Communication of Smart Media [1st ed.] 9789811594632, 9789811594649

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Peng Duan Lei Zhang Kai Song Xiao Han

Communication of Smart Media

Communication of Smart Media

Peng Duan · Lei Zhang · Kai Song · Xiao Han

Communication of Smart Media

Peng Duan Communication University of China Beijing, China

Lei Zhang Communication University of China Beijing, China

Kai Song Communication University of China Beijing, China

Xiao Han Communication University of China Beijing, China

ISBN 978-981-15-9463-2 ISBN 978-981-15-9464-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9464-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Contents

1 Media’s Role in the AI Era? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 History of Human Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1.1 Changes in Media Over the Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1.2 Origin of Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 What Is Smart Media? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.1 Understanding AI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.2 Communication Becomes Intelligent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Enter the Era of Smart Media Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 1 12 21 21 25 28

2 Differences in Smart Media Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 New Features of Smart Media Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1 All-Embracing Media, All-Inclusive Connection . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.2 Human–Machine Interaction, Human–Machine Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.3 Public as the Participant and Public as the Media . . . . . . . . . 2.2 New Space and Time in Smart Media Communication . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 Time Disorder and Fragmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 Space Mobility and Contextualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Smart Media Communication Myths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 Smart Versus Human . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.2 Reason Versus Emotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.3 Virtual Versus Real . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.4 Technology Evolution Versus Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 New Prospects of Smart Media Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

31 31 31 34 37 40 40 43 46 46 48 50 52 54

3 VR—The Vanguard of Smart Media Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Concept, Features and Historical Origin of VR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 Concept of VR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2 Historical Origin of VR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.3 Features of VR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57 57 57 58 60

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3.2 Practical Application and Characteristics of Immersive Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 VR + Smart Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 VR + Fashion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.3 VR + Future Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

61 62 64 65

4 Intelligent News—The Backbone of Smart Media Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Intelligent Trends in the News Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Changes in News Brought by Smart Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Smart News Aggregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 Smart News Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.3 Smart News Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.4 Smart News Consumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Reflections Prospects of Smart News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69 69 71 71 73 75 77 80

5 Social Network—The Core of Smart Media Communication . . . . . . . 5.1 Enter the Era of Social Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.1 From Public Society to Private Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.2 From Six Degrees of Separation to Smart Society . . . . . . . . . 5.1.3 From Interpersonal Interaction to Human–Machine Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Ubiquitous Smart Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.1 Voices as a Smart Gateway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.2 Ubiquitous Smart Connection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.3 Beware of Social Bots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 New Social Network Ecosystem in the Smart Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

83 83 83 85

6 Platform Society—The Trend of Smart Media Communication . . . . . 6.1 New Smart Mechanism of Platform Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1.1 Datafication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1.2 Commercialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1.3 Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Smart Platform Ecosystem Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.1 Smarty City and City Image Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.2 Smart Healthcare and Health Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.3 Smart Education and Education Communication . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 The Advent of Smart Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

101 101 101 104 106 108 108 111 113 115

7 The Push by 5G . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Disruptive Communication in the 5G Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.1 From Full Space and Time to Full Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.2 From Full Connection to All Personal Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.3 From Full-Feature Communication to Full-Effect Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

119 119 119 122

88 91 91 92 94 97

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7.2 Financial Media Development in the Context of 5G Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.1 Refactoring the Information System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.2 Reconstructing the User Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.3 Reshaping the Media Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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127 127 130 133

8 Reflection and Future of Smart Media Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 8.1 The Future of Smart Media Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 8.2 A Vision of 5G Intelligent Media Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Chapter 1

Media’s Role in the AI Era?

1.1 History of Human Communication 1.1.1 Changes in Media Over the Years From time immemorial, communication, especially an effective one, has always been the basic pursuit of human activities. However, the “helplessness of communication” that frequently arises in real life is inevitable, such as meanings not being understood, feedback being ignored, the spread and interference of rumours, the lack of information and knowledge and the deprivation of the right to speak. Such imbalance in communication is even more pronounced during complex, volatile social communication that transcends time and space. Meanwhile, new media technology and application continue to increase the speed and scope of information communication, reception, transfer and feedback. Technological advancement has also changed media use and consumer behaviour, which triggered the transition of the audience’s cognitive structure. In addition, the interactive influence between diverse individual psychological factors, complex social structure and economic, cultural and political fields has created a novel and unique media environment. However, technological inventions did not appear out of thin air or happen overnight. During the long process of development of human communication, technology, culture and society interweaved and interacted to produce media forms that belonged exclusively to that time and space. Hence, we usually present the knowledge of human communication studies focusing on the historical periods with major changes in the forms and features of media technology. Each revolutionary wave that caused tremendous changes in the history of human communication was an effect of media technology. After the modern industrial revolution in particular, the significance of technology has prompted increasing reflection on modernity and postmodernity in the academia. Friedrich Krotz believed mediatization was interconnected with globalization, individualization and commercialization, which were regarded as the meta-process that affected the long-term living environment of human beings in terms of society, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 P. Duan et al., Communication of Smart Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9464-9_1

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culture, politics and democracy.1 Mediatization, a regular existence, is a frequently discussed topic in communication studies, such as the role it plays in daily life, culture and social rituals, or from the perspective of the stages of communication history, how it shapes different communication subjects, forms, models and results. From ancient media (mainly verbal communication), writing culture, printing revolution, imaging technology, radio broadcasting, digital media and the Internet to the emergence and development of artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years, the course of development shows the significance and influence of interaction between media and technology during a certain historical, cultural and social processes. The countless processes of information flow of every scale throughout history constitute the entire process of development of human communication, which is in fact the evolutionary history of media and technology. The examination of the history of human communication from the perspective of media changes may roughly be divided into four continuous stages, namely verbal communication, handwriting, printing communication and electronic communication. Despite having four successive stages, no distinct dividing line is found between each–in fact, they complement each other and overlap. As it inspires changes in the means of human cognition, the alternating evolution between communication forms, spatial concepts and communication effects as brought about by different media is reshaping the details of human life and the overall changes of social reality. Verbal communication, also known as spoken-language communication or oral communication, refers to a communication means whereby a communicator (a speaker) communicates and conveys information to a recipient (a listener) by producing sounds through the oral cavity assisted by the use of specific words and phrases, grammatical structures and non-linguistic signs. It is widely known that during the long history of human evolution, human beings have gotten ahead of other mammals and learnt to use tools and built society using languages. Human beings mastered the tools of language and created a “semantic world” that no other ordinary animals have. Hans-Georg Gadamer, a German philosopher, believed that language itself was a worldview. It may be said that human beings created a world because of language, which gave rise to their relationships with the world and that in turn produced a unique attitude towards it (Fig. 1.1).2 Language is a form of meaning and a vessel of information; its production is closely connected to human beings’ needs to communication information. As Marx remarked, language was initially born of the urgent needs to communicate with others.3 In a primitive society, human production was low, and the ability of individuals to survive natural disasters was almost non-existent. Verbal communication as a primary means of communication and contact allowed individual human beings to come together and form a stronger, collaborating tribe and community. In a historical context with the appropriate conditions, verbal communication strengthened the cohesiveness of society members, and extended the attribute of social synergy upon 1 Krotz

(2007). et al. (2005). 3 Marx and Engels (1995). 2 Ashford

1.1 History of Human Communication

3

Fig. 1.1 Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), a German hermeneutics scholar

which human civilization depends. In such sense, as the starting point to a critical stage in the history of human communication, the emergence of linguistic media truly unveiled the civilization of human communication. In terms of human communication activities, verbal communication is the oldest, easiest and most basic form of communication. It is diverse and may be widely applied, whether it is whispering, words on the street, reciting and singing, orally passed-down folk songs, preaching and lecturing or open gatherings. Verbal communication exists as dialogues between two or more people and derives meaning from the linguistic exchanges. People may elucidate the communication using non-linguistics actions such as eye contact, body language, facial expressions, sound elements and spatial distance (Fig. 1.2). However, the limitations of verbal communication are plainly evident. Firstly, as a means and a tool of communication, language is unable to free itself from the limitations of the communicator and recipient and intersubjectivity. Secondly, verbal communication is better suited for the communication of information in a confined space and has a relatively small communication range without media assistance. In addition, verbal signs are transient and harder to preserve. The limitations stated above also means verbal communication has a smaller informational load, lower content accuracy and greater temporal and spatial limitations. As society and civilization continuously progressed, human beings searched tirelessly for tools such as drums, fires, knots and flags to convey and preserve information. Meanwhile, the language mechanism was maturing, but the monotonous verbal communication had yet to satisfy the development needs of individuals and society (Figs. 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5). If the birth of language transformed our ancestors from animals to human beings, then the invention of writing was a milestone that saw the evolution of a primitive human society to civilization tens of thousands of years after the birth of language. During such communication, auditory signs are replaced by visual ones, which to a certain extent allows language to throw off its shackles and become relatively independent and tangible. If language is a direct sign of things, then words are the

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Fig. 1.2 Pheidippides running back to Athens to deliver the news of war victory

Fig. 1.3 Communication via drumbeats

indirect signs of things. As the symbols of human civilization, words are written signs that record human language and thinking. Unlike verbal communication that may be acquired naturally, written language requires human agency to learn to read and write, and such human characteristics add to the definite communication purpose of written communication. Primitive written media such as clay tablets, stones, leaves, oracle bones and sheepskin basically were born alongside pictures and evolved with writing. They led to major breakthroughs, temporally and spatially, in information communication,

1.1 History of Human Communication

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Fig. 1.4 Communication via smoke signals

Fig. 1.5 Knot-record

and to a great extent make up the limitations of verbal media. Written communication provides a relatively independent means for the storage, accumulation and delivery of information, and human memories, experience and knowledge no longer have to rely on human brains for survival and their life is greatly extended. Aided by written signs, language cast off the shackles of distance and environment in verbal communication, before moving on to continuously expand the living boundaries and

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Fig. 1.6 Primitive written media such as stones and oracle bones

social space of human communication and interaction. Meanwhile, as the use of written signs became extensively adopted and standardized, the accuracy of communication content also increased tremendously, which to a certain extent inhibited the unrestrained spread of rumours commonly seen during the age of verbal communication. It may be said that the breakthroughs of written media in temporal and spatial limitations actually affected the overall development process of human society. For example, the standardization of writing effectively organized the legal and political systems, which in turn make structured centralized rule possible. Furthermore, crossregion economic communication was simplified and became more efficient, leading to the development of commodity (Fig. 1.6). Writing, in addition to being a tool, has distinctive cultural characteristics. According to Wilbur Schramm, an authority on mass communications, the rise and the similarities and differences of different cultures were evident in the diverse language families and their writing.4 As a subsystem in the overall operations of a cultural system, writing also connects the characteristics, attributes and content of individual subsystems as a form of symbolic expressions. In such sense, writing with a stable internal structure may be regarded as an exclusive form of expression of a culture that helps us continuously approach, experience and understand the numerous and complicated cultures. In the prologue of Explaining Graphs and Analysing Characters, it was stated that the development of writing was the foundation of classics studies and imperial rule and allowed the forefathers to be known to the descendants and the descendants to learn about history. The invention of writing and the introduction of documentation were major undertakings in the history of human communication. They changed the fact that human history could only be orally passed down through myths or legends, and guided human beings from a “barbaric age” towards a “civilised age”. Despite the limited productive forces and technological standard that meant writing or written media was unable to escape from pitfalls such as inefficient communication, slow communication speed, small information load, limited communication scope and man-made errors, it is undeniable that the emergence of writing provided a more stable, long-lasting and reasonable means of presentation for pluralistic civilizations. 4 Schramm

(1984).

1.1 History of Human Communication

7

The advancement of human social civilization was thus expedited, as a preliminary foundation of mass communication in its true sense was born. Actually, human beings underwent a lengthy period of hand-copied texts, which had not only higher media costs but also subtly set a certain cultural threshold, as the initiative of communication was objectively limited to the upper classes. It was not until the printing revolution that the situation slowly improved. Driven by the idea of expanding the scope of communication, helped by the needs and acceptance of the public towards structured text and following the grasping of text-copying techniques by professional printers, the print media became the third major milestone in the development history of communication media after language and writing, truly marking the advent of the age of mass communication. China’s print media began in the sixteenth-century BC, and in between the development of stamps in the eleventh-century BC and stone rubbing in the third-century AD, woodblock printing, clay moveable types, wooden moveable type and papermaking emerged and spread across East Asia and the West. They were the beacons that guided human beings towards the print culture and made indelible contributions to the development of world civilization and human society. However, the real media revolution was considered to have taken place when Johannes Gutenberg, a German craftsman, invented the metal moveable type in 1450. The invention took advantage of the fixed letter combination of the Western phonetic alphabet and made machine production and mass reproduction of written information possible, thus enhancing the quality of human communication. Following the industrial revolution in Europe, information communication picked up a new pace with the help of electricity and mechanical power (Fig. 1.7). The advent of printing machines and mechanized papermaking induced the birth of modern newspapers and magazines and boosted the rapid communication of cultural products. Meanwhile, special communication bodies and systems were created. The systematic and rigorous processes of media communication bring together natural acts of communication and greatly enhanced communication efficiency. As literacy level improved, print media began to play an increasingly critical role in daily life and even social transformation. The advancement of printing technology not only made the reproduction of text information possible, but also created a new cultural form dissimilar to the verbal or written age, and profound influence was seen in fields such as politics, culture and education. As Schramm remarked, textbooks made the provision of large-scale public education possible, while newspapers and magazines provided a channel for people to understand and participate in politics during a period of general discontentment with the division of powers. Following the popularization of the print media and the elevation of literacy and cultural levels, the idea of freedom of speech and publication had also been awoken, nourishing the budding democratic thinking in the West. Charles Horton Cooley, a representative scholar of the Chicago School, asserted in his book Social Organization that “[p]rinting means democracy”; the profound significance that communication had for social development was underscored from a media

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Fig. 1.7 Gutenberg, a German craftsman, invented metal moveable type in the 1440s

determinism perspective.5 In fact, not only had the print media ended the knowledge monopoly and the exclusive communication rights of the minority, which provided powerful ideological weapons to throw off the feudal shackles of the Middle Ages, it also encouraged exchanges and communication among countries, ethnic groups and social classes, providing a space for the development and extension of humanity and morality. Marshall McLuhan believed that as a new medium print matter could end the narrow regional and tribal views between the mind and society and between space and time.6 Undoubtedly, in the history of media communication, mass communication and print media almost took off and evolved simultaneously, which in turn accelerated the beginning of the modernization of human society. Later, human communication entered the stage of electronic media. Broadly speaking, electronic media refers to all the media that rely on electric current to communicate information, which include privatized media such as telephone, telegram and mobile phones and public media such as radio, television and the Internet. In the narrow sense, electronic media refers exclusively to public media.7 In terms of its development, electronic media has undergone the transition from telegram, radio, television to the Internet, during which period the activities of human communication have experienced tremendous changes. The entire social-information system 5 Cooley

(1909). (2007a). 7 Li (2003). 6 McLuhan

1.1 History of Human Communication

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Fig. 1.8 Samuel Morse, the father of telegram from the USA, and his invention

has continuously improved and even formed a relatively independent communication system. Back in 1837, Samuel Morse, an American, invented the first telegraph of the world. Seven years later, Morse sent the first telegram from Washington to Baltimore with a verse from the Bible: “What hath God wrought!”, which perfectly reflected the emotion towards the advent of the age of electronic media. The arrival of telegram overcame the spatial limitations related to the communication of verbal, written and print media. Meanwhile, the scope and efficiency of information communication were immensely improved, greatly facilitating social and private life (Fig. 1.8). As the revolution of science and technology took place in the West in the nineteenth century, along with the needs of imperialism for external expansion and maintaining colonialism, radio media slowly emerged against such background. In addition to allowing the actual recording, copying and preservation of human voices, it possessed many advantages, including timeous information communication, easy to understand and few spatial limitations, which led to the qualitative leap in the scope and speed of information communication (Fig. 1.9). The first radio broadcast of the world At around 8 on Christmas Eve in 1906, Fessenden, a professor at the then Western University of Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh, successfully made the first radio broadcast transmitted from a 128-metre-tall antenna of National Electric Signalling Company in Brant Rock, Massachusetts. The radio broadcast was also the first in the world.

