Open Password – Wednesday, May 12, 2021
#921
vfm spring conference – Digitalization – Abolition of journalists – Agile organization and development – Willi Bredemeier – Virtual events – Corona – Real-time surveys – Informal spaces – Karin Bjerregaard Schlüter – University of the Arts – Automated routines – Media houses – Real-time analytics – Artificial intelligence – New products – customer requests – Rudolf Augstein – automation – one to many – many to many – means of production – disintermediation – Airbnb – Uber – new platforms – reallocation of advertising materials – Gruner + Jahr – SPIEGEL – RTL – SWR – Stefan Doganay – Jasmin Baumgartner – Christina Bouche – Middle Range Theories –
Leaders of Tomorrow – Pandemic – Politics – Social Media – Fellow Citizens – Gaining Trust – Health System – Science – Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions – St. Gallen Symposium – Daily Newspapers – Public Television – News Magazines – Fake News – AI and Ethics – Big Tech and the Pandemic – Health Mapping – Felix Maschewski – Anna-Verena Nosthoff – Luxembourg, social analysis and left-wing practice – Health mapping – Tim Cook – Google – Health data – Health Study – Verily – Baseline – Healthy at Work – Google Covid-19 Community Mobility Report – Apple – Apple Watch – Citizen Scientists – Interface for Tracing Apps – Facebook – Fake News – Data for Good – Facebook Messenger – Predictive Models – Amazon – Amazon Care – Halo – Affective Computing – GAFA
Cover story:
vfm spring conference – The keynote: Is digitalization abolishing journalists?
II.
Leaders of Tomorrow: Loss of trust in the pandemic
among politicians, social media and fellow citizens – gains in trust for the health system and science
III.
Outside the box:
Big Tech maps the terra incognita of our bodies – The pandemic as an accelerator of health mapping
Prof. Karin Bjerregaard Schlüter
vfm spring conference:
The keynote
Is digitalization abolishing journalists?
Or is agile organization and development part of the solution?
By Willi Bredemeier
vfm spring conference “Great freedom or quarantine – agile media documentation in times of Corona.
The evolution of virtual events is progressing, as shown by the vfm spring conference, which took place again after a year of interruption due to Corona. A survey among participants as to whether “agile working” was desirable for their own store could be experienced in real time in the form of block diagrams on their own PC (with an overwhelming majority saying it was “desirable”). Participants were able to retreat to informal rooms called, for example, “coffee counters” or “smoking corners” and meet there with specific people with whom they had previously arranged to meet via the chat function. It became apparent early on that a spring conference would be successful, at least in terms of the number of participants. Around 225 people took part in the events on the first day, a number that is difficult to achieve in face-to-face events relevant to the industry.
In her keynote, Prof. Karin Bjerregaard Schlüter from the Berlin University of the Arts spoke about the topic “Digital change and its influence on the meaning, tasks and work of media companies”. People are creatures of habit, Ms. Schlüter noted, who are reluctant to break away from familiar routines. This could not be otherwise, since many human actions are automated and have to be done that way for capacity reasons. Because of Corona, we found out how important this was when we had to practice completely new routines, which was very tiring and led to total exhaustion. At first, she repeatedly came late to the virtual conferences and once even forgot her computer.
What applies generally applies equally to media companies. Media houses? This is also a commonly used term (“I’m going to the studio now”) that should perhaps be abandoned in the wake of digitalization. Yes, in the past, the media house had to be a media house in which the printing presses thundered or palaces were built around the studios for the production of radio programs and, in addition to its function as a production facility, it had other functions such as gaining reputation and tying up capital had fulfilled. In addition, every employee had a permanent job there and they had demonstrably fulfilled their work obligations if they had complied with their attendance requirement. Today there are doubts about the term and reality of “media house” in view of a number of trends:
Real-time analytics. Monitoring success was also possible and common in the past, for example via subscription numbers, advertising sales and changes in market shares. However, new additions include real-time analytics, such as clicks or comments in chats and social media, which can and may even have to be responded to in real time.
News used to be written exclusively by journalists. Today, traffic news, sports reports, parts of economic news (e.g. current developments in stock market prices) and other areas of reporting can largely be taken over by bots. This is already happening and is not only happening faster, but possibly also more correctly and more differentiated (the latter using our own databases). Or the replacement of journalists by bots remains, at least for the time being, a partial one, with the journalist acting as the editor of his robot. If artificial intelligence can already generate appealing poetry, how close is it to taking over the comment columns?
The products change “because they already contain the customer’s ideas”. If journalists learn very quickly which of their headlines and which of their stories have been particularly successful in terms of clicks, won’t they learn to adapt more and more to the wishes of their customers and write accordingly? This is not only technically possible and in the economic interest of the carrier medium. Rather, it also leads to the question of whether not only parliaments but also the media should be enriched with elements of representative democracy. In any case, extensive compliance with customer wishes is one of the expectations of the editorial board and management that has been made explicit, and Rudolf Augstein’s statement “We write what we would like to read ourselves” would no longer be accepted today.
