up with an app - Access to Places, to help make New York subway stations more accessible for the blind. They tried to identify the core concerns and then followed it by researching how the issues can be resolved creatively, using technology. They took the speech-to-text technology to come up with maps and fed data into the app to assist visually impaired  people to navigate more smoothly in the complex subway network of New York.

While going around the demos, there was a particular demo that really got me interested. Fractal Media is an attention based video production company and they have come with Project Fovea. Project Fovea is an innovative collaboration of technology and media. With video content of more than billions of hours just on Youtube, it can be difficult to figure out what exactly is being processed by the users and are they actually paying attention at the actual product or motive of the video content. This project takes information gleaned from a video and combines it with measures of viewer engagement to create a powerful predictive model that knows what a viewer wants, maybe even before they do. As someone from the media industry, I was really amazed by seeing this. This project has multiple applications within the video production field and beyond. In my opinion it can be used by marketers and advertisers to have more precise data on what is being accepted by the users which can further help them create content that caters to the needs of the viewers. As media is experiencing this shift of creating more user centric products and giving them an experience rather than a product, this can definitely be helpful.

The conference also offered a screening of the movie - The Great Hack, a documentary film made in 2019 portraying how journalist Carole Cadwalladr uncovered the story of how Cambridge Analytica used social media to influence 2016 Presidential elections. This was later followed by a discussion with David Carroll. While the movie was definitely gripping and informative it also revealed the dark side of social media. The discussion touched on topics about the impact of the movie and what measures can be taken in order to protect user data privacy.

When David was asked about his thoughts on whether there has been movement on the obvious regulatory questions this movie raises, he was confident as he said there were definitely repercussions and consequences which were mostly positive. For example there were rulings that showed that Facebook had mislead its investors. The FTC settled with Alexander Nix for deceptive practices. There were not only consequence for the company in the UK, but even in the US - like The Class action lawsuit in California has been allowed to be proceed. The accountability although slow is happening eventually. The discussion also revealed how after the movie has come out Facebook admitted that there were thousands Cambridge Analyticas, thousands of other apps that were siphoning data and they don’t have any idea what is going on. David said that this wouldn’t have been the case, if Cambridge Analytica didn’t happen. Cambridge Analytica is just the tip of the ice berg and there are many more such firms. This was an inevitable reckoning of the reckless attitudes that had just been building. It showcased how our behavior does not match our sentiment when it comes to privacy. He urged us to be more careful and take effort when it comes to privacy. He said that it is important to go through the settings of all our apps and opt out of things that use our data. He wants us to do the work even if it is tedious, it feels pointless and it doesn’t do much but it shows the industry that we care. Because what the industry does is that it looks at our behavior rather than what we say and the statistics suggest that people don’t care about their privacy. Companies like Cambridge Analytica have the analytics to prove that. And we have to generate analytics that says that we actually do care.

Summing up the conference, I can say that it not only helped me realize the potential media and technology have in the coming decade but also made me aware of the crucial role I will play as a member of the media industry in shaping up the future of this country. I need to be more aware of the consequences of media on the consumers and be ethical in my approach with it. One question I left with after the conference was, when it comes to technology - If we design a tool that can be turned into a weapon, should it be built? I also realized that US has a dark data problem, and consumers and people need to be more careful with their data and being media literate plays a major role in helping us spread this awareness. The idea that you can quit social media is a false choice. Social media has let to this wildfire-like transfer of data and information, hence we need to be able to make a decision and judge between what is clickbait and what is the truth. We need more of good journalism and need to work on creating a healthier media environment in order to progress as a society.