Film and television media are mass media with sounds and motion pictures that satisfy the audio–visual sense and offer a sense of presence. The television media has undergone half-a-century’s experiment before slowly turning from a niche product toyed by scientists, inventors and radio enthusiasts into a medium of mass communication. Films were born after television, when breakthroughs were achieved in optics, acoustics and mechanical engineering. The emergence of film and television

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Fig. 1.9 Fessenden made the first radio broadcast of the world in the USA in 1906

media meant that sound- and image-information systems were no longer bound to human bodies. Not only can they exist independently and be stored easily, but they also provide more vibrant means to render the collective memories of human beings. As a result, social, cultural and historic preservation has richer forms of expression, while the efficiency and quality of knowledge accumulation and cultural heritage have also greatly improved. The development of electronic technology ushered in and promoted the arrival of the age of digital media. Following continuous improvement and evolution, the Internet has finally created an unprecedented, utopian virtual world, which is showing more and more significant reaction to the real world. The emergence and arrival of digital media have strengthened the bilateralness of the communication process, as the unilateral, linear model upgraded to a multi-lateral nested model, and the parties may fully engage in real-time communication and interaction. Digital media has also integrated multiple media features, whereby text, sounds, frames and images are converged to an organically interconnected communication platform. Furthermore, in the age of globalization of information communication, the richness of media resources to a certain extent breaks up the monopoly of information resources by a few media bodies. During the 1970s, social media was born out of the Internet. As computers and the Internet advanced during the 1990s, social media developed even more widely. As the model of user-generated content matured, social networking services began to thrive and grow into a media force that could not be ignored. The monotonous,

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passive status of recipients during the processes of conventional mass communication was gradually overturned, and their right to speak was re-assigned, as information recipients became the expressing subjects. Meanwhile, the term “recipient” has in recent years been slowly replaced by the term “user”. As different social media and self-media platforms sprang up, they strongly evoke the communication desire of the public in the information age with their grassroots, diverse, interactive and original in nature. Users may freely access different information, present their viewpoints and effectively communicate them using media. As the right of access to mass media becomes a reality and the sense of participation of the public continues to strengthen, their self-identity, sense of belonging and social responsibility are also gradually reinforced. As a result, the online public space for the protection of public interests and welfare is being built, leading to the regular emergence of platforms for “seeking advice from netizens on microblogs” and “online help”. The right of access to mass media The right of access to mass media basically refers to “a legally enforceable right, based on which an ordinary, private individual may demand the media to provide coverage or dayparts, unconditionally or under certain conditions and freely or paid, for the expression of personal opinions.”8 In 1967, J. A. Barron published the article Access to the Press. A New First Amendment Right in Harvard Law Review, in which he first proposed the concept of the right of access to mass media. In 1973, he published the book Freedom of the Press for Whom? The Right of Access to Mass Media, which systematically explained the concept of the right of access to mass media.9

Focusing on the current process of communication, smart media communication is extensively and intensely infiltrating every aspect of production and life. Smart media comprises AI, information technology and big data. In addition to understanding its users and deconstructing and reshaping social forms and people’s lifestyles, smart media better integrates clientele and services to provide users with an application environment with great experience. The age of smart communication not only extends the pivotal role of information resources in the age of digital communication, but also loads information upon smart technology to create a communication ecological environment with man as the subject, which is highly vibrant and creative and shares the pulse of the actual society. Harold Adams Innis, a Canadian pioneer of the Toronto School, once remarked that the advantage of a new medium would lead to the birth of a new civilization.10 A broad overview of the evolutionary process of technology and communication media reveals that the evolution of communication media involved constant rectification, improvement and stimulation of the social-information system. Media and technology have undergone a process that began from scratch, from low level to high level and from simplicity to complexity. The old and new media did not change and alternate in a one-off and orderly manner, but rather in a converged, interwoven state. Technological advancement means communication media is no longer scattered 8 Lin

(2002). (1973). 10 Innis (2003). 9 Barron

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about people or simply an intermediary. Instead, communication media infiltrates society as a complete organism that combines individual perception and experience of the world, which in turn influences imperceptibly and reshapes people’s thinking, life and even social reality. As a result, reflection on the changes in media forms should not merely focus on communication technology but also include the scientific understanding of the interaction and significance of technology, culture and society, so as to truly grasp the development and the patterns of human communication.

1.1.2 Origin of Technology When going through the historical development of human communication through the ages, a question often arises: Does technology determine societal changes? The answer undoubtedly is negative. Technological determinism alone cannot explain the complex interaction among technology, culture and society. Many scholars have studied the interaction from different perspectives adopting different means and have established a relatively comprehensive knowledge prospect. Nevertheless, the influence of science and technology on media and social development may not be overlooked. In the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology and Society, scholars regard knowledge competition as the choice of truths that may be deemed as notable and significant, just like choosing assertions that may be deemed as correct or false, which all have serious consequences.11 Its profound significance lies in the clarion call that is being sounded to awaken the world to recognize the importance of media to society and that of technology to communication, which remind us to change our way of thinking when dealing with and understanding issues. Here, the original media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) and his distinct media technology theory must be mentioned. 1. Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) During the 1960s, McLuhan was a highly influential star scholar who was so popular that even Woody Allen, the most well-known intellectual of New York, invited him to guest star in the romantic comedy Annie Hall. However, McLuhan’s line in the film was truly puzzling: “You mean my entire fallacy is wrong.” The entirely unintelligible sentence is not unlike the unusual uproar he had caused in the communication theory field at the time. The New York Herald Tribune once called him the most important thinker after Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov, whereas academic groups and conservatives dubbed him “the Dr. Spock of pop culture” and “metaphysical wizard possessed by a spatial sense of madness”. However, the advent of the age of digital media had put him back on the pedestal, as media ecology re-entered people’s vision from the secondary fringes of communication studies (Fig. 1.10). Well-known statements and phrases, such as “the medium is the message”, “media is the extension of man”, “hot media” and “cold media”, became the key thinking of 11 Sismondo

(2015).

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Fig. 1.10 Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), a Canadian original media theorist and thinker

McLuhan. “The medium is the message” refers to how media technology changed the way people perceive and think about the world, which consequently changed our collective thinking and behaviour. In his The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), McLuhan reasoned that media technology such as the alphabetical-writing system, printers and electronic media had changed individual consciousness, which in turn changed the greater social structure. He therefore considered that the truly meaningful and valuable information was not the communication content from different periods, but rather the nature of the communication tools of the period and the possibilities and social changes they brought about. McLuhan emphasized the criticalness of media forms and regarded it as the key factor influencing human behaviour and social life. The research perspective that regards media as environments through the revelation of the hidden attributes of media environments has also become a key train of media ecology. “Media is the extension of man” refers to that any medium is the expansion or extension of human feeling and senses. The development history of media and society is also that of human senses, as they “unify”, “divide” and “re-unify”. A medium refers to a kind of communication technology, which media ecologists from North America consider include not only mass media such as newspapers, radio, television and the Internet, but also parchment, stones, clothing, mathematics, advertisement, prose, currencies and much more. In Empire and Communications, Innis

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listed a dozen media, while McLuhan actually listed 26 kinds of medium. However, McLuhan was of the opinion that the extension of media broke the balance of human senses, leading to the restructuring of the sensory ratio,12 which in turn rendered a complete individual desensitized and fragmented. The sensory bias of media enriches the overall theory of media bias after the introduction of ideological bias, anteriorand posterior-area bias and temporal and spatial bias of media. McLuhan regarded human civilization as the product of technology. He focused on how the human environment was re-rendered and shaped based on an incomplete, extended image. He firmly believed that extension had the unique attribute of transferring power from source objects to extensions. Just like the two concepts he proposed regarding the categorization of media: the “hot media” and the “cold media”, the former conveyed clearer information, so recipients did not require additional senses and associations to understand it, whereas the latter was the exact opposite. Although the categorization has no consistent standards and has clear limitations, it opened up the space for media imagination. McLuhan once predicated the trend of future development would be the extension of the central nervous system through the electronic media technology, which would free people’s consciousness from the shackles of the mechanical world and allow it to travel the universe. The image of the future in the context of smart media is precisely an overlap of the real and virtual worlds through the extension of every human sense, which properly integrates the objective and subjective worlds. As a result, the virtual environment created by images will be infinitely close to human consciousness, and McLuhan’s predication may well become reality. 2. Harold Adams Innis (1894–1952) Looking back at the inspirations for the many theories and research methods of McLuhan, Innis was a pivotal figure. Harold Adams Innis was a Canadian economic historian, economic theorist and communication scholar. He has been called “the first Canadian-born social scientist to achieve an international reputation” and “the father of Canadian Economic History”. Innis had a profound interest in how media changed the entire social civilization. As a pan-media advocate, he attempted to conduct comparative research on the mutual relationships between communication and politics and between economy and religion by presenting a large number of facts and examples throughout the historical world. Such research approach of dynamic deductive analysis has also become a key ideological source for media ecologists such as McLuhan and Neil Postman. “The bias of communication”, as the most critical component of Innis’s communication ideas, explains the connection between the rise, development and fall of civilization and a certain communication form and the commencement, spread and variation of the media upon which it depends.13 Innis maintained that media bias was caused by the coupling of communication media and the information, knowledge and power attached to them. Based on their characteristics, communication media may 12 McLuhan 13 Xu

(2007b). (2012).

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be divided into media with light but hard to preserve materials that aid spatial extension, including paper and telegraph, and “time-bias” media with heavy but durable materials, such as parchment and stones. The different media biases had led to differentiated biases in communication means. For example, expression cultures related to legends, myths and drama showed bias towards verbal communication, whereas cultures based on print media such as newspapers and books biased towards written communication. However, Innis argued that influenced by media and communication biases, fissures appeared in the internal consistency and continuity of cultures and systems. He claimed media technology could transcend time and space and extend but could not possibly strike a balance. Media that extended time were biased towards encouraging the upholding of social traditions, whereas media that extended space encouraged social expansion and drastic changes. For instance, city-states and communities in ancient Greece were spirit and moral extensions of verbal communication, whereas written communication alienated the relationships among people. The unilateral communication paths led to power concentration, which saw the Roman Empire rose to power with its tremendous spatial control. As a pioneer in media ecology, Innis not only liberated media from being regarded as a lone and monotonous tool, he clearly described the interaction between media and the entire social system, while reminding people to maintain the corresponding balance when using media to promote positive social development. Just as Innis’s ideology exuded enthusiasm and nostalgia for verbal culture, it also serves as a cultural warning for how modern humanity, who ignores actual communication, indulges in virtual survival and even regards virtual reality (VR) as a way of life. 3. Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) Referring to the concerns about technology and the nostalgia for face-to-face communication, Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher, postmodernism theorist and media and social theorist who has been referred to as “the high priest of postmodernism”, shared similar sentiment. The “McLuhan of France” had no shortage of ideas and interpretations of communication media, technology and human society in his impressive yet unconventional ideological research (Fig. 1.11). Fig. 1.11 Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), French philosopher, postmodernism theorist and media and social theorist

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In his study of postmodernism society, Baudrillard conferred enormous power on media. He maintained that media, simulation and cyber blitz had constituted new experience fields, new historical stages and new social types. In his later academic research, simulation and simulacra, media and information, science and new technology and implosion and hyperreality constituted his key postmodernism-theory world and provided a specific model for how media of omnipotent and spontaneous social power could play its role. In his Simulacra and Simulation, Symbolic Exchange and Death and Seduction from the 1970s and the 1980s, Baudrillard adopted a scientific and technological perspective and regarded media as the primary “simulators” in disciplines and fields such as biogenealogy, bionics, holographic principle and computer simulation. He depicted a real field created by media-produced code, imitations and simulations, which drove human society towards new historical stages and social types. He contented that mass media such as television that has profound influence on the recipients often copied images, symbols and code to create and support hyperreality. Baudrillard claimed that the rapid rise of symbols and information in media was removing meanings through the counteracting and breaking down of content, before completing the disintegration of meanings and the process of eliminating the difference between media and reality. He asserted that communication aided and accelerated the degeneration of modern production fields towards a postmodern simulacrum society.14 The medium is the message does not merely mean the disappearance of information intermediaries, but also that regardless of the content or form, an intermediary force between one reality and another will cease to exist. In the past, we could regard communication media as a mirror reflection of phenomena and reality. However, the hyperreality created by modern mass media and even smart media is doubtlessly more realistic than the reality as perceived by recipients, which may lead to the disintegration and disappearance of reality. As media environments and real life become one, humanity will become more lost in the grey area between virtuality and reality and unable to identify the truth. The criticism on postmodernism social media that Baudrillard voiced in his social theory and media criticism primarily focused on mass media in the electronic-communication age as research subjects. However, if the perspective is shifted to the surging smart-communication age of now, Baudrillard’s ideas and concepts of simulation and hyperreality may still serve as critical perspectives and practical tools in the analysis of smart media and platform society based on cybernetics. 4. Manuel Castells (1942–) The fourth representative in the tracing of the ideological sources of technology is Manuel Castells, who has dabbled in different academic disciplines. He turned his attention to the influence that information technology has on society towards the end of the twentieth century and is hailed by The Economist as “the first significant philosopher of cyberspace”. Focusing on the interaction between communication and society, Castells formulated the “network and information-society theory” in 14 Chen

and Lu (2007).

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Fig. 1.12 Manuel Castells, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, USA

his The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, which triggered beneficial discussions in the academia. He identified phenomena such as information capitalism and digital divide, revealed the internal logic of information technology and social changes and illustrated the key process of social structural changes (Fig. 1.12). Castells maintained that the culture of a network society possessed the characteristics of “real virtuality”, which comprised the “space of flows” and “timeless time”. In the age of network information, the spatial concept related to the conventional sense and venue was disintegrated and reassembled into virtual functional networks, creating a unique spatial form in which the concept of time fell apart and information could interact. Castells regarded the “space of flows” that emerged in the information age as a social expression instead of a simple mirror reflection, that is, the space was the society itself and not a copy. The space in the network society organized the time, and events in the “space of flows” were no longer arranged consecutively in a linear chronological order, as a kind of undivided time was established. Building upon this basis, Castells put forward the concept of “timeless time”, which explained new issues related to the definition of flexible network working hour and the life cycle of network humanity. The network society has created new communication forms and power categories. Social operation in the information age relies on the powerful network environment and communication system, and Castells asserted that the control of information, speech and symbols was the direct control of power. As a result, communication in the information age extends power towards the boundaries of nations and ethnic groups, and the acquisition of the right of access to mass media impacts and even shatters the control that the ruling class has over the right to speak, which eventually leads to “equal rights” in communication. It is therefore evident that Castell’s thinking contains the exploration of interweaving elements such as technology, culture and power, which provides a unique perspective for the examination of the development of a network society. His argument concerning temporal and spatial concepts, communication power and media power has acquired a whole-new research context in the age of smart communication and is worth for further exploration and reflection.

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Fig. 1.13 Nicholas Negroponte, professor at MIT and columnist for WIRED magazine

5. Nicholas Negroponte (1943–) Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA and founder and director of the MIT Media Lab, Negroponte is hailed as a “digital prophet” by Western media due to his consistent advocation of the transition of social life with the help of digital technology. He is also one of the most influential masters in the fields of the Internet and communication technology (Fig. 1.13). In his 1995 book Being Digital,15 Negroponte looked at the status quo of the use of smart media across all sectors of society in dedicated chapters, which to a certain extent drafted the blueprint for the development of smart media. For example, he explained the reason that VR produced a strong sense of presence: binocular disparity and mentioned that the application of VR technology frequently used a helmet. He further identified the two most critical factors that affected the quality of the sense of reality, namely image quality and response time, which are two key directions of focus of contemporary VR technology. The common media-content distribution mechanism based on algorithm application of today has also appeared in Negroponte’s earlier writings. He claimed that newspapers based on an electronic medium could be communicated to the recipients in the bit form, and the interface agent would screen and classify the information like a digitalized relative who knew you well, before delivering the most suitable information to the readers in the end. This objective is achieved precisely by the AI technology that is currently attracting widespread attention. Negroponte wrote in the prologue of Being Digital that “the best way to predict future is to create it”. Actually, he simply revealed the future possibilities to the public, and some of which became the future in our hands.

15 Negroponte

(1995).

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Fig. 1.14 Paul Levinson, American media theorist and sci-fi writer

6. Paul Levinson (1947–) Levinson’s ideas drew intense attention and were widely accepted in the smart media environment. As a successor in media ecology, his viewpoints involved topics and the three stages of media evolution (toy—mirror—art), which comprised theories such as “humanising trend” and “remedial media” and are to a certain extent looked up to as the accepted criteria among smart media researchers. Levinson asserted that the evolution of media was continuous, dynamic and affected by all social figures and environment, which allowed media to have continuous and lasting effects. In the end, media would complete a humanized evolution following the expectations of the recipients and society.16 Meanwhile, as technology complements one another, the media needs of humans are also being satisfied, and eventually a consistent state is formed with the current complex social environment. As media continues to advance, the connection between the necessary technological operation of media and the necessary communication that arises from human activities will become increasingly tight, before they integrate as one (Fig. 1.14). Levinson once candidly remarked that media to a certain extent evolved based on human wishes and desire, which gave it human attributes and forms of human communication. Moreover, media evolution had gradually integrated different forms 16 Levinson

(2017).

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Fig. 1.15 Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of the American WIRED magazine

of media technology. As media evolved, all equipment slowly converged as one to work together to process information of all kinds and nature from the social environment, before eventually forming a unified and multi-dimensional information analysis and processing system.17 Levinson considered media development and evolution as driven by human needs, which is why media was naturally given human attributes and forms of human communication. As a technological optimist, Levinson believes human rationality and agency will complete the control of technology, and humanization is the future trend of media development. It is not only media that has entered a smart-communication age, but everything in social life will learn to understand human ideas and thinking, as the distance between man and machines continues to reduce until man and machines co-exist. As machines become smarter, will Levinson remain so optimistic about technology? We shall wait and see. 7. Kevin Kelly (1952–) The founding executive editor of WIRED magazine, Kelly is regarded as the spokesperson and observer of “network culture”, as well as a “maverick”. In terms of the content, his Out of Control, The Inevitable and What Technology Wants have already gone beyond the field of Internet technology and require interpretations from different angles. Similarly, he boldly offered his prediction for the scientific and technological development over the next three decades. He claimed that AI would be an inevitable technological means, and future social networks would be a dynamic, automatic and expandable network structure, not unlike a mirror world or “The Mesh”. Humanity would enter the next immersive age, in which everything would have a chip, and everything could become a computer and exist once again in the virtual world. As a result, our entire world would be digitized, ushering in a true world with the Internet of Everything (Fig. 1.15). In addition, Kelly reckons the value of face-to-face communication will not disappear—in fact, mechanical and technological development may even facilitate social interaction. He is positive about the prospects of virtual technology, which allows 17 Xu

(2017).