More and more processes in “media companies” are subject to automation. This applies just as much to administration as it does to editorial staff. However, the more areas are automated, the more “houses” and “(work) places” are replaced by cyberspace, in which stories are produced, shared collaboratively and distributed everywhere and without fixed locations.
There used to be no communication between journalists and readers. The “letters to the editor” served at best as a fig leaf, and when Ms. Schlüter’s grandma was upset that the media was reporting too well on Boris Becker, she didn’t expect any response from the editorial team. Today, with the rise of social media and readers becoming information producers, the “one to many” business model has morphed into the “many to many” model and the reader no longer accepts if the journalist does not respond to him. If the journalist still tries to get away with remaining silent, he runs the risk of becoming the object of an escalation process that can quickly lead to a shitstorm.
towards a “many to many minus one” model, i.e. news production without journalists, when customers take over the means of production ? Ms. Schlüter had a nice example here. The television station reported “on site” about the ongoing corona vaccination campaign, namely at the gates of a vaccination center. Meanwhile, people about to be vaccinated and those who had just been vaccinated stayed inside the vaccination center and tweeted what was happening there from personal (“authentic”) experience. At the same time, she posted her pictures of what was happening in the vaccination center online. Would the television team have a good reason to talk about the superior quality of their own program compared to the stories of the “media laypeople”? The “disintermediation” that accompanies digitalization mentioned here, i.e. taking the previous players out of the game, applies generally and affects not only editorial teams, but also hotels (for example through Airbnb) and the taxi industry (through Uber).
The media companies of the past could also be used as platforms can describe. But digitalization favored the rise of new platforms with different rules and very high usage promises. This was accompanied by a change from closed media markets to open global markets. The new platforms do not necessarily have to displace the old media, but the threat as such exists. Steps towards such displacement have already taken place, in particular the reallocation of advertising resources in favor of Google, Facebook and Co.
Are not only journalists but also media documentaries threatened by digitalization? This is the case, even if Ms. Schlüter did not go into details. The conference repeatedly recalled the impending closure of Gruner + Jahr’s media documentation, even though, like the SPIEGEL documentation, it was an industry model and made industry history. G+J probably doesn’t want to become dependent on robots in the future, but rather on “external sources”. But the opinion that one’s own documentaries were disposable was clearly expressed.
What should be done to avoid being pushed out by the emerging trends? As well as Ms. Schlüter may have characterized the challenges of digitalization for “media companies,” here she remained vague. You have to stop and reflect on what can be continued profitably and what you have to do without in the future. However, as was shown in the following session “Agile Organization and Development” using the examples of RTL and SWR, you had to become very specific very quickly in order to enable promising work under the conditions of digitalization (Stefan Doganay, RTL News, Cologne, Agile Working in content management at RTL News – Jasmin Baumgartner and Christina Bouche, SWT, Baden-Baden and Mainz, Reinventing IDA – How and why employees redesign their HA). In between, i.e. between the general tendencies as described by Ms. Schlüter and the seemingly endless concrete conditions and design options such as those found and further developed or replaced at RTL and SWR, there is a lack of “medium-range theories”.
More about the vfm spring conference coming soon.
Leaders of Tomorrow
politics, social media and fellow citizens during the pandemic
Gains in trust for
the healthcare system and science
(NIM) The COVID-19 pandemic clearly shows the danger of fake news. But who to trust when it comes to conveying facts and assessments? For young top talents and young managers it is clear: false information can be found primarily in social networks. They believe that their own generation trusts social media too much instead of doing something to combat fake facts. In general, they see the problem that the line between objective facts and subjective opinions is becoming increasingly blurred. These are the results of this year’s study “Voices of the Leaders of Tomorrow – Challenges for Human Trust in a Connected and Technology-Driven World” by the Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions (NIM) and the St. Gallen Symposium.
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Leaders of Tomorrow view their own generation critically.
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The 620 young managers, young entrepreneurs and students from the St. Gallen Symposium network surveyed for the study come from 84 countries and were mostly born after 1990. This generation has grown up with social media and a variety of media offerings – and at the same time has a strikingly strong criticism of the trustworthiness of social media channels: 90 percent of the young top talents answer that, in their opinion, fake news is primarily found on Facebook, Twitter and Co. are circulating. In the current COVID-19 pandemic, traditional media, such as daily newspapers, are by far at the top when it comes to trustworthy media genres: Over two thirds of those surveyed said that they only sometimes or never notice false information in daily newspapers. News programs on public TV stations and news magazines take second and third place.
According to the Leaders of Tomorrow, the line between objective facts and subjective opinions is becoming increasingly blurred. In this context too, they see and criticize the innocence and indolence of their own generation, which in their opinion places too much trust in social media: 53 percent consider young people’s blind belief in the news content on social media channels to be a big problem and 75 percent agree that their generation is not doing enough to combat fake facts. Roughly the same number believe that most online companies and platform providers do not do enough to identify or prevent fakes and fake reviews.
