Social media and
technology go hand in hand. Without our advanced technology of today, I’m sure
that social media wouldn’t have rapidly grown the way that it has. Technology
is constantly evolving; it changes and advances every single day. At this point
it is hard to imagine that new technology could come about because it feels
like all innovative and new ideas have been imagined. However, technology has
infinite possibilities so even though it is extremely advanced right now, there
is still a lot of room for innovation.
I found a very interesting
technological concept that would affect the future of social media: optical
pattern recognition. According to Wikipedia, pattern recognition is a branch of
machine learning that focuses on the recognition of patterns and regularities
in data. Police and security services already use this in order to help
identify known criminals. Collaboration blog claims that right now, social
media has already started using this technology to help with tagging pictures.
If you notice when you upload a picture on Facebook, the site suggests who the
people in the picture are for you to tag based on facial recognition.
What is really cool is what
I read about this technology in a Mashable article. In order to explain it
well, I’m going to provide the example that the article gave:
Imagine you're on your way to
a conference and you have a couple of hours to kill so you park yourself in the
corner of a local bar to catch up on Mashable. You've barely begun reading when
an attractive girl or guy catches your eye. You're transfixed, your heart
starts to race — you're in love. But being the shy type you can't just go over
and introduce yourself, so instead you do a quick scan of the room with your
cell phone to pick up any latent metadata. Unfortunately, a social network
profile pops up informing you that the object of your affection is in a
relationship. Your initial excitement rapidly dissipates and you get on with
your reading.
So pretty much in the future, we could possibly be able to
bring up people’s social media sites by “scanning” the area with our phone. I know
that this is super crazy and a little bit far-fetched, but I find it extremely
interesting.
A potential problem with this technology is privacy issues.
There are already a lot of issues with social media stalking and I’m pretty
sure this tech would make it a lot worse. If I were just at a grocery store and
I saw someone using this technology to try to find me on social media I would
be really creeped out. Although people can already find information about me on
the internet just by knowing my name, I don’t want strangers to be able to find
information about me just from seeing me in a public place.
Sources:
I liked your blog post a lot! Honestly this sort of technology is kind of scary to me, I'm a private person and I feel like if someone could just look at me and find out all of this information on me, I'd be pretty freaked out too. I'm glad you talked about the potential privacy problems. I feel like this is a great technology that could be put towards catching criminals on a larger scale, but I feel uncomfortable with your average Joe using it to try to improve his game. Great post :)
ReplyDelete