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people to see their friends on a screen and offers the corresponding sense of interaction that humanity greatly desires. He asserts that media environments based on VR and augmented reality (AR) will exist with the strongest social features among all the social media. Kelly’s remarks reveal analysis of and reflection on ideological and technological fields such as cybernetics, systems theory, information theory, AI and VR. It is precisely through such cautious reflection on and bold imagination of machines, systems, organisms, technology and society that Kelly guides us through his vision for the future, tests predictions of technological developments and foresees the future. During the process of media communication and technological development, in addition to the abovementioned thinkers and scientists of communication technology, the progress of research from different fields and schools of thought using different means and approaches has never stopped. For instance, represented by Bruno Latour (1947–), sociologists of scientific knowledge proposed the Actor–Network Theory in the 1980s. In the context of smart media communication, the theory regarded all human and non-human actors (such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI, machinealgorithm, VR and AR technologies) as equal and included them in an interactive network. The network nodes with equal, decentralized actors emphasized the value of non-human actors and the equally important status as the human actors. We are thus truly convinced by such viewpoint: It is precisely such spectacular ideas that prompt the historic leaps of media communication again and again. Lastly, let us return to the question at the beginning of the paper: Does technology determine societal changes? Our answer is: Technology does not entirely determine societal changes, but it does drive, influence and accelerate societal changes.

1.2 What Is Smart Media? 1.2.1 Understanding AI Against the background of smart-technology transformation, media forms are undergoing tremendous changes, and smart media and its new social practice are reshaping social forms and people’s perception and way of life. In this increasingly intense and dramatic smart-technology revolution, the technological waves have set off gigantic changes, and media faces opportunities and challenges in its development. It is common knowledge that the invention of the steam engine by James Watt marked the arrival of the steam age, and Thomas Edison’s light bulbs opened the door to the age of electricity. Meanwhile, the invention and application of atomic energy, computers, spatial technology and bioengineering essentially heralded a revolution of information-control technology, which prompted for the rapid development of new industries and tertiary industries, among them the swift popularization of computers created a brand-new information age. Currently, AI technology is bringing man and machines ever closer, and machines are slowly able to simulate human behaviour,

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perception and thinking. The combination of man and machines has reshaped the role of man in communication and created an immersive media environment with stronger interaction. As the results of digital revolution continue to benefit humanity, a new round of revolutionary waves triggered by smart technology has unveiled the age of “zero-hour smart media”. From a biological point of view, what separates man and animals is chiefly the intellectual abilities. The moment that man separated from animals is abstractly referred to as the “zero hour”, which was the first revolution of human intellectual abilities. Building on the natural intellectual abilities of man, AI would trigger the second revolution. Influenced by the waves of AI, media communication entered a new development stage known as the age of smart media communication. The objective of smart media studies is to create artificial systems that may simulate human intellectual abilities through the study of the patterns, so computers may complete tasks previously requiring human intelligence to accomplish. In other words, certain human intellectual actions are simulated through the application of computer software and hardware. The analysis and exploration of smart media hardware and software technology are the foundations of smart media studies. The smart media technologies that are currently widely researched and applied refer to media technologies featuring AI, which primarily include drones, the IoT, sensors, robot reporters, big data and cloud computing. AI is the foundation and the feature of smart media communication. Back in 1950, Alan Turing already proposed the concept “mechanical intelligence” in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and it was regarded as the harbinger of AI research.18 In fact, as a branch of computer science, the objective of early AI research was to explore and produce smart machines that responses intellectually in ways similar to human, which included robots, speech recognition, image recognition and natural-language processing. Today, despite the controversies that exist in the conceptual understanding and application of AI in the academic and business circles, it is undeniable the field has achieved marked progress as technology advances and human beings continue to explore the field. AI is not simply a key subject in scientific research, it is also a critical technology for the exploration of the world and has progressively entered people’s daily life. For example, drones have innovated the means of newsgathering of conventional media and are now regarded as a key tool in news reporting. First of all, drones offer unique angles of view and flexible shooting means. They capture wider images without compromising the resolution and strengthen the authenticity and objectivity of the news coverage, all the while bringing the audience powerful visual impacts and a stereoscopic audio–visual experience. Secondly, conventional aerial photography chiefly relies on helicopters, which come with high costs and risks, and the noise of helicopters also seriously interfere with the quality of the news coverage. In contrast, drones are light and portable, cost less and easy to operate and can transmit images in real time, thus greatly enhancing the efficiency of news coverage. Furthermore, the use of drones effectively reduces the safety hazards of the news industry and 18 Turing

(1950).

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Fig. 1.16 A monitor displaying a drone shot

plays a tremendous role in enhancing reporting efficiency and staff mobility. Classic examples of the application of drones in media coverage included unexpected news events such as the sinking of the Oriental Star, Tianjin explosions and Shenzhen landslide. It is worth noting that the introduction of drones in news reporting has subtly stretched the “borders” of news reporting, which leads to scrutinization of and reflection on the duty and function of news media in public events amid new technologies (Fig. 1.16). As technology continues to progress, drones are not only charged with the key tasks of the media industry, their contributions to the protection of public lives and safety cannot be left unrecognized. In the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, the SF Fangzhou unmanned aerial vehicles delivered up to 10 kg of epidemic-prevention materials covering up to 18 km to multiple locations, including Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital. Meanwhile, DJI provided the emergency solution for body-temperature measurement using drones, whereby a cotton bud was placed within the field of vision of a thermographic camera for temperature reference, and a forehead thermometer was used to calibrate the detected temperature of the drone before measuring the body temperature. The application of a series of drone technology effectively reduced interpersonal contact, including the police drones with cameras and speakers and the tethered drones with high-power zoom cameras with 24-hour flight time, thermal cameras and flashlights. In addition to ensuring the effective communication of information while reducing the infection rate, the technology further expanded the coverage of communication, contributing tremendously to the pandemic prevention and control, both at home and abroad. As a media technology that connects man and everything, the IoT may maximally connect everything in the world and push the “extension of man” to the extreme. In the age of the IoT, sensors, as the “antennae”, may reach all corners of society and are extensively applied to the construction of smart infrastructure. Above all else, sensors include terminals that are close to personal living, including smart homes, smart medical care and wearables. They are able to perceive and record data of human physical environments and behaviour, which they use to provide users with smarter services (Fig. 1.17).

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Fig. 1.17 The IoT smart-home system

As the basic vessels of the IoT, sensors play the role of physical terminals in AI application, and they include smart homes, smart medical care and wearables that are close to individuals. In addition to being able to perceive the needs and expectations of individual living, they may record data during actual operations, including the behaviour trajectory and physical indices of individuals. Sensor journalism refers to the use of sensors to collect data and information, which are analysed, reorganized and integrated into news coverage to complete the “story-telling process” of the news-production model. Meanwhile, to a certain extent, it expands and diversifies information sources, particularly when certain public news events take place, sensors may optimize the coverage effects through data processing and calculations. In an IoT society, a considerable number of companies continuously improve their related technologies through the research, design and application of sensor technology, which allow them to grasp user data. The control of sensor technology allows private tech companies to gradually advance towards key fields of news creation. The research and application of robot reporters symbolize a decentralized writing system that combines man and machines and has diverse subjects, which is slowly becoming the key form during the process of news production. Wordsmith of the Associated Press has produced over 1 billion articles and news reports in 2014, which equated to 2,000 articles per second on average. Meanwhile, the Blossom Bot of the New York Times predicts the content with promotional effects on social media and helps editors pick the most suitable articles and content accordingly. It may even independently create headings and extract copy and find corresponding images. In China, Xinhua News Agency’s “Kuai Bi Xiao Xin”, Tencent’s Dreamwriter or Toutiao.com’s AI sports-news reporter Zhang Xiaoming, who debuted during Rio 2016, are widely recognized by both the academic and business circles. Although robot reporters are still in the initial stage of news development, they show exceptionally promising ability in the in-depth excavation and systematic processing of social-life data (Fig. 1.18). Technologies such as big data and cloud computing are widely applied to information acquisition and distribution. Take China for example, helped by web crawlers, smart technology captures information across the Internet and easily acquires portals with massive amounts of traffic. Smart newsgathering platforms such as Toutiao.com have demonstrated remarkable communication effects that may not be overlooked, which put conventional news media to shame. Meanwhile, big data and cloud computing may understand the user needs and interests by analysing user clicks and

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Fig. 1.18 Wordsmith of the Associated Press (Source https://www.lexically.net/ wordsmith/)

touches, which may be traced in depth to understand the need and interest changes. Once the amount of user data obtained has reached a certain scale, a user pool may be created, which in addition to user grouping and model construction may help filter existing content platforms and connect to other resources. The distribution of diverse content will be enhanced to correspond to user stickiness, so data use, appreciation and monetization become possible. As a new, key driving force behind global scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, AI has reached a stage whereby it may enter industry and production to serve man. It will also become the new production forces when applied to fields such as self-driving, security, health and medicine, finance, retail, entertainment, AR and VR, which will inspire new industries, business formats and models, as it becomes one of the key drivers of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Human society is entering a whole-new era driven by AI at top speed. The empowerment brought about by new technology will not only further liberate human bodies temporally and spatially, the spirit and creativity will also be set free and given tangible forms that subtly transforms the communication ecology and living environment, profoundly reshaping our existence and social status.

1.2.2 Communication Becomes Intelligent Against the background of the revolution of intelligent technology, technology-driven media communication also follows the law of becoming intelligent. From the traditional media represented by radio and television to the emerging network media represented by social media, the intelligent process is constantly evolving. In recent years with the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, intelligence media have gradually ridden on the waves of the era of “Zero-point intelligent media”. Against this background, future images generated and developing relying

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on intelligent media technology has attracted more attention. Technology, communication, industry and so on have become the key to interpreting future images. On the definition of “intelligent media”, there is no common opinion at present. There are many angles to understand this concept. The two most common angles are technology and users. From the perspective of technology, many scholars believe that intelligent media consist of the media, artificial intelligence, information technology, data and so on. From the perspective of users, a common view is to regard intelligent media as comprehensive media meeting the needs of users. They can identify preferences of users intelligently, so as to provide users with superior experience in terms of service and information. On this basis, some domestic scholars have proposed the concept of “intelligent media”, namely “user-cantered”, pursuing satisfaction from users. The media industry, through the application of intelligent technology, makes the media system gradually similar to human perception and memory, thinking ability and learning ability, as well as self-adaptive ability and behavioural decision-making ability. The result of media intelligence is to make the definition of intelligent media. Intelligent media integrate user demands with intelligent media technology and regard intelligent media as the products of media intelligence. Intelligent media rely on media technologies characterized by artificial intelligence, mainly including sensors, virtual reality, IoT, big data, cloud computing, human–computer interaction and the like. The artificial intelligence features of these technologies are embodied by the simulation of human capabilities on the one hand, and the strengthening and expansion of human capabilities on the other hand. At the level of user experience, intelligent media can not only understand the user demands, but also meet user demands and, with deep learning ability, provide users with the most appropriate services. Intelligence is also affecting every aspect of radio and television media. In every process of radio and television news collection, integration and distribution, we can see the logics of intelligent technology. From central kitchen operation to robot writing, and then to intelligent and personalized push, from AR anchor of news programs to VR scene construction of entertainment programs, in all fields of the production, broadcasting and distribution of radio and television programs, an intelligent information ecosystem is being constructed. Now, domestic media have also seen the inevitability of intelligent radio and television. In the coverage of a series of major events including the “two sessions” in recent years, CCTV and many other media have tried the intelligent production and communication in the “central kitchen” mode, which has greatly improved the operation efficiency of the media. Sensor data acquisition, AI integration and writing, customized and personalized push, and so on, are all in-depth application of intelligent technology in radio and television media. Media intelligence is more than just writing press releases with intelligent software; it also means to use artificial intelligence technology to analyse user data and audience emotions, and even create an intelligent information ecosystem. For example, BBC uses face recognition technology to identify audience emotions. Only by recording the viewer’s facial expressions with a desktop camera,

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it is possible to analyse which contents have triggered the user’s emotion. It is also possible to explore cross-platform TV audience and analyse TV programs with AI technology. Besides, there are the development and application of chat robots and a series of innovations to enhance audience viscosity, which have been new attempts for radio and television to combine with intelligent technology. At present, intelligent technologies are not only widely used in traditional media such as radio and television, but also more integrated with online social media. As for the information production of intelligent social media, there are not only intelligent writing and content auditing robots which free people from content management, but also AI technology application in the processing and identification of video and image information. For example, Facebook is committed to developing related technologies of recognizing languages of characters in videos automatically generating subtitles and marking the characters according to the data like costumes, figure, and hairstyle, and so on to facilitate the user retrieval in the future. Furthermore, the information recognition and processing technologies, such as image vision technology, natural language processing (NLP) and artificial audio intelligence have greatly improved the information production efficiency of social media. And during information communication, precise and personalized information push based on the user profile technology is widely used, greatly enhancing the accuracy and validity of information communication. For example, Facebook assigns all such tasks as edition, recommendation and ranking of hot topics to machine algorithms based on the number of articles and posts on the topic, while Weibo, based on its hundreds of millions of users, hundreds of billions of relations and nearly a trillion contents, depicts a map of Chinese netizens. In terms of the information reception of the audience, chat robots with voice functions make social media more “considerate” and create a new mode of human– computer interaction. In addition, the retrieval and analysis of audience data can also be accomplished with intelligent technologies to help the backstage better understand and predict the psychological preferences, selecting intents and behavioural modes of the audience. Besides Quartz, a digital business news website, has launched a news push notification client in a man–machine dialogue mode. It can recommend personalized news to readers with a chatty tone. The interactive process is completely done by machine algorithms. According to relevant surveys, this kind of news pushed in chatty tone has indeed greatly improved the user viscosity and provided a brandnew possibility for both the news media and the social media. Of course, in social media, an important proposition based on interpersonal network relations, the demand for intelligence is increasing day by day. AI and big data will broaden the weakened ties network of users with various technologies, including algorithms. In whether recommendations to related contents for related users with various profiles and labels, or intelligent analysis and deep learning of user behaviour and other information with AI technology to assist interpersonal communication, we can see more and more intelligent social media catering to different social demands.

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However, from radio and TV to social media, although media communication is becoming more and more intelligent, the restraints it brings to people are gradually threatening our social intercourse and daily life. Will the cleverness of machines magnify human’s laziness? Will passively receiving push notification impair the initiative and creativity of the human brain? It is undeniable that the intelligent evolution of media communication is truly another leap in the process of communication. However, we also need to further think about the shadow behind it.

1.3 Enter the Era of Smart Media Communication Previously, we mainly take communication technology as the main thread and from the changes in media forms to the evolution of communication thoughts, it gradually cast their eyes on intelligent media communication with intelligent technology as core driving force. In general, the history of the exploration of artificial intelligence can be simply summarized as an era when noise and desire, frustration and disappointment alternate. As the most revolutionary technologies in the era of electronic communication, intelligent media and future image lead the development direction of future media. The “message” and social vision created by these core technologies are becoming clearer and clearer. Looking back on the history of changes in human communication technologies, after oral communication, written communication and printing communication, in the age of electronic communication, the intelligent media integrate the advantages of the existing language, text, visual images, and so on to innovatively create media features more suitable for the demands of human development, making McLuhan’s prediction of “infinite extension of human consciousness and senses, integration of virtuality and reality”. Known as the “fourth industrial revolution”, the revolution of intelligent media technology is pouring into the media and social life in an all-round way. Traditional media, in the tide of intelligence, are looking for cooperation with intelligent technology and their own transformation towards intelligent to build an intelligent information ecosystem in various fields such as production, broadcasting and distribution. New media, on the other hand, are taking the opportunity of intelligent communication, relying on their own network foundation and communication advantages, supported by core technologies, to achieve functional extension and structural breakthrough. In the era of intelligent media communication, not only has the media forms changed subversively, but also the communication system has undergone unprecedented changes. In the future, intelligent media will build a huge communication community, in which each individual will have the media attribute of personalized characteristics and become both a producer of media content and a participant in the communication process, as well as the owner of communication rights.

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Today, intelligent media and future image technologies are gradually popularized, and are more closely connected with people. If you’re careful enough, it is not difficult to find tracks of intelligent media communication everywhere in our life. The increasingly popular VR games, the code scanning operation we use every day, the “face recognition” we use when turning on our mobile phones and computers, and so on, intelligent media and future image are slowly penetrating people’s daily life. In the future, intelligent media and future image communication will be applied to various industrial systems, such as game, film and TV design, manufacturing, retail, medicine, education and art. Specifically speaking, application of intelligent media technologies to fields like design and manufacturing enables users to perform simulated assembly operations at lower cost, thus not only saving the expenditure, but also significantly improving the design efficiency. In the retail industry, the combination of future image with marketing can realize immersive shopping experiences, such as AR viewing of houses and cars, and AR fitting, which promotes the development of e-commerce. Intelligent media can also be applied to medical treatment, educational, arts and other industries. For example, surgical simulation, simulated treatment and remote treatment in the medical field, teaching and experiment simulation in the education field. Moreover, AR, VR and holography are already shining brilliantly on various stage of art. The development of future image is just in the ascendant. With the gradual maturity of the virtual reality technology, the promotion and application of various industries are also accelerating. As for academic research, in recent years domestic research on intelligent media mainly focuses on the following angles: First, caring intelligent media from the perspective of media convergence. Many scholars believe that the process of media convergence will not end with the integration of the subsystems of the media industry. On the contrary, the process of all media becoming digital and networked is only the beginning of media convergence to a deeper level. It symbolizes that the process of media convergence has reached a higher stage of development, namely the age of cross-border integration of media and intelligent communication driven by “Internet plus” and IoT technology system is coming. At that time, intelligent media and human intelligence will develop in harmony, which will bring subversive changes to the media industry, and then bring profound impact on the whole society. Secondly, discussing the essence and current situation of media intelligence. The research from this angle pays more attention to the analysis of intelligent media from the theoretical perspective, which mainly starts from two dimensions, studying theory orientation and analysing the hierarchy, to classify research topics of intelligent media into four categories, respectively, the social-constructionist macro study adopting the paradigms of political economy, the techno-centrist macro study adopting the research paradigms of new media, the techno-centrist macro study adopting cognitive psychology paradigms and social-constructionist micro study adopting the paradigms of scientific anthropology. At last they predicted that the social constructionist micro study adopting the paradigms of scientific anthropology would become the mainstream of future research.

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Thirdly, looking into the future development trend of intelligent media and warning about the risks and cybersecurity of artificial intelligence, further thinking is on how intelligent technology has reshaped the boundary between the real and the virtual world, and how to examine the relationship between people’s subjective world and the external objective world. Thus, these questions have already been the key matters for us to jointly consider for academic research and the practical application in the new stage of the development of intelligent media. In general, with the vigorous development of new technologies such as big data, AI, IoT and cloud technology, the existing communication forms and patterns are showing such characteristics as everything is media-related, human–machine integration and self-evolution. The age of intelligent media has taken shape, and next, I’ll take you to more detailed and in-depth discussions on relevant phenomena and specific cases of the age of intelligent media, so as to gradually build a relatively complete idea about intelligent media.

Chapter 2

Differences in Smart Media Communication

Artificial intelligence is neither human life, but also has a certain life dimension. When it intervenes in human communication activities, all communication relationships, communication situations and communication patterns need to be re-examined.

2.1 New Features of Smart Media Communication What are the new features of smart media communication compared to previous human communication activities? What new types of communication and relationships has it created?

2.1.1 All-Embracing Media, All-Inclusive Connection This is an age of extreme abundance of material products. Today, let’s talk about things in intelligent media communication. Our basic view is that everything can be media in the age of intelligence, and media make it possible for everything to be connected to each other and further connected to humans. The abundance of mediated objects in digital and intelligent societies shows three new trends. Firstly, there is an increasing abundance of mediated objects in human society. Surrounding every individual in society, from mobile phones to computers, from headphones to smart bracelets, people are already living in a parcel of mediated objects. Secondly, media objects are becoming more intelligent and human-like. Whether it’s having a conversation with Siri, the smart assistant on an iPhone, or immersing ourselves in algorithmic recommendations on social media, the communication tools we interact with seem to have been given a life of their own. Thirdly, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 P. Duan et al., Communication of Smart Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9464-9_2

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the medium is changing more and more frequently. A smartphone can be obsolete in two years, and it has become a matter of course that it will be replaced. There can be stationery, electronics, clothing, decorations, furniture and so on. Even in the simplest scenes, we’re surrounded by dozens of things. Which ones of them are media? They include PC, smartphones, tablets, wearable electronics, as well as the attached mouse, keyboard, audio electronics, headphones and so on. They have become things around us in our daily life. Usually we can take media out from other things as a separate category, because they are mainly used for storing, processing and transmitting information, which is very different from things that are made for matter and energy. Very often we may ignore the existence of media as things, and only care about the information they convey. At this point, the existence of the medium as an “object” is easily overlooked, and the communicator is only concerned with the content of the message it conveys, ignoring the materiality that the channel itself may have. The medium is no different from any other object, but it has its own characteristics. Taking Heidegger’s theory as a starting point, they are both “utensils” and “signs” at the same time. According to Heidegger, the word “sign” designates all sorts of things: not only signs of all sorts, but “being the sign of something” can itself be formalized as a universal mode of relation. The sign is, first and foremost, also a utensil. Its peculiar appliance nature lies in display.1 But now things have changed. There are two complementary processes going on. That is, media are becoming things, and everything is becoming media. On one hand, media are increasingly reflected as things. They are not just invisible carriers of symbols but are also things or material systems with independent entities. Just like what we just observed, people today have all kinds of things that are media. On the other hand, many things start to have the functions of information storage and transmission. Take sneakers as an example. When embedded with a chip, they can record the number of steps we take and another sports information. They have become things with functions of media. This basis gives us the possibility of building the Internet of things. Internet of things (IoT) is a network, based on information carriers like the Internet and traditional telecommunications network, that realizes the interconnection between all individually addressable ordinary physical objects. Simply put, if a thing has an online ID card and an independent network address, and can be connected to the Internet and telecommunications network, then it is connected to the Internet of things.2 The International Telecommunication Union Annual Report 2005 was also themed the Internet of things. The report pointed out that the Internet in the future would be anytime, anyplace, anyone and anything. Every moment, everywhere, everybody and everything would be constituent elements of this large network, the Internet of the future. The realization of the IoT is dependent on the development of various technologies.

1 Heidegger 2 Sun

(1927/1996). et al. (2010).

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One important technology is radio frequency identification (RFID). Chips are embedded in items to create electronic labels and then information about the items can be read wirelessly. In fact, this technology is already widely used. For example, the second-generation ID card we all use has a relevant chip embedded in it and can be read wirelessly. It also involves intelligent embedding technology and nanotechnology. Some items are too small, so nanotechnology is required to achieve radio frequency identification. One example is the artificial pacemaker which needs a nanoscale chip for radio frequency identification. Some scenes we see in science fiction movies, like embedding chips in the human body to realize seamless connection of various scenes of life, can be achieved this way. Another important technology is the sensor. It converts motions and changes of things into an electric current, then generates number 1 or 0, and thus, digitizes the changes in things. The sensor network is the basic network for the Internet of everything. To connect a thing into a network, it needs to have an independent address and a protocol for the exchange of information. Through a unique coding system, we can build an intelligent address system for everything. This way, information can go unobstructed. Finally, all this is realized in the overall development of big data and cloud computing. What applications of the IoT are there? How does it influence media and communication? IoT can be used in various industries and on various occasions. To social individuals, one change is the improvement of wearable devices and the realization of intelligent home. Our glasses, headphones, watches, clothing and carry-on items in the future will all be interconnected and connected to people. Media may not be static external systems in the future but could be the dynamic and mobile environment around each one of us that follows us wherever we go. Our family environment will change as well. In fact, it’s already changing. Many people have installed intelligent locks, smart lambs, vacuum cleaning robots and other intelligent tools at home. Many large Internet companies today are developing a complete set of intelligent home system with intelligent home gateway and voice assistant as the focus. In the near future, every important thing in our family could be embedded with a chip and connected to the intelligent home system which can be used in many other ways as well. For example, the number of unmanned convenience stores in retail business may keep growing. The logistics industry will be an important part of the IoT application. Cars will form the Internet of vehicles. Urban transportation will be more intelligent, and the smart city will become a reality. Intelligent manufacturing, intelligent agriculture, intelligent medical care, intelligent education, intelligent fire protection and intelligent public services will all be popularized. To human communication, the fundamental influence of IoT is that everything can be media and they could also become media terminals. One example is that there will be more screens in a family. In addition to TVs, computers and mobile devices, our refrigerators, microwave-ovens, routers and intelligent gateways may also have screens of their own. They could become new windows for news information and entertainment. The generalization of media will be something common. We would like to talk about three critical processes that could happen. Firstly, voice will become a critical

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entry, hub and link.3 In recent years, major Internet companies are all developing voice assistant systems and digital speaker. Why is that? Because it’s very likely that the intelligent home will be controlled by voice. We don’t select something by clicking or sliding anything with our fingers, but through voice interaction. Driverless vehicles may also be operated by voice. This brings both challenges and opportunities to traditional media. For example, the traditional broadcasting industry may lose its market in home space and vehicle space, but they can develop voice products and integrate them into the new intelligent communication system. Secondly, we’re going into a multi-screen, or screenless or even ubiquitous-screen era. We usually call TV screen a big screen, and the screen of a phone or tablet a small screen. Screens at home will not only increase in number but will be interconnected in the future. There will be multiple screens, and content can be shared across different screens. With the development of holographic projection technology, will we enter an age of no screens? In a screenless age, a screen can occur anytime around us. Therefore, “screenless” means the possibility of ubiquitous screens. This will bring a new era of video. Thirdly, everything can be media, and media are not just media. Features of things can be integrated to provide a full range of services. We’ve deeply learned that the boundary between advertising and sales is disappearing. Influencer marketing that we often talk about today not only gives product information and promotes the brand, but also provides direct access and channels for purchases. Another example is that many new government media have integrated various functions like government approval and public services into media applications. What other possibilities will there be in the future? Let’s wait and see. To summarize, today we started with things around us, and emphasized that media were becoming things, and everything could be media. IoT is now already being realized. It will influence all walks of life in various ways. To media communication, everything is media, media is everything, and everything is connected. There are more possibilities waiting ahead.

2.1.2 Human–Machine Interaction, Human–Machine Integration Today we have a word “cyborg”. It is the integration of human and computer. We will in this section talk about the relations between human and computer. With the popularity of computers, interactions between human and computer have increased. The IOS system used by iPhones provides a voice assistant for users, SIRI. Many users have had conversations with SIRI. They jokingly call it “flirting with SIRI”. A question that SIRI has been asked many times is “Am I pretty?” or “Am I cute?” And we’ll get some interesting answers. In fact, such conversations are 3 Hu

(2018).

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personified imitative interactions. It is combined with voice recognition and information search to provide services for us. Our interactions with computers are much commoner and much more complicated. Actually, we realize computers’ functions through continuous human–computer interactions. Here are some examples. When you click a button in a Word document to give an operation order, some part of the document changes. When you enter keywords in search engines, you get a long list of results and you can choose any one of them. When you press your fingerprint on your phone, you complete a payment. When you delete a photo in your phone, it tells you it’s still in the Recycle Bin and will be completely deleted one month later. It is the same when you scan a QR code, and so on. We call this two-way control process in human–computer interaction. The conversation with SIRI is just a personified instance of human–computer interaction. We draw this process into a diagram. A computer consists of hardware and software. To users, we first interact with a computer on the interface and then realize its functionality in an app. Whether on the interface or in an app, we give a series of orders and get a range of feedback. This is a cybernetic process. Cybernetic in English is also the source of the word “cyborg”. In the development of computers and artificial intelligence, many scientists have made important contributions. I think two of them made the greatest contributions. One is the British mathematician Alan Mathison Turing, and the other one is the American mathematician Norbert Wiener. Turing proposed the common language of computing and the Turing machine, which contributed to the invention of computers. At the same time, he asked a thoughtprovoking question, “Can machine think?” He came up with the famous Turing test to test if the intelligence of a machine is unidentifiable by humans. Therefore, people often refer to Turing as the father of computers and the father of artificial intelligence. But the computer in Turing’s mind was a one-time computer. In other words, human intelligence first designs artificial intelligence and then artificial intelligence accomplishes its task. This means that artificial intelligence is always subordinative. Wiener’s Cybernetics provided a very important idea, that is, the process of feedback and adjustment. In the process of Wiener’s Cybernetics, a computer or other machine does not complete its task by one try but adjusts its behaviour after getting feedback to achieve the goal. Isn’t this process of the Cybernetics just like the general process of action of humans and other organisms? Then the behaviour of machines is getting increasingly similar to that of organisms’ neural networks. Therefore, we can understand the human–computer interaction as a cybernetic process. Today, humans and computers can not only interact with each other but have also shown a tendency to integrate. We can see the three phenomena: the embodiment, universalization and personification of computers (Fig. 2.1). By embodiment, we mean computers can fit the user’s body increasingly well. The so-called wearable devices are a typical example. The smartphone can fit our palms better, not to mention smart glasses, smart bracelets and smart headphones. In the future, our clothes may get smart as well. Some companies are exploring smart head rings. In the near future, these devices may even be in our bodies.

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Fig. 2.1 Nobert Wiener (1894–1964)

By universalization, we mean that computers are now ubiquitous in our surroundings. Just ten years ago, computers were still tools for specific information and entertainment activities in special scenarios, but today we have computers or electronic items using a computer system everywhere around us. By personification, we mean a computer is treated as a subject similar to humans. For example, we may give our voice assistant a name and imagine that it is a living thing. We make AI machines into the shape of a human body or vital signs. One example is the welcome robot in the lobby of many hotels. It can lead us up the elevator to our room or bring us items. In addition to its ability to interact with us, it has been specially given eyes to look like a human. In this case, human and computer integrate into one. We call it cyborg—A human whose physiological functions are performed with the assistance from mechanical or electronic devices or performed independently by such devices is called cyborg.4 Let’s take a look at an extreme example. In 2019, the film “Alita: Battle Angel” was shown worldwide. It depicts an imaginary world where the human body is modified by mechanical or electronic devices. You won’t die as long as your brain is alive. Any other parts of your body can be replaced by machinery. There are many more such similar imaginations in various sci-fi movies and science fictions. People may say it’s a fantasy after all, but every storm is very weak at the very beginning. Similar situations have sprouted. In fact, many people already have mechanical devices in their bodies. Electronic pacemaker is an example, and prosthesis is another. They are already the first generation of cyborg. When it comes to AI and sci-fi movies, some movies show AI robots’ resistance to humans or even their control of man, which is very terrifying. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla in America, once warned 4 Haraway

(2006).

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that we should not develop AI without control, or someday we would get controlled by robots. But interestingly, the solution he proposed was to expand the control of human intelligence through a brain–computer interface. In other words, he believed we shouldn’t develop independent robots, but we could develop cyborg. We could connect a human brain and a computer, connecting human intelligence and AI, to ensure humans’ right of control. Then here comes a question. Is cyborg still the original human? If something like that in “Alita: Battle Angel” happens, most parts of our bodies are replaced by mechanical devices, are we still humans? Ship of Theseus There’s an old philosophical story that can help us think about this. Philosophers once proposed a thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus. Theseus wanted to go from A to B by sailing a boat. It would take him 365 days. His boat happened to be made of 365 parts. Theseus prepared a spare part for each of the 365 parts on his boat. At the end of his first day of the voyage, he replaced a certain part of his boat with one of the spare parts. The next day he replaced another part. This kept going on. When Theseus arrived at his destination 365 days later, all the parts of the boat had been replaced. The funniest thing was that Theseus used the parts taken off the original boat and built a second boat next to it. The 365 parts of the second boat were the original 365 parts of the boat that he set off with. When the two boats were there side by side, which one of them was the original boat? If all parts of a human body were replaced by mechanical devices, would cyborg still be the same human?

2.1.3 Public as the Participant and Public as the Media In this section we’re going to talk about participation. With the popularity of intelligent terminals and the popularization of social media, we’ve entered an age of different voices. I’ve heard people say that everyone is the we-media, and everyone has a microphone. In other words, each of us has become a communicator. In fact, we really are communicators in our daily life. When you’re talking with somebody, both are the communicator and the receiver of information at the same time. So, everyone being a communicator is just something normal. Information communicators and receivers or audience started to be separated following the birth of the mass media in modern times. In the sixteenth century, hand-written copies of tabloids appeared in Venice, Italy. Later with the maturation of modern printing, modern journalism, represented by newspapers, came into being. This gave birth to the first batch of professional workers whose work was communication, journalists and editors as we know. Modern mass media give communicators three features, being specialized, professional and organizational. “Specialized” means that the communicator has his own technical skills, knows all the techniques of news interviewing and writing, and is able to use relevant technical equipment. “Professional” means that communicators start to have a profession. There’re people making a living out of it. “Organizational” means these professionals usually belong to an organization and complete mass communication activities together.

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The concept corresponding to “communicators” is audience. It means the sum of information receivers. The rise of mass communication formed a relation of binary opposition; the relation between communicators and the audience. Many communication theories we are familiar with are based on the premise that this relation does exist. Examples include: Two-Step Flow Theory and Spiral of Silence Theory. The development of the Internet has changed that. Mass communication and interpersonal communication begin to merge. For example, you can use WeChat to chat with your family and friends, but you can also use it to read news or express your opinion. Another example is that professional media not only have their own websites, but also open an account on social media to interact with subscribers. Therefore, the concept “audience” is getting less applicable. If you go to an Internet company for a job interview and accidentally mention the word “audience”, you may not get hired because you don’t have Internet thinking. The word widely used by Internet companies is “users”. Compared with audience, users reveal two important changes. We think the first change is that the use of information has changed from “passive” to “active”. The second change is that people do not use information in the same way, but in their individual different ways. This is the truth about human communication. Even in the TV age, people watching TV has always been an active and personalized process. But this is not the most fundamental change. The Internet not only breaks the boundary between mass communication and interpersonal communication, and that between the communicator and the audience, but also breaks the boundary between information production and consumption. The journalist used to write news and the editor used to take care of the layout. They were the producers of newspapers. The vast majority of readers read the news and they were the consumers of newspapers. Today, different users post articles on Weibo, browse posts, repost them or comment on them. We can hardly tell who the producer is and who is the consumer. Therefore, Browns created a new word “prosumer” to describe this situation, a combination of “producer” and “consumer”.5 This is very common on social media. One example is Zhihu that we’re familiar with. The main body of the information on the website is made up of questions and their answers. These questions are asked by users and also answered by users. If such content was removed, Zhihu would be nothing but a technical empty shell. Various Internet services familiar to us are mostly based on social networks and dependent on contributions made by prosumers. The same is true of Internet companies with the most developed technology and best algorithms. Jinri Toutiao is a news service app with the highest installation rate in the country. Then where does it get its contents? It had a slogan which goes “We don’t produce news. We’re just the carrier of news.” Relying on crawlers, it collects and carries news all over the Internet. Today, it has become one of the most popular platforms. Large numbers of companies and users have created an account on it and offer to provide various kinds of content. By October 2017, the number of accounts on Jinri Toutiao had exceeded 1.1 million. 5 Bruns

(2009).

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That’s where the vast amount of content on the Internet comes. We can divide sources of content on the Internet into three categories. One is the content produced by professional workers. We call it PGC. The Paper is an example. The majority of the content products there are produced by professional journalists. The second category is the content produced by users, known as UGC. When we post something, write a journal, add a movie entry or publish a book review on Douban, we are producing contents. The combination of the two generates PUGC, that is, quasi-professional user produced content. For example, on the bilibili website, an uploader may be an ordinary user at first, but the video content produced by him is very popular. He gradually becomes a head content producer who is somewhat professional and earns money from that. He may even set up a studio to make a living. This is the shift from UGC to PUGC. Major Internet companies today are all vigorously cultivating this PUGC production model. The development of AI technology will further advance this situation. With intelligent machines, technologies and platforms as the media, the threshold for professional production will be lowered. More users will take part in content production. When these creative ideas come together, a pattern of crowd-creativity is formed. This participatory creation not only allows ordinary users to imitate professionals but may also inspire greater creativity and change our information and entertainment consumption. Let me give a few examples. One is fan fiction. Eileen Chang once said there were three regrets in her life. The first regret is that fish has too many fishbones. The second is that Chinese flowering crab-apple is not fragrant. The third is that the novel “Dream of the Red Mansions” was not completed by the original author. That’s why many fan writers like to write its sequels. It is very common for people to create something based on cultural and recreational works they like. Take “Harry Potter” as an example. Whether in the English world or the Chinese world, many fan works have derived from it. They are of various types, forms and styles, even forming a text universe. Another example is virtual idols. This is a phenomenon of ACG (Animation, Comics, and Games) culture. Some companies have created some virtual idols, such as Hatsune Miku, Yuezheng Ling and Luo Tianyi. They perfectly cater to the creative pleasures of their fans. People can write songs, compose music and let their favourite virtual idol sing for them. This was not possible in the mass media era. The third example is online games. Where does the fun of online games come from? Some people think it’s from the clever battle design, grand scenes, sophisticated weapons and the good visual effects. But we can imagine an extreme situation. If there is a perfectly designed online game, but there’s only one player, will there be still fun? If might be less enjoyable than an old stand-alone version of RPG game. So, the greatest charm of online games is the gathering of players. Thus, the greatest creativity of the Internet comes from all its users. Intelligent media communication lies in the use of new tools and technologies to stimulate this creativity. Then we need to consider, since we create the contents and make all the contributions together, shouldn’t all the results be shared by us all? We should try

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to rebuild the shared public culture. That’s the significance of everyone being media and universal participation.

2.2 New Space and Time in Smart Media Communication 2.2.1 Time Disorder and Fragmentation Confucius said that the passage of time is just like the flow of water, which goes on day and night. It is a description of the linear passage of time. In this section let’s talk about time in the age of intelligent media communication. Usually we think time is an objective existence, and that it moves forward in its unidirectional linear fashion. There is the past, the present and the future. Its passage is independent of man’s will. In other words, it should be going at a constant speed, but in this digital age today, we kind of feel time is passing at an accelerating speed. There is a song called “How time flies!” We feel we don’t have enough time every day and may even suffer from time urgency. For easy understanding, we can explain it this way. The objective and real time is moving at a constant speed, but our practice regarding time, that is, the way we mark, measure, use and feel time has changed, thus, making us feel it is moving faster. This is related to our current political and economic situation and the popularization of the Internet. What changes has the Internet brought to human practice regarding time? One key change is that it makes our benchmark for marking and measuring time more accurate. In ancient times, people knew the time through astronomical observations and natural means. They invented timing tools like sundial, hourglass and burning incense. Later we had the mechanical clock, quartz clock, electronic clock and atomic clock. And then we had an international standard time and a globally coordinated time-to-time comparison system. Today, the whole world shares one-time benchmark with an error within one second. With the advent of the Internet and satellites, and the development of automation and intelligence technology, global time coordination, timekeeping and time-telling have already formed a sophisticated system. We all have obtained a benchmark time. Twenty years ago, many of us wore a mechanical watch or an electronic watch for timekeeping. They were independent timers. To ensure our time was the same as others, we often needed to set the watch or find a benchmark like the radio or television to synchronize time. Twenty years later, many people use their mobile phones as the timing tool. Some people wear a smart watch connected to their mobile phone. We find we don’t need to set the watch anymore, because it can automatically obtain the standard time from the server. In this age of intelligent media communication, we are marking and measuring time in a more digitized, automatic and precise way. It allows us to synchronize time. But is our communication always synchronous? Not always. For example, when we watch a TV show on a video site, there may be comments on the screen. Different

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users can even respond to each other. It looks as if they were communicating at the same time, but actually, they were not. This situation of synchronous time benchmark but asynchronous communication time brings more complexity. In fact, the original time is disordered. Now another question arises: how we use and feel time? From here, we would like to talk about three phenomena: extension of working time, scientification of time management and fragmentation of time used. The first phenomenon is the extension of working time. In early 2019, some Internet company wanted its staff to follow a 996-working system, working from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. and 6 days a week. It sparked a heated debate. Some people say it’s a modern version of the story of landowner mimicking a cock crowing at midnight to force laborers to work longer. Indeed, by extending working hours, workers can create greater value and capitalists can make higher profits. But in modern society, they are not doing it directly like the wealthy landlord in the past. They extend and increase working time using a more systematic way. Flexible employment is an example. It allows workers to arrange their own working hours or even their working place, as long as they complete their tasks on time. It looks like something nice, but isn’t it possible that our 24 h a day could all be the time spent on working? Another example is the various kinds of chicken soup for the soul which are all communicating the philosophy that only by working hard can we succeed. This makes the waste of time something to be guilty of. Besides, our media are also involved in this system. We all use instant messaging software like WeChat. They have brought us convenience and created new social networks. At the same time, they have also become new working tools. We can use them for business negotiation, file transfer, team cooperation and information communication, and many of these activities are done outside the usual working hours, so, our working time is extended without being realized by us and thus, becoming something, we’re willing to do. The second phenomenon is the scientification of time management. As our pressure from the working time is increasing, and our working time gets extended to every moment, we want to manage time in a more detailed and scientific way. We have all heard a word “deadline”. It’s the time by which we must complete a task. When given a deadline, many people feel exhausted, hence their increased procrastination. Actually, if there was no pressure from a task that must be completed, there would be no procrastination. When we feel pressure, we want to do something irrelevant to relieve the pressure, thus, causing a delay. Because of the delay, we feel guilty and greater pressure. This creates a cycle of anxiety. To overcome procrastination, people have found some scientific time management methods. The pomodoro technique is an example. Every 30 min is regarded as a working period. People use this detailed method to enhance self-discipline and overcome procrastination. Various kinds of software are also developed to help us become more machine-like workers. Mobile phones become an important tool for time management. For example, the calendar software on your phone, through active input by the user or automatically obtaining information from other software, can put together all your must-do tasks and provide a summary of your deadlines. With the development of artificial intelligence in the

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future, will we all have an intelligent secretary or intelligent assistant with us that keeps reminding us of the tasks we have not finished that day? The third phenomenon is the fragmentation of time used. As our time is managed in an increasingly scientific and detailed way, our time periods are more finely divided. That’s the fragmented time we often mention. In fact, this kind of time use is not a product of modern times. Ouyang Xiu wrote in his “Gui Tian Record” that he mostly thought about the outline of his articles on the horse, in the bed or on the toilet, that is, on the road, before bed or in the bathroom. Isn’t that the fragmented time as we call it today? But people today are not meditating or creating something. Instead, they may watch an episode of a TV series on the subway, browse videos on Tik Tok before bed or play a game in the bathroom. That’s when we find how important a mobile phone is. It often takes away our so-called fragmented time. Mobile phones and fragmented time are really good match for each other. It is mobile and easy-to-carry, and it keeps providing us with new information and entertainment activities through the Internet. For developers of mobile apps, fragmented time is something they all fight for. And short single-use time, simple interaction design and fast updates are the basic rules followed when mobile phone apps are designed. Our life pace is also related to how we handle time and media (Fig. 2.2). Back to the question we asked at the beginning. This is why we feel time is passing at an accelerating speed. Time is marked and measured in an increasingly accurate way. Time is synchronized all around the globe, but it’s not the case for people’s communication. Capitalists want workers to work longer, but workers don’t want to. The working time is extended to 24 h and there’re many deadlines to meet in their work. On one hand, we want to manage time scientifically, but on the other hand, we get stuck with all the fragmented time. Everyone is getting busier and busier. That’s why we feel time is going faster. Fig. 2.2 Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), a write of China’s Northern Song Dynasty (960–1279)

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However, German philosopher Byung-Chul Han6 believes that it’s not that the time is passing faster, but that time is getting disordered and unhealthy. He proposed a concept of “meditation on life” to deal with it. Simply put, in this intelligent media age, we should try to put down our mobile phone, and give our brain some time for relaxation and meditation.

2.2.2 Space Mobility and Contextualization Wild swans were used to deliver message from afar in the past. Space is one of the biggest barriers to human communication. With the development of modern media, the Internet and intelligent media communication today, the spatial barrier seems to have been eliminated. Is it really the case? Let’s talk about space, mainly focusing on the mobility and contextualization of space. In modern society, the development of two systems plays a significant role in the elimination of spatial distance. One is the transportation system. For example, trains, cars, ships and airplanes allow us to travel far and wide in a short time. Material products of humans and humans themselves can move far away very quickly. The other is the communication system. The telegraph, phones, mass media, mobile communications and the Internet enable people to deliver all kinds of information in real time and bring people closer to each other. That’s why Marshall McLuhan believed that the globe had been reduced to a village. He called it global village. Interestingly, whether in English or in Chinese, transportation and communication used to be one word. The word “communication” in English and the characters “Jiao Tong” in Chinese both have two meanings. Today, people’s pursuit of faster speed is incapable of further increase. The speed per hour of a high-speed rail and a maglev train can reach 250 and 600 km, respectively, while that of a supersonic aircraft can reach thousands of or even tens of thousands of kilometres. Information is also communicated at a faster speed. The 5G network transmission speed reaches more than 1 GB per second. It seems that space is no longer a big barrier. “Annihilate Space with Time” suggested by Karl Marx seems to have become a reality. People in this space now enjoy unprecedented mobility. It seems to have brought unprecedented benefits to people. We can fly high into the sky and dive deep into the sea. We can go to somewhere we’ve never been to see the exotic beauty and fairyland there and we can also communicate with people all over the world. But we need to know that this mobility is not evenly distributed. Some people enjoy higher mobility than others, and sometimes mobility is just an illusion. Firstly, mobility is different in the social structure. Whether in terms of social class, ethnic groups or gender, the advantaged always enjoy higher mobility than the disadvantaged. Simply put, people with a higher income are more likely to move. 6 Han

(2017).

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Secondly, mobility is based on media. The ancients said that a scholar could know what was going on in the world without going outdoors. That was realized through the media of books and words. Today with modern media, TV has opened a window to the outside world. In the age of the Internet, we can even travel around the world while sitting at home. In 2019, Notre Dame de Paris in France unfortunately caught fire. There was a Chinese netizen saying on the Internet, “What a great pity! That’s the place I’ve been to so many times when playing Assassin’s Creed”. Playing games can also give us mobility. In 2019, China National Tourism Administration launched a national all-for-one tourism holographic information service system. Intelligent technologies like VR can also become the media for our mobility. Thirdly, mobility does not necessarily bring people closer to each other. Martin Heidegger said that humans travelled the longest distance in the shortest time, and they left the biggest distance behind and brought everything to themselves through the shortest distance, but this hurried elimination of distance did not create any closeness, because closeness did not lie in short distance. Media allow us to communicate across boundaries, but there can be new barriers in this communication. For example, when two people in love live in two different cities, they can communicate via video calls on their phone, but can they look into each other’s eyes with love? No, they can’t. The camera is on the top edge of the screen. For most mobile phones or computers, only when you look at the camera, can people on the other side see you are looking at them. But in that case, you won’t be able to see their eyes. So??? when people are having a video call, they can hardly look into each other’s eyes. Even if two people did meet in person in the same space, what would the situation be like? People often say that the furthest distance in the world is not life and death, but the fact that you’re having fun with your mobile phone while I am sitting right in front of you. We have talked about the flow of time and the mobility of humans. Now let’s talk about the contextualization of space. Space is very complicated. We can divide it into four dimensions: geographical space, social space, media space and imaginary space. For example, you can consider where you’re right now. Geographical space means the point where the latitude and longitude you are at meet and the position of a certain height from the sea level. Sometimes we give such space names, like in which room, building, city, province and country and on which continent you are, and so on. Social space means the spatial situation based on social relations that is formed after human activities enter the geographic space, including the people around you, their relations with you, their distance from you, whether your locations follow any social rules, whether the spatial situation is moving or changing and so on. Media space means the space connected by humans beyond the current geographical space and social space through the use of media. For example, when you are watching this video, the media connect the space you are in and the space I am in here. We often call the Internet space virtual space. Imaginary space is another space that forms in our mind. It can come from the geographical space, social space and media space we are in or have nothing to do

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with them at all. We may be in a shabby room, on the crowded subway or in a remote village, but our imagination could gallop in the vast universe. Well, contextualization is formed based on the multiple spaces. Simply put, based on the geographical space and social space, everyone is in a context. Media provide corresponding information, entertainment and services according to this context and embed them into this context so as to change it. The realization of contextualization is dependent on a number of new technologies and tools, including mobile devices, positioning system, sensors, social media and big data technology. If I was a mobile social app service provider and you were a user, your mobile phone gives me all the permissions to access your information. Based on the satellite positioning of your mobile phone, I get to know that you have left your residence and appeared in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, which is a shopping area. Through your smart bracelet, I know you are now moving. At the same time, your post on social media tells me you are shopping with two friends. Then I can make use of the local data system and recommend to you the nearest cafe well known on the Internet so that you and your friends could go and take a drink there. This realizes information push done according to the context. Miraculous as it may sound, the principle is simple. But it’s not so easy to do that. The way to know the user’s context is still in a relatively rough stage. Usually we can only identify two factors. One is the geographic information point of the mobile phone user which we can use to determine the user’s location on the map. The other is what context the mobile phone user is in, at home, working, on the move or in the public. To know the user in a more detailed way, we need to obtain more data. Contextualization requires a precise user profile. A typical process is like this. Firstly, obtain the user’s basic characteristics, and the time and space of the user. Secondly, get to know the user’s relations and behaviour in this context. Thirdly, understand the needs, emotions and habits of the user. Of them, the first one can be obtained automatically. But the second and third will require the user’s active entry of information. For example, we can get to know such information through the user’s keyword searches. Only in this way can we provide accurate context-based media products. That’s the space we’ve talked about. In intelligent media communication, the mobility of space can be enhanced. But can it bring us closer to each other? The contextualization of space is receiving increasingly more attention, but can it actually be realized? Answers to these questions are still unknown to us and are worth for further exploration and discussion.

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2.3 Smart Media Communication Myths 2.3.1 Smart Versus Human In the last first sections, we already introduced to you new features of intelligent media communication and new manifestations of intelligent media in time and space. But at the same time, we will also doubt that while artificial intelligence brings us infinite hope and new imagination for future communication life, will it bring trouble to mankind? Will it be more intelligent than human beings? Will reason overcome emotion? Where is the boundary between the virtual and the real? What ethical design and artificial morality do we need? In this section, will discuss such questions. In the section, we will first introduce you the relationship between intelligence and men. Let’s first see what happened to Hitchbot about hitchhiking. The Story of Hitchbot Hitchbot is a robot from Ontario, Canada. It is developed by David Harris Smith and Frauke Zeller, professors of communications. Hitchbot is 1 m tall and weighs 6.8 kg, looking like a beer cooler, and wearing beautiful big leather boots. When it needs a lift, it will put down the support under its buttocks, take a serious seat at the roadside, and extend its hand with yellow fluorescent glove, raising its thumb and waving it up and down slightly just like a hitchhiker. Its hand won’t ache, and it won’t need to rest, unless the battery runs out. Of course, it really unlikely for Hitchbot to run out of electricity because its torso is covered with solar panels. As long as the sun is shining, there’s no problem for it to wave its hand. If some kind-hearted person stops to take him, Hitchbot would tell him he is heading for San Francisco, asking the driver to take him as far as possible. Of course, I will be more grateful if it can stop by to visit the Times Square, the Millennium Park in Illinois, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Hitchbot cannot move on its own, so the driver needs to carry it into the car and fasten its seat belt. It will remind you to charge it with the cigarette lighter or a charging socket in the car. Like all considerate hitchhikers, Hitchbot will start chatting with you when it gets into the car. It can interact with people thanks to the speech recognition and voice processing software, which allows it to listen and talk for a while. As for the topics, to put it bluntly, they are copied from Wikipedia in batches. For example, how it loves the band Kraftwerk. If it happens to be your interested topic, just chat with it. In addition to quite intelligent software, Hitchbot is also equipped with a GPS camera. Its head is a liquid crystal screen, which can display text information and make some facial expressions. On the Internet, it can have text conversations with many people at the same time. Hitchbot is equipped with a recording device which can keep a complete itinerary and record interesting things that happened to it and dribs and drabs during the journey. It will take photos for everyone who has helped it and every place it has visited. It, and of course the human team behind it, always stay online on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Anyone can follow the robot’s journey and share what it sees synchronously. In the summer of 2014, Hitchbot hitchhiked from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Victoria, British Columbia of Canada. In just 26 days, it took a total of 19 rides and covered over 10,000 kilometres. Hitchbot’s adventures continued in 2015. It visited German cities, such as Munich, Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg. Hitchbot also spent a wonderful holiday in the Netherlands, during which he visited the most famous art and cultural sites in Twente. In 2015, the team created a new Hitchbot for the US adventure. Hitchbot’s journey began in Salem, Massachusetts on July 17. It hoped to arrive in San Francisco, California.

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Fig. 2.3 The Hitchbot

Within the two weeks of Hitchbot’s journey, it successfully travelled to 5 cities with the help of friendly strangers, Boston, Salem, Gloucester, Marblehead and New York. However, Hitchbot’s journey was ended suddenly in Philadelphia on August 1, 2015 because it was maliciously damaged by people. Still, Hitchbot left his last words on its official project website, full of emotion: My love for human beings will not decline.

Seeing this situation, we cannot help thinking whether artificial intelligence is redemption or destruction for men? Debate on this issue, in fact, began as early as the 1950s, that is at the beginning of the development of artificial intelligence (Fig. 2.3). The camp headed by John McCarthy, proposer of the concept of artificial intelligence, believed that the nature of artificial intelligence is the ability to actively simulate human beings, and is to ultimately serve human beings. The camp represented by Douglas Carl Engelbart, however, believed firmly that computers should be used to strengthen and expand human capabilities instead of replacing or imitating these capabilities. Human beings exist to make artificial intelligence. Until now, with the continuous progress of technology, although artificial intelligence has comprehensively entered our daily life and work, the confusion, uncertainty and even panic of human beings to artificial intelligence has not decreased at all. Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Human Institute, University of Oxford elaborated in his book “Superintelligence” published in 2014 on the catastrophic consequences after the outbreak of intelligence.7 Once the superintelligence appears, it will thoroughly remove all the obstacles in the way, for it to unboundedly obtain decisive strategic advantages, especially human beings. Even if artificial intelligence can act according to human intentions, unexpected abnormal target modes may also bring about severe disasters. However, Ray Kurzweil, an American inventor and futurologist, firmly believed that artificial intelligence can bring various benefits to the mankind and serve the mankind. In his book “The Singularity Is Near”,8 he said that when science and technology have developed to a certain extent, great progress may take place in a very short period of time. And when this turning point comes, it will change the 7 Bostrom

(2014). (2005).

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whole social pattern, for example, artificial intelligence that can evolve itself. This is Kurzweil’s “Singularity Theory”. It is called singularity because it is a critical point. As we get closer to this critical point, it will have greater influence on everything of mankind until it becomes a consensus of mankind. In fact, artificial intelligence at this stage and human beings have their own advantages and disadvantages. Machines are more rational and analytical, having encyclopaedic information reserves and high computing ability, so the more rational the thinking process is, for example, logic, operation, memory, and so on, the more computers can surpass human beings; while human beings are leading in professional knowledge, judgment, intuition, empathy, moral principles and creation. In other words, machines are still far from being able to compete with human beings in terms of artistic creation and emotional expression, and so on. So, do you agree with this view? Do you think artificial intelligence a threat to the future of mankind or something that can bring benefits to mankind?

2.3.2 Reason Versus Emotion In this section, we will explore another confusion about intelligent media communication. That is, under the entrapment of artificial intelligence, can reason replace emotion? Because the communication and exchanges between human beings are full of emotion, in the process of human–computer interaction, it is natural for people to expect machines to have emotional abilities. Then we will have another question. Can machines be given the same abilities to observe, understand and generate various emotional characteristics like people? As for this question, Rosalind Picard, sponsor of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, published her book “Affective Computing”, over 20 years ago, which told the whole world that computers can understand human emotions, and through emotional technology design, computers could finally communicate emotionally like human beings. Just as Picard said in the prologue of “Affective Computing” that the role of emotions in decision-making, perception and creativity has long been found in neuroscience and psychology.9 However, it is rarely known in computational science. Few people know that emotions contribute to rational and intelligent behaviours; most people believe that emotions of computers are something empty and boring, like a layer of icing on the surface of a cake, which is just used to make the cake look more pleasing, but without real significance. So, can artificial intelligence have emotions? First, let’s see how Affective—the emotion measurement technology company founded by Professor Picard, works. Affectiva Affectiva, a company grew out of MIT Media Lab, is a pioneer in the field of affective artificial intelligence. Affectiva’s patented affective artificial intelligence technology utilizes machining learning, deep learning, computer vision and speech science. Affectiva has created 9 Picard

(1997).

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the world’s largest emotional data repository, which includes the analytical data of over 7 million faces in 87 countries, and over 50 billion emotion recognition points. 25% of Fortune Global 500 companies apply Affectiva’s technology to detect the interaction between consumers and advertisements, videos and TV programs. The company has also provided more than 1,400 brands worldwide with technical support for consumer sentiment. In 2018, Affectiva released AUTMOTIVE AI, the emotion monitoring software, which is used to monitor the mental states of drivers. When a driver has such states as drowsiness, excessive anxiety, or irritability, the automatic driving system will take over the car in time, to ensure driving safety. AUTOMTIVE AI is a multi-mode onboard AI sensing solution of Affectiva, while Emotion AI is the foundation of AUTOMOTIVE AI. Emotion AI has accepted the training on more than 7 million faces to identify specific human emotions. In September 2018, Affectiva declared cooperation with Nuance, the world’s largest Automatic Speech Recognition solution provider. Affectiva Automotive AI will be integrated with Nuance’s Dragon Drive, the car voice assistant. The new integrated solution will be an interactive car assistant capable of recognizing the complicated cognitive and emotional states of the drivers and the passengers according to their facial expressions and voices, and make corresponding adjustments, realizing integration of gesture interaction technology with voice interaction technology. Affectiva also plans to integrate facial expression recognition with speech interaction technology to make cars smarter and smarter and more understanding.

However, cases of Affectiva show that such artificial intelligence is still in the stage of weak artificial intelligence, namely building emotions by technical means. This technology is to simulate human brain, and the emotions it produces are also simulative. In other words, the current artificial intelligence technology is only capable of emotion recognition, but not having emotions. Let’s see another example. The Socialbot Cozmo Cozmo, a robot from Anki based in San Francisco, is a palm-sized, and very cute little guy. Cozmo sells for USD180. It has been officially put on sale since October 16, 2016. Cozmo is a crystallization of artificial intelligence technology. Although it looks like Wall-E, the classical robot, it’s definitely smarter than ordinary pets. It is just like a real voice assistant. Unlike previous racing toys, Cozmo has more advanced software and intelligence. First of all, Anki used a programming language for affective robots, which means that Cozmo can show its emotions like human beings, such as happiness, bottleneck, depression, or anger. If you accidentally drop Cozmo on the ground, its big blue eyes will turn into an angry expression, a and it will raise its arms high to show its dissatisfaction. Of course, if you play games with Cozmo, its eyes will squint to show you that it’s happy. But be careful, if you beat Cozmo during a game, it will also be angry. Cozmo’s programming language has provided it with dozens of subtle emotional changes, allowing us to see a more personified side of Cozmo, which is also one of the earliest features shown on Cozmo. Meanwhile, Cozmo’s vivid and interesting facial expression changes are created by Carlos Baena, a designer hired by Anki who once worked at Pixar Animation Studios. And it is he who has made Cozmo more personified. Moreover, Cozmo will come to you on his own initiative to express its current emotions. In fact, Anki is not building something big that might be brought to us through artificial intelligence like Apple, Google and other giants of science and technology. On the contrary, it is only an idealized choice, and Anki also wants to tell us through Cozmo that artificial intelligence can not only bring convenience to our life, but also bring happiness to us. Cozmo will tell us that how men can coexist with technologies and how we can achieve a balance between productivity and communication in a unique way.

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However, for Anki, although Cozmo is an AI robot with facial recognition and emotion engine, since it’s too small and cute, the audience can only be limited to children. So if Cozmo wants to be an indispensable part of human daily life, it is required to explore more potential of it in the future so that it can complete more tasks that are still unknown today, and provide Cozmo with more practical functions, not just playing games with children. It can even bring more convenience for our life management. In this regard, Anki hopes to provide Cozmo with functions similar to action recognition of Microsoft Kinect and explore more potential of it through computer vision development. Interactivity of technology may become a key to the breakthrough, because interactivity is increasingly becoming a default state for media technology, from traditional media to social media, which is also true for artificial intelligence. The more it is in line with the interactivity of interpersonal communication, the better interactive experience it can provide to users. One day in the future, perhaps, such interactivity will not only include emotions, but provide artificial intelligence with humanity and personality. At that time, perhaps, artificial intelligence can achieve a great balance between reason and emotion.

2.3.3 Virtual Versus Real Jaron Lanier, pioneer of virtual reality and technology pioneer of the Silicon Valley, and scientist at Microsoft Research, in his 2010 book “You are not a Gadget” expressed such concern that with the progress of science and technology, humans would gradually deviate from the human track, and become more and more machinelike.10 Facing the increasingly developing artificial intelligence technology, human beings begin to constantly ask such questions: What is reality? What constitute a real human being? This is also the focus of this section. We will take a look at the relationship between the virtual and the real. As for this question, let’s start with a review of McLuhan, the famous media theorist of the Toronto School in the twentieth century. In his 1964 book “Understanding Media”, he said that media are the extensions of man, and media and men are relatively independent. Different media act on different senses. Written media affect vision, making people’s perception take on a linear structure. Audio–visual media affect touch, making people’s perception take on a three-dimensional structure. If we extend the logical view of extensions of man to artificial intelligence, what will happen? Some scholars have concluded through observation that virtual reality evolution fuelled by artificial intelligence can be divided into three stages. The first stage is the primary stage, which is the virtual experience stage based on physical existence. In this stage, people can enter or exit from the virtual world by wearable devices, which, as a boundary, distinctly divided people’s life into two situations: the real life 10 Lanier

(2010).

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and the virtual life. The virtual life cannot exist independently on its own without physical support. The virtual life is only a small part of the real life. The second stage is the intermediate stage, in which a physical body is fully mechanized except the brain. A familiar example in reality is the famous British scientist Hawking, who suffered from systemic muscular disability, but he could control computers and mechanical and electronic devices by thinking. Under certain technical conditions, human brains can exist independently from other biological organs of human bodies. With external nutrition supply, they can live in an artificial environment and maintain thinking ability like test-tube babies. In this way, the trunk and limbs of a human body will no longer be limited to what they are like today. Instead, they can be manufactured into various forms according to different requirements to meet the demands of different external devices. In this stage, the virtualized existence of men is embodied by the blending of the virtual and the real. Many ways of existence impossible in the past can be directly experienced by breaking away from most of the physical limitations or experience indirectly by loading direct experience data of others. Virtual experience, as the experience gained via the devices in no need of physical experience, is the stage characteristic of virtual existence, but it is not the terminal. Since brains have not been replaced by simulation, there are still limitations for experience of human existence. The third stage is the advanced stage, the virtualized existence stage. The material and technical basis for this stage is complete replacement of human brain with intelligent mechanical and electronic brain or some other biological brain, and the mobility, transferability and replicability of thoughts and consciousness. Only when thoughts, consciousness, feelings and emotions can be transferred 100% certifiably, and no longer attached to particular objects, such as brains, or other computerized and intelligent devices, namely when the carriers of thoughts and consciousness can be replaced, can human beings really enter the stage of virtual existence. In the future, perhaps, we can feel the scenes thousands of miles away with cutting-edge intelligent sensing technologies. Facing such a situation, we may as well think will machines be more than extensions of the human body but part of the body? Let’s imagine two scenarios. First, a day of a man with a complete human body. From 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. in the real world, after washing and breakfast, he loads the experience of bathing in a volcano hot spring, enjoying Maori massage, mud bath, and having delicious local food in Rotorua, New Zealand. From 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., by virtual devices, he has a friendship match with Billy Tilden, the famous American tennis players of the 1920s, and, of course, ends in a fiasco. However, he gets the exercise 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., which is for health monitoring. He checks the status of each part of his own container and gets the latest information about container styles and functions to maintenance the operation of the container. From 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., he does a job in the virtual world that affects the real world, debugging the automatic management program of an iron mine in the real world. The ironstone produced by this mine is mostly used for the supply of virtual existence containers. Thanks to the technologies in the virtual world, such as automation, online collaboration and fuzzy intelligent analysis, his job is done soon. During the lunch break from 12 p.m. to 13 p.m., he has food in the real world. And from 13 p.m. to 18 p.m., he continues doing

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the job that affects the real world in the virtual world including container repair. From 18 p.m. to 22 p.m., he shares the latest information and entertainment forms in the virtual world with friends, and then has a magic combat on the fantasy continent. He engages in a star war in a simulated special force on the Sagittarius of the Milky Way system with other online users. When taking a jump, he accidentally sprains his ankle and exits from the virtual world in advance, and then goes to bed. Secondly, an intelligent human being with all parts of the body except the brain replaced by machines. He gets up during 7 a.m. to 8 a.m., relaxing his brain with classical music in the database. No need to listen to music, he just needs to stimulate the brain by electronic means to generate biochemical reactions, so as to get a sense of relaxation after listening to music directly. From 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., since most parts of his body have been replaced, physical exercise is no longer necessary. But he still needs to get enough nutrition for the brain by biological means, inspect and maintain the mechanical and electronic parts of the container, and ensure networking authority, which are all necessary to maintain the operation of life. From 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., he gets access to the real estate management network and starts working. The significance of real estate in the virtual world lies in the cost for container placement and the management of container security. There is no need for ordinary houses in the past to exist. To enjoy the experience of living in luxury houses, you can just download the experience data at any time instead of getting real ones. From 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., he does a job in the virtual world that affects the real world, transacting formalities for a container storage site in the real world after bidding, mainly involving supervising the cleaning of the site and provision of basic facilities and land levelling, and so on. During the lunch break from 12 p.m. to 13 p.m., he continues to relax his brain. This time he has the afternoon tea on the Kilimanjaro Mountains with the temperature set at 24 degrees Celsius in summer. At a meeting from 13 p.m. to 18 p.m., he is engaged in security information exchange of the rectification of some management measures, monitoring measures, and early warning and prevention of recent geographical disasters in the container storage area under his jurisdiction. From 18:00 p.m. to 22:00 p.m., he contacts with his biological family members, recalling the time they spent together before his body was replaced, asking about the health of their respective brains, and communicating on the economic status for maintaining the existence of the brains and the mechanical containers. So, do you think under such entrapment of artificial intelligence, will there be such scenes as virtuality-as-reality?

2.3.4 Technology Evolution Versus Morality In September 2016, one of Google’s self-driving Lexus SUVs was involved in a car accident in California, USA. Such traffic accidents have put self-driving vehicles into the focus of the world’s attention. With its advanced technology and a great appeal with a sense of future, self-driving vehicles have never lacked attention. However, the

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topic brought by this accident is different. Upon an accident, how should we investigate and affix the responsibility? Or more precisely, who’s to blame? Everyone is a natural moral subject, so it’s easy to investigate the responsibility clearly. But when a self-driving vehicle causes an accident, is an autonomous machine, or the maker of this machine, or the designer of it to blame? So, should we send the machine to the recycling plant, or send its designer or manufacturer to jail? This is the main subject of today’s course. In this section, we will lead you to think about another confusion about intelligent media communication, namely, the conflict between technological evolution and ethics. Ex Machina The movie tells a story about man and artificial intelligence. It involves the love and sex between a man, who is the hero, and an AI robot, who is the heroine. A programmer working for a well-known search engine company named Caleb Smith is lucky to win a prize from his boss Nathan. He is invited to a villa in the mountains to spend a holiday with his boss. In the isolated villa, Nathan receives the employee kindly. In fact, there is another purpose for him to invite Caleb here. That is to assist him to complete a test of the AI robot he has developed. Nathan, the genius, has developed Ava, an AI robot with independent thinking ability. In order to confirm whether she has the ability of independent thinking, he hopes Caleb to administer the Turing test to Avail seems that at the first sight Caleb is attracted by robot who has a beautiful human-like face. In their subsequent communication, it seems that he is not facing a cold machine, but a poor girl who has been imprisoned innocently. Ava finally succeeds in deceiving Caleb’s sympathy, and then kills Nathan and escapes from the Villa. Alex Garland, director and editor of this movie, said that he believed that the Si-Fi scenes in this movie would soon appear in our reality. The AI robot in the movie has the same appearance as an ordinary woman, and she also has certain thinking ability and subjective consciousness. In this movie, she exists for the validation of the Turing test, attracting the hero to indulge in their relationship, and the ending is an accident.

In addition to the “Ex Machina”, many recent film and TV works are discussing this issue. The movie “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”, for instance, tells such a story: A.I. Artificial Intelligence In the middle of the 21st century, due to the greenhouse effect, Arctic and Antarctic glaciers are melting, and many cities on the earth are flooded. At this time, the science and technology of man have been highly developed. AI robots, are just one of the technological means invented by man to deal with the harsh natural environment. Besides, the robot manufacturing technology has been highly developed. Advanced robots have not only realistic human appearance, but also the ability to feel their own existence. Monica’s son Martin is seriously ill, on the verge of death. In order to relieve the pain, she adopted a robot child called David, whose mission is to love her. Martin returns home after recovering from his illness. A series of things have put David out of formant finally makes him abandoned by Monica. After escaping the cruel pursuit of the machine slaughterhouse, David, with the help of Joe, a lover robot, begins to look for his own value of existence, desiring to become a real child and turn to Monica.

This movie presents a moral proposition: if a robot can truly love a human, then in turn, what responsibility should that human assume for that robot. So, we can’t help thinking about such questions: Are the emotions of AI real? Does the love and

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sex between an AI robot and a human seem to be uncomfortable? This is just the conflict between AI and ethics. In fact, as early as 2004, experts and scholars have already started the construction of robot ethics with humans as the subject of responsibility. In 2004, the first Robotics was held in Italy, which was the debut of the word Roboethics. Robin Murphy and David Woods proposed the “Three Laws of Robots” in 2009. The First Law, a human shall not deploy a robot without the human–robot work system meeting the highest legal and professional standards of safety and ethics. The Second Law, a robot must respond to humans in an appropriate approach in terms of the roles of humans. The Third Law, a robot must be endowed with sufficient autonomy to protect its own existence as long as such protection provides smooth transfer of control to agents satisfying the First and Second Laws. In this way, a robot-centric perspective is then changed to a perspective of human–robot interaction. Of course, perhaps at the current level of science and technology, the most reliable norms are the norms for humans. The code of ethics for robotics engineers proposed by Brandon Ingram et al. in 2010 sets up a code of ethics for the responsibilities of robot engineers. This code includes the following content: (1) in terms of behavioural robotics engineer should recognize that he may be held responsible for the actions and uses of all creations in which he has a part; (2) he should consider and respect peoples’ physical wellbeing and rights; (3) he should not knowingly misinform, and, if misinformation spreads, do his best to correct it; (4) he should respect and follow local, national and international laws in any applicable area; (5) he should recognize and disclose any conflict of interest; (6) he should accept and offer constructive criticism; (7) he should help and assist colleagues in their professional development and in following this code. In 2016, the UNESCO released a preliminary draft of the robot ethics report: The Preliminary Draft Report on Robot Ethics. This draft not only discussed robot ethics issues in society, medical care, health, military affairs, surveillance and working, but also discussed the manufacturing of ethical machines by applying the ethics for machines. In 2016 and 2017, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the IEEE, promulgated the first of the Ethically Aligned Design and second editions. At present, relevant departments of China are also actively working on standards for AI. There is no doubt that while discussing ethical problems brought by AI, people are also thinking about how to solve these ethical problems. Although there is still a way to go, the construction of ethical norms recognized by both humans and robots is an inevitable trend in the future.

2.4 New Prospects of Smart Media Communication In this section we will take you to look into a new prospect of intelligent media communication. Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethical Information and Director of Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University summarizes the four

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self-cognitive revolutions of human beings in his book “The Fourth Revolution”.11 The first revolution took place in 1543 when Nicolaus Copernicus let the world realize that man was not arranged at the centre of the universe as favoured by the creator with his work “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres”, thus forcing human beings to rethink their position and role. “On the Origin of Species”, published in 1859 brought about the second revolution. In his book, Darwin refuted the view that man was regarded as the Lord of Creation, claiming that all living things have come from a common ancestor and are evolving under natural selection. The third revolution came from Freud’s Psychoanalytic works, which broke the false impression that man has the ability of conscious self-reflection and self-control into pieces. The fourth revolution is the present age. With the great convergence of the online and the offline media, and the great development of artificial intelligence, man has entered a superhistorical era when man finally ushers in the Turing Revolution, the fourth revolution of self-cognition, following the Copernican Revolution, the Darwin Revolution and the Neuroscience Revolution. The whole world is turning into an information circle, in which everyone lives in the Clouds, and man is no longer the undisputed masters of the information circle. There is no doubt that the Turing Revolution has played the prelude of the reconstruction of the whole human society by artificial intelligence. The aforementioned Turing is Alan Turing, the father of artificial intelligence. Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine runs with internally stored programs, which has broken the old concept of that time. Storage of programs in the computer memory means that programs can run automatically. This breakthrough has opened a door of artificial intelligence in the field of computers. In memory of the outstanding contribution of Alan Turing, the Hollywood reproduced the story of Turing’s breaking the code of the German army and brought it to the big screen, which is the movie “The Imitation Game”. In July 2019, the Bank of England announced the cover figure of the latest 50-pound note to be Alan Turing, the wizard of mathematics and the father of artificial intelligence. At the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, John McCarthy formally proposed the term of artificial intelligence, and this field of research was officially established. As promoted by this conference, the field of artificial intelligence ushered in its first spring. With the birth of the robot Sahakyan the chatting robot ELIZA, and so on, man has high expectations of artificial intelligence. However, their expectation then was divorced from the actual technology, spoiled people’s fantasies, and artificial intelligence was neglected. Until the early 1980s, with the development of the fifth generation of computer technology, artificial intelligence rose again. However, after only less than ten years, it fell into the shade again. However, with the continuous progress of technology, the AI winter is over. Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of “Wired” observed that artificial intelligence has developed rapidly in recent years on the three premises of the acquisition of big data, the optimization of neural network algorithm, and the cheapness of parallel computation. Facing the tide of artificial intelligence in the fourth revolution, we, as communication scholars, can’t help wondering what

11 Florida

(2014).

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changes will happen to human communication? Before answering this question, let’s first take a look at what communication is. In his book “Communication Power”, Manuel Castells, the world-renowned sociologist, said that communication, in brief, means the sharing of meanings among people achieved by the exchange of information.12 Similarly, James Carey, a famous American communication scholar, proposed that through language and other symbolic forms, communication becomes the basic atmosphere of human existent relations as early as several decades ago.13 In order to better understand the abovementioned views, let’s watch a short titled “A Brief History of Communication”. According to this short video and the interpretation of communication by James Carey and Manuel Castells, we know that the essence of communication is to complete information exchange through language and constantly changing symbolic forms of media information. When such a way of information exchange evolves from traditional media to social media, and then to artificial intelligence, what changes will happen in human communication? Will artificial intelligence explore the laws of interpersonal communication through artificial neural network technology so as to copy human communication modes to man–machine communication mechanically or will human communication in the future entirely rely on social robots? These are all issues worth pondering.

12 Castells 13 Carey

(2009). (1988).

Chapter 3

VR—The Vanguard of Smart Media Communication

In the current application of intelligent technology, the virtual reality (VR) technology, which directly brings sensory experiences to users, can be described as a daring vanguard. It directly appeals to people’s visual channel and unfolds a life-like but unusual picture of communication.

3.1 Concept, Features and Historical Origin of VR What is VR? How were its technical principles and application products invented step by step? What are its features and possibilities in its communication?

3.1.1 Concept of VR VR, or virtual reality, was put forward by Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Company in the USA in the 1980s. It mainly refers to a computer network technology that creates a life-like virtual space through digital media. To be specific, it is to take computer technology as the core to generate a life-like virtual environment (VE) incorporating vision, hearing and touching. Users interact and influence with objects in the virtual environment by means of devices, thus generating immersive feelings and experiences. The year 2016 is often called the first year of VR, because it was in this year that HTC, Oculus, Sony and other enterprises successively sold VR head displays, that VR-related consumer products appeared and that VR began to gradually enter the public vision.

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3.1.2 Historical Origin of VR Although VR has only attracted public attention in recent years, it has a long history of development, which can be roughly divided into four stages. In a chronical way, the following content will show many key time nodes, products and figures in VR’s history, from the concept to the product germination, and then to its present popularity across the globe. 1. The Theoretical Embryonic Stage (1838–1935) Charles Wheatstone, a famous British physicist in the nineteenth century, discovered and determined the Principle of Stereo Graph in 1838. This principle clarifies the realization mechanism of the binocular vision, which guided him to construct an equipment composed of prisms and mirrors, so that people can observe threedimensional effects from a pair of two-dimensional images. This principle is actually the working principle of some simple VR products such as Google Cardboard. This stage can also be considered as VR’s fuzzy fantasy stage. In 1935, novelist Stanley G. Weinbaum published the short science fiction novel Pygmalion’s Spectacles. This pair of “Pygmalion’s Spectacles” is considered to be the earliest prototype of VR glasses in the world. After wearing it, one can not only go deep into the world depicted in the glasses, but also hear, smell and touch the people and items inside. What is most amazing is that the wearer in the novel can even interact with the world in the pictures and affect the historical process of the world in the glasses. This is also the world’s earliest detailed description of a VR immersion experience. 2. Experimental and Argumentative Stage (1957–1968) Morton Heilig, who won the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974, is a genuine senior geek besides his job in the film industry. In 1957, he invented an immersive experience machine “Sensorama”, which can produce somatosensory interactions such as wind, smell and vibration when watching movies. However, Sensorama’s design concept is too avant-garde; the lack of market and application scenarios caused it to be neglected for a long time. Then, Ivan Sutherland, Turing Prize winner, father of computer graphics and founder of human–computer interaction “Interface”, defined the concept known as “the ultimate display” in 1965. This concept stipulates that the content provided by a certain “ultimate display” can make users unable to distinguish the differences from the real world. It mainly includes the following three points: (1) The head-mounted display shows 3D visual and sound effects and provide tactile feedback; (2) The computer provides images and ensures real-time performance; (3) Users can interact with objects in the virtual world in the same way as they do with reality. These rules half a century ago are still in use today, setting the direction for the development of VR technology. After the establishment of the three principles of VR, Ivan Sutherland and his students made the first head-mounted display connected to a computer in 1968.

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Limited by the manufacturing procedures and technology of that year, the weight and volume of this head-mounted blindfold were not suitable for light and convenient wearing. It needed to be hung and fixed by a steel cable from the ceiling, hence the name “Sword of Damocles”. Like ENIAC, the world’s first computer, Damocles Sword is more of an experimental forward-looking scientific and technological product, limited by the processing power of the computers at that time and the extremely limited image processing performance. Ivan Sutherland’s “Ultimate Display” can only display very primitive rooms and objects composed of lines. However, its birth brought a satisfactory end to the theoretical and practical stage of VR technology. From then on, the VR technology entered the pilot application stage. 3. Pilot Application Stage (1985–1995) After undergoing the attempt that VR technology did not make any achievements in the entertainment industry in the Heilig era, Ivan Sutherland successfully introduced the concept of “ultimate display” to the top of the US military and scientific and technological circles. In 1985, NASA launched the VR device “VIVED VR” program to build an immersive spacecraft driving simulation training centre for NASA, so as to enhance astronauts’ telepresence and enable them to work better in space. This device is no different from a VR equipment that has entered the civil market today in terms of naming, design and experience. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, artist, philosopher and founder of VR, coined a phrase “Virtual Reality” in 1987 to confirm its name. From this year on, this research field finally has had a formal name. The company founded by Lanier has also become the first company in history to manufacture and sell VR helmets. SEGA, a Japanese console manufacturer, introduced a device called SEGA VR in 1993. It has a VR helmet modelling that meets today’s composition standards. The device has head tracking, stereo sound effects and an LCD display. Like a small sparrow complete with all five organs, its birth has established a reference standard for subsequent VR devices. However, due to the processing performance of the game devices at that time, there were only four matching game software, and the game experience was not ideal. Coupled with the high selling price, it was soon buried in the endless flow of history. The Virtual Boy designed by Gunpei Yokoi is another attempt by the gaming industry to achieve VR. Virtual Boy is arguably one of Nintendo’s most revolutionary products. Gunpei Yokoi tried to change the development direction of the game with a breakthrough idea, which was not accepted by the market due to the avant-garde concept and the limitation of technical power at that time. 4. Large-Scale Popularization Stage (1990s–present) In 1998, Sony launched the PC Glasstron head-mounted liquid crystal display to the market. Although this is not a real VR device, it can generate a 30-in. screen equivalent to SVGA (800 × 600) resolution. Besides, it is equipped with stereo audio. The transparency of the display screen can also be adjusted so that users can

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see the surrounding environment while watching the display. This display technology still appears in various sci-fi movies and TV shows. In 2012, Oculus VR company, in order to bring the low-latency immersion experience to the public, introduced a head-mounted display designed for video games. This device was believed to change the way people play games in the future. It has two eyepieces, each with a resolution of 640 × 800. It gives a resolution of 1280 × 800 after the visions of both eyes are combined. The gyroscope-controlled viewing angle is a major feature of this game device, thus greatly improving the immersion in the game. On March 26, 2014, the Company was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. In 2014, Google launched Google Cardboard, a pair of cheap VR glasses. Google Cardboard is a foldable smartphone head-mounted display composed of lenses, magnets, velcro and rubber bands to provide a VR experience. Smartphones installed with 3D display software are suitable for matching with this device. The lens will allow users to perceive the left and the right image, respectively, to create a 3D image. The wearable device was designed by Google, but there is no official manufacturer or supplier. Instead, Google provides free parts lists, schematics and assembly instructions on its website to encourage ordinary people to assemble themselves with easily available parts. As a result, it became the best-selling VR product in history, with more than five million units sold in total. It can be said that VR devices after VIVED VR basically did not break away from the “ultimate display” construction principle established in the era of Ivan Sutherland. Thanks to the rapid development of large-scale integrated circuits and liquid crystal display technology in the past 20 years, the price of VR products represented by head-mounted VR devices has dropped significantly, and their display performance and experience effect have been witnessing revolutionary improvement. Despite some technical problems to be improved, most people in the industry agree with the conjecture that VR technology will become the next generation of cyber access equipment after TVs, computers and mobile phones. At present, the head-mounted displays are the most common VR devices. Headmounted VR devices are the main form of VR. Through immersive helmets or VR glasses, users can directly place themselves in the virtual world. This experience is the most intuitive and thorough; it will also be the development trend of VR.

3.1.3 Features of VR The emergence of VR has brought users a brand-new experience. Then, what is unique about VR? Generally speaking, it mainly includes the following three points, namely, three-dimensional, immersive and interactive. VR can achieve three-dimensional visual effects, but it is still different from the three-dimensional perception of 3D movies. Since the viewing angle range of human eyes is about 120° under a fixed viewing angle, the best range for watching 3D movies is usually 120°. The most intuitive difference between VR and 3D movies is that

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VR realizes 720-degree panoramic full coverage of three-dimensional immersion. That is, on the basis of 360° horizontal, the range of 360° vertical can be increased concurrently, to see the panoramic view of “going to heaven and entering earth”. In addition, with the cooperation of VR helmet gyroscope sensor, when the head of the wearer rotates, the picture seen by the wearer is a scene that switches synchronously with the rotation of the head. It gives rise to a feeling of “immersion” integrated into the virtual scene. Immersion means to be immersed inside, where one cannot distinguish between virtual and real feelings. The more immersive a VR device is, the more it can make the experiencer feel the sense of reality of the virtual scene. Ideally, when the experience reaches complete immersion, it is impossible to distinguish whether it is in the virtual or in the real world. Complete immersion includes common vision and hearing, as well as five senses such as touch, smell and taste, all of which witness the realization of interaction between the wearer and the virtual scene. Interactivity is manifested in the two-way interaction between the wearer and VR scenes through man–machine interface, control equipment, and the like. At present, the interaction modes of VR devices are relatively simple. The common interaction modes mainly include gesture control, head tracking, tactile feedback, among others. After wearing VR gloves, one can see one’s hands in the virtual scene. VR scenes change according to the movement of the head’s angle of view. Wearing VR protective equipment, one can realize tactile feedback and others in the virtual scene. For example, when you play shooting games, you can achieve real somatosensory feelings such as live firing and being hit. In the future, with the gradual perfection of motion capture, eye tracking and various sensor technologies, it is expected to gradually introduce an increasing amount of consumer products. In recent years, VR has become an important part of the country’s promotion of industrial transformation and information consumption. The VR industry is featured by great market potentials. With the blessing of 5G technology featuring a high transmission rate, excellent stability and massive connections, it will be easier to realize various creative ideas about VR. With the in-depth popularization of 5G technology and the continuous upgrading of cloud computing, natural interaction and other technologies, 5G + VR will become an important breakthrough in the VR industry. 5G Cloud VR will empower many vertical industries such as manufacturing, education, retail, exhibition, medical treatment and others. The VR industry may usher in a new round of development opportunities. Innovating formats and stimulating kinetic energy will also become the mission of 5G + VR in the new stage of development.

3.2 Practical Application and Characteristics of Immersive Communication What are the applications of VR in human communication? What fresh experiences might it bring to contemporary life?

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3.2.1 VR + Smart Life Virtual reality is often abbreviated to VR. With digital media expression, VR can simulate a space that can be similar to the actual world. It is also a computer network technology. The technology is a simulation system to create and experience a virtual world. The computer generates a simulated environment and develops it into an interactive 3D world with multiple information sources integrated and systematic simulation of users’ actual activities. To users, it could be a completely immersive environment. The progressing VR techs have been applied in urban planning, real estate, heritage protection, museums, military, education, medical care, video games, training, product presentation, survey and mapping, and so on. Currently in VR life, a headset is the most commonly seen VR equipment. Using VR equipment not only allows people to interact with intelligent media in more possible ways, but also changes our daily lives towards a more intelligent, smart future. We will be living a life with more technologies and immersive experiences. According to the Journalism School of Columbia University, there is a field called Virtual Reality Journalism which defines VR as a media which offers immersive experience to its users. The virtual reality could be from the real world or just imaginary. Users interact with the VR world by being in it. In people’s daily lives, VR can be a part of the intelligent home control system. With Internet of things, home life can be more convenient and interactive and also provides us with an immersive smart lifestyle. With VR technology, the intelligent home system will present to us a simulated space that is almost identical to the real one. Or we can say, an integrated virtual reality which is beyond the real one. At home, people’s main leisure includes watching movies, listening to music, playing video games, and so on. With VR’s help, people can interact with the virtual world in their own house. In a virtual reality, users put on VR equipment to acquire simulated senses such as vision, hearing and touching as if they are actually in that space. They can observe the simulated environment with a limit-free vision from all angles. When a user changes his position in the virtual space, he will see the environment is also changing with his move, creating a sense of being present. With technologies developing, there are higher demands for better audio–visual experiences. Technologies like IMAX, 4 K or Dolby Surround 7.1 have almost become standard requirements for watching movies. Also, VR is just the tech we need to make everyone’s home an actual theatre. Put on your VR headset, then you can enjoy a simulated theatre and interact with the environment around. You can be completely focused on the movie. Because VR equipment have put you into a simulated space with no limits, there is no possibility of you hearing a noise from outside or being distracted by anything in the real world. You can immerse yourself in the audio–visual dream. Audio–visual VR experience has become the present and future of home entertainment. Moreover, VR technologies’ uniqueness has made it perfect game tools. So now I will introduce VR games technologies that have brought reforms and changes to our ways to interact with a simulated world. Besides observing the simulated world from

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aside, we are now able to be part of it more actively. And one of the most important functions of family video games is to stimulate interactions between family members and create an agreeable atmosphere at home. And that’s where VR comes in. In a quality-time scenario equipment can help family members to enter the simulated world and put their whole mind to interact with other members. The scenario won’t be each member starring at one screen, be it computer or television, but all family members in one simulated world. When shopping by VR, you just need to put on a pair of VR glasses to fully enjoy the sight of all famous brands in the world. One moment you are shopping in the hustle and bustle of Las Vegas; 5 min later you are picking up vintage on a British market. What’s better, there is no more measuring troubles when selecting furniture. A pair of VR glasses would transfer the furniture right into your home to see if it fits in well. With rapid prototyping and haptic simulation, you can even feel the texture of clothes and try them on just at home. You can also turn the things at hand into some helpful tools when shopping. At last, you just check out with the VR headset. Google Earth VR In 2007, Google released Google Earth VR, which displays real graphics and street views of 85 countries and regions, covering 500,000,000 square kilometres can scan the earth planet like a real astronaut with 3D redering technology. Open up Google Earth Grand put on your HTC Vive devices, by just turning the controller, you can go to anywhere you want to go. How about an exciting global flight? Or do you prefer to go to Rome and see the Colosseum? Or you can be in Manhattan of New York and climb on the top of the Empire State Building like King Kong did. Apart from allowing us to see the street view of a particular area, Google Earth VR can also show us their changes in 32 years of various places on earth. For example, Antarctica, known as the last great wilderness, is losing her good time with more and more glaciers melting. The research team of Google Earth Rebased on the original Google Earth, spent about 10 years collecting and sorting out a great number of images. It used more than 5 million photos of 3-billion-megapixel quality to build up a street view with 3D rendering. Users can view the world in any way they want without stepping out of the room.

Besides travelling, VR technologies are also applied in daily commuting, such as navigating. Nowadays using mobile navigation system, we can check out the simulated streets, routes and street views of the destination and any specific location. Users can know about the surrounding environment of the place they are planning to go, making the trip much easier. In general, in the past decades, our society has witnessed exciting changes like digitization, internet plus and intelligent working. Beyond the physical world in which we live, there has already emerged an internet world. People are taking a lot of activities in this digital space. In the meantime, the actual world is being more and more connected with the Internet. The line between online and “real” life is gradually disappearing. We are in an era of digitization. Informatization and digitization are reshaping every aspect of our daily life. And in the new waves of information technology reform, new lifestyles are emerging involving VR in daily life. But we should also notice that these new media are based on building up of network infrastructures. Maybe VR technologies will enjoy real popularity only when we have entered the 5G era.

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3.2.2 VR + Fashion Since 2016, different sectors such as VR games, movies, education, training and medical care have been integrated more and more closely. However, in the field of fashion, it sounds like it has nothing to do with VR but it is not the truth. In recent years, it has become a new trend for the major fashion weeks to embrace VR. Early in 2014, Dior was the first brand that invested in VR. They bought a batch of VR headsets and recorded the fashion show into a VR video. Then they invited people to watch the show for free from the show window of their store in London. Later in 2016, Intel participated in almost the whole process of recording the New York Fashion Week Show into VR content. Thirteen catwalk performances were recorded into 360-degree videos, allowing people to experience fashion in an immersive way. In 2018, HTC Vive worked with the famous fashion magazine GQ China and brought us a wonderful VR fashion show which proved the possibility of cooperation between fashion and science. The products and elements of two different fields amalgamated and interconnected with each other, sparkling with unique appeal. This illustrates the trend of cooperation between VR and fashion. It may have simply been a new attractive way of marketing for the fashion brands at the beginning to adopt the VR technology. Now the results prove that VR provides a more unique way of expressing and popularizing fashion. At the VR fashion show launched by HTC Vive and GQ China, clothes that were designed with the Vive Pro HMD and which were paired with the Vive Focus standalone were showcased for the catwalk finale. Designers pushed the limits of graphic design and worked in a three-dimensional space for the first time, which ignited unprecedented inspiration and innovation. All the highlight moments were captured in the live video Infinite Path. Limitless creativity was fully expressed in this one minute. It also aligned with the season’s “Infinity” theme. The concept of the theme was expressed with an innovative technology that challenged imagination. Besides, the show was opened in an impressive way with the high-tech video Through Your Eyes. It showed the application of VR technology in different scenes through the immersive view of Vive device, bringing the guests in attendance to mountains, rivers and lakes, modern cities and even a futuristic world. Moreover, HTC Vive completely restored the dazzling moments of the show with a 360-degree video. This allows users who were not at the show to watch it as if they were actually there with their smartphones. Therefore, the combination of VR and fashion provides the fashion community with a more immersive way of promotion and interaction. It also brings various experience scenes to the audience. At Oculus Connect 3 in 2018, a new VR avatar system was launched. This VR avatar has no option for gender. Users can choose their personalities, outfits and styles. This avatar system supports many detailed options. For the fashion community, the VR avatar can be a tool for social contact and interaction. The Oculus VR avatar has a full body with changeable skin colour, hair colour, facial features and elements that tell personal tastes like dressing and hair styles. For fashionistas, the external features such as outfits and hairstyles show their attitudes in a more visual way.

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Therefore, the personal VR image design has brought reformation to social interaction of the fashion world. The virtual world has become another important venue for social events. And for the fashionistas, how to design their personal VR image has become the competition in a new field. When social interaction happens in the world of avatars, the VR image will replace the original looks of the fashionistas. It will not only show their fashion attitudes but also help them realize more designs. Users can customize their avatars, and try on different skin colours, hairstyles, eyes and clothing. In 2015, the Californian fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff held her fall fashion presentation during the New York Fashion Week. At this presentation, Minkoff recorded the whole presentation with VR technology. When watching this 360-degree video, people can choose their seats. For example, they can choose to sit beside the camera man and watch the show from his angle. Or they can choose to sit in front of the catwalk. Whichever seat they choose, they get to clearly see the models, the celebrities in attendance and the flashing lights from the reporters’ cameras. In 2015, Dior introduced a new product named Dior Eyes which revealed the secret of fashion to anyone wearing it. With the headset, you will enter the virtual backstage where you can watch designers doing makeup for models and look at the new clothes to be displayed. In 2015, the USA outdoor brand The North Face invited customers to experience VR scenes in a South Korean mall. When customers walked into the store which had been set up as a snowfield and put on The North Face down coats, the salesperson would lead them to sit in a sleigh and put on the Oculus Rift headset. Then they could enjoy the riding in The North Face down coats on a sleigh in a frozen world. VR provides more scenes to display fashion, and this new form of interaction reveals more details of fashion designs. Customers and audience will be able to understand fashion in a more immersive way. Now fashion brands and retailers have begun to tap the potential of VR technology. Designers are applying VR to all kinds of fashion shows. And the e-commerce giants are starting to apply VR technology to shopping. They keep opening VR stores where customers can try on clothes and other products. So, for the future development of fashion, displaying fashion products will embody more technological elements. With the help of VR fashion has found an immersive way to get people understand and enjoy it. Meanwhile, the new ways of interaction created by VR have made fashion no longer exclusive to fashion designers. In the virtual world, ordinary people can also design clothes and accessories to their own tastes, present them on the catwalk and exchange their own ideas about fashion with friends.

3.2.3 VR + Future Images Intelligent media is inseparable from future image. Image technology, represented by VR, with immersive, experiential and interactive features will lead us to the age of “being in intelligent image”. Images are everywhere, and human beings cannot

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live without images. Images have been running through the historical context of human development. Since the date of birth of the human race, it has maintained a close relationship with human beings. We know that before the emergence of language, primitive rock paintings, totems and other visual symbols had already become important media for men to perceive and understand the world. The emergence of language marked the beginning of human communication activities. And gradually, human beings began to enter the age of communication dominated by language, writing, printing and other language symbols. And with the emergence of electronic media like radio, television and the internet, human communication media began to return from language symbols to visual symbols. Driven by media image technologies, image technologies are also advancing with the times. Naked-eye 3D images, virtual reality images, augmented reality images, holographic images and other image forms have gradually broken the gap between the virtual and the real worlds, and merged elements such as text, sounds and images, to form a new image form that integrates dynamic images, sounds and interaction and bring better immersive sensory experience to users. Future images are not only extensions of modern images, they pay more attention to satisfy people’s curiosity about the “unknown” and the pursuit of “presence” through the “real” and “objective” use experience. Therefore, to comprehensively grasp the concept of future images from the realistic, sensory and mental perspectives and looks ahead at and speculates on it, is an urgent need for media research and even human development research. If the images are the key factors of image media like movies, television and the Internet, then future images are key factors of the future media. Intelligent media are the products of media evolution to a higher stage, which show the development direction of future media. Therefore, if we discuss future media under the logic of intelligent media, we can understand them as forms and patterns of media images such as images on movies, television and the Internet, to be shown in the future driven by innovative intelligent media technologies. Among the topics about the media application and development of future images, the most noticeable technologies at present are virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and hologram. Virtual reality image technologies represented by VR will lead us to the “being in intelligent image”. In the state of “being in intelligent image”, you can reach any destination in time and space where you want to go, for instance, you can roam the vast galaxies, explore jungles with towering trees, see First Emperor of Qin arranging his troops, or drink and sing with Li Bai. In the state of being in intelligent image, there will be no place in this world that cannot be reached. And this kind of immersive experience will be more and more real with the continuous upgrading of image technologies. The image world explored by VR + exists and will be existing in the present and future media like news, variety shows, games and movies. For example, the new format of “VR + news” has provided us with the sense of reality and the sense of presence for the news which the 2D TV images, mainly relying on pictures, video and audio elements, cannot offer. VR technologies can not only simulate scenes difficult to draw materials from, but can also change the audience’s perspective from onlookers to the first person, shortening the distance between news reports and viewers, enhancing the subjective feeling of the cognitive subjects about “objective

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existence” like cognitive objects of news, and so on, and changing the communication effect of traditional news coverage. “VR + variety shows”, on the other hand, provides the audience with unprecedented experience of image participation. Through “live viewing”, every viewer can get the impression as a VIP, sitting in the first row to enjoy the show. “VR + games” offer more realistic game scenes to the players, stimulating the initiative and interaction of the players, providing them with maximal satisfaction at the experience level, just like it is shown in the “Ready Player One”. The features of immersion, interaction and the presence of VR technologies also coincide with the core goal of game experience. “VR + movies” can not only better create and reproduce the scenes of the stories, but also allow the audience to make their own choices and break through the originally closed narrative rhythm through their own “participation”, thus making the stories more exciting and the emotions better expressed. Currently, intelligent media have received widespread attention for their cuttingedge technologies, and while stimulating the vitality of the media, they are also leading the development directions of future media, communication technologies and the cultural industry. Therefore, to talk about future image in the context of intelligent media, we can just begin from three perspectives: technology, communication and industry. First of all, from a technical perspective, future image in the context of intelligent media is an intelligent technology, which reflects the intelligent feature of future image technology in human–computer interaction, and from the perspective of communication, future image is as a form of communication not limited to visual symbols. It integrates different communication symbols like audio, olfactory tactile symbols, to form a communication combining multiple elements of sounds, odours and materials, and so on so as to meet various sensory needs of the audience in a more comprehensive manner and realize that communication effect of intelligent media. Besides, it is also understood as an industrial carrier with outstanding development potential and closely related to people’s daily life. Future image in the context of intelligent media can be used as a basic element of “image+” to be integrated with many common industries at present so as to generate strong momentum of development. In addition, analysing the development of future image from the perspective of user experience, we can see three features of future image at present: immersion, presence and interaction. Immersion refers to the feeling of users to be immersed in it. The immersion process brought by future image to users is the process when future image brings users to a certain image scenario and makes them immersed in it through evolutionary or innovative presentations of image. This scenario can be “completely virtual”, or “both virtual and real”, or “integrating the virtual and the real”. Sense of presence is a subjective experience, which means that the user feels himself part of a scenario. If “immersion” emphasizes the guiding role of future image, and it is the future image that realizes the effect of making “users immersed in it”, the sense of “presence” emphasizes that the users actively participate in the scenario created by future image, and subjectively and actively feel his identity as a

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“first-hand experience”, and experience the story in a first-person narrative manner. “I am here” and “I am present” will be a remarkable experience that future image technology can bring to users. Sense of interaction refers to the user experience generated during the interaction between the user and the images. During this process, there are communication, acceptance and feedbacks between the user and the images. Compared with the sense of immersion, the sense of interaction pursues a communicability experience, and more reflects the communication between the user and the images, and between the user and the environment. Feedbacks in interaction can be either indirect or direct feedbacks. The user’s subjective initiative is also further stimulated in this dynamic process. Virtual reality technologies represented by VR and the integration of various media forms bring a structural change in the overall mechanism of immersive media communication, which has completely reconstructed the information transmission process and the overall narrative mode of the traditional media forms, and the position of the audience in the communication process also changes with respect to time and space. Besides, human subjectivity is also experiencing great changes in the era of holistic immersive communication. In the process of deconstruction and reconstruction, people are also constantly reflecting on the complicated relationships between men and the media, science and art, the virtuality and the reality, and seeking a way of integration more in line with the laws of social development.

Chapter 4

Intelligent News—The Backbone of Smart Media Communication

The news industry is the lighthouse of contemporary society; it is at the core of the contemporary mass communication system. Intelligent technology has also been widely used in the news industry. We first observe the revolutionary changes of the news industry from the holistic perspective, and then analyse the impact of intelligent technology on the news industry from the four links of news collection, news production, news distribution and news consumption (Fig. 4.1).1

4.1 Intelligent Trends in the News Industry As media further integrate, the news industry has undergone profound innovations from concept to practice. In the past, media of various types minded only their own businesses, and each media collected its own raw materials for news production. Newspapers collected materials and then made newsprint mainly composed of words and pictures. Radio stations recorded sound materials to make sound products. Television stations recorded sound and images to bring forth audio–visual products. They are not interlinked and seldom share their materials. Even within the same media, different departments and different team groups may repeatedly collect materials for the same news event. There is no doubt that this is a waste of resources. At present, TV stations, radio stations and newspapers are constantly merging and reorganizing. However, there are still morphological differences among them. In this case, have such repeated interviewing and shooting worsened? It is not. The application of information technology has broken through technical barriers between media, while institutional barriers are also being eliminated. Portable devices enable journalists to be versatile and make it more efficient to collect news (Fig. 4.2). At present, the news industry has witnessed the gradual formation of a consensus, that is, in a converged media environment, we should carry out “integrated planning, 1 Zhang

(2017).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 P. Duan et al., Communication of Smart Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9464-9_4

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News collecƟon

News consumpƟon

The news industry

News producƟon

News distribuƟon

Fig. 4.1 Four links of the news industry

Raw materials

Finished product

News collecƟon

News producƟon

Fig. 4.2 News collection and news production

Integrated planning

One-Ɵme collecƟon

MulƟple generaƟon

Diverse distribuƟon

Fig. 4.3 The workflow of the news industry in the converged media environment

one-time collection, multiple generation and diverse distribution”. Frontline reporters collect various materials for news events, then editors generate various news products according to media forms. After that, the news products are distributed through various media channels. Its premise is to have integrated news planning (Fig. 4.3). The news media has carried out all-round reforms under the impetus of this concept. For example, an important reform of People’s Daily witnessed the establishment of the “central kitchen”2 for news production. It involves innovation in many 2 Ye

(2017).

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aspects, including the innovation of business forms and the re-combing of planning, interviewing, editing and distributing processes. It also includes the innovation of technological forms, with the need to build a unified platform and assembly line. It even includes the innovation of space form, so that the space of the news editing room can also adapt to this concept. For another example, Xinhua News