Even when it comes to values and attitudes towards new technologies, the next generation of managers in the study are critical of their own generation: 66 percent are convinced that their peers place too little value on ethical standards. And just under 60 percent of those surveyed consider the attitude towards new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), to be too uncritical.
Since new technologies will continue to create enormous digital opportunities in the future, the Leaders of Tomorrow consider a number of measures to be necessary or very urgent to strengthen trust in technology: These range from greater transparency, such as users’ personal data from comprehensive education of people on the risks and opportunities of technologies to the establishment and strengthening of supervisory authorities.
When asked which institutions and groups have gained or lost trust in the current COVID-19 pandemic, politicians and governments recorded the greatest loss of trust among top talent at 64 percent, followed by social media. Almost 60 percent say their trust in social media has decreased slightly or even significantly. Almost half report that their trust in their fellow citizens has suffered during the pandemic. The clear trust winners are medical staff, such as doctors and nurses, as well as the professional group of scientists: 68 percent and 63 percent respectively say that both groups gained trust in them over the course of the pandemic.
Outside the box:
Big Tech and the pandemic (47)
Big Tech maps the terra incognita
of our bodiesThe pandemic as an accelerator of health mapping
Felix Maschewski and Anna-Verena Nosthoff, Big Tech and the pandemic – smart rescuers in times of need?, in: Luxembourg – social analysis and left-wing practice, April 2021. The authors assume that “Big Tech sees the world as a map that can be read. While every street, every hill and every house has already been recorded, every book and photo has been translated into digital form, our behavior has also been datafied and aggregated more and more insistently and its patterns analyzed for some time now. Maps are there to orientate yourself and navigate; they make the world accessible but also controllable. The healthcare market is expected to reach a volume of $979 billion worldwide in 2025 and almost $57 billion in Germany. It is therefore not surprising that the digital companies “recently viewed the human body as terra incognita”. In 2019, Apple CEO Tim Cook answered “almost on behalf of Silicon Valley” when asked what his company’s most important contribution to humanity should be: “health.”
One of the most advanced players in the health mapping business is Google . Most recently, this focused “primarily on the development of algorithms with which to predict the course of patients’ illnesses and to better organize bed occupancy.” Google entered into collaborations with external health service providers through which millions of data sets were transferred – often without the patients’ knowledge disease processes were acquired. In the “Health Study” by the Google subsidiary Verily, since 2018, “10,000 people have been (equipped) with so-called study watches over four years to track all (in)activity (from the number of steps to the quality of sleep). At the same time, the test subjects should continuously fill out questionnaires, check-ups in clinics and undergo tests – from vision tests to walking tests – which give the group insight into all areas of life (and death).” In the “Baseline” project, 1.7 Millions of Americans tested for Corona. “Healthy at Work” offers constant Covid-19 screening for employees. “Google Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports” reflects the current movement trends of the population based on location data from smartphone users. These serve to “locate possible risk areas of infection based on evidence and to determine to what extent measures to restrict contact are effective or not.”
Apple Watch in particular occupies a key position on the wrist, enabling its users to become citizen scientists and use the app to collect personal data – from daily activity to sleep patterns – for early detection of Covid-19 Donate.” You can donate your own data to research further data via Apple’s Research app. Both Google and Apple made a “specially developed interface (available) that enables almost decentralized, anonymized data exchange via Bluetooth and today forms the standard for almost all national tracing apps in Europe.”
Facebook “has developed a corona virus vaccination center for the news feed and has combated fake news – especially about vaccinations – more consistently than ever before.” The company made a platform available on which 50,000 people report to researchers at two universities every day so that the virus can be tracked. Under the motto Data for Good , apps record “how the range of motion and social contacts contribute to the spread of the corona virus, whether the exit restrictions are effective or whether new measures are recommended”. For example, with Facebook Messenger, the respective location data is recorded in real time in order to “create predictive models that predict the course of the crisis”.
Amazon created “Amazon Care” just for its own workforce in the greater Seattle area . “Employees can obtain diagnostic advice from doctors at any time via chat or video call, arrange in-house appointments if necessary, or seek care directly from the employer.” The fitness tracker Halo “can not only count steps, measure pulse rate or skin temperature, it also enables Body fat analysis using a type of 3D scan”. To do this, users “have to take photos of themselves half naked and upload the photos to the Amazon cloud. … The voice should also be recorded via a microphone in order to use affective computing to draw conclusions about the emotional state of the person wearing it and to show its effect on strangers.”
In all of these activities, the pandemic has acted as an accelerator of change processes “that had already begun before it, but are now being pursued with even greater concentration.” The smart tech companies present themselves as “smart saviors… that often take on tasks beyond the state’s hesitation take over and act without democratic consideration processes. … What seems understandable and perhaps necessary during the pandemic can quickly develop a new dynamic. According to GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), they have never collected enough data and always know too little about what holds the world and us together deep down.”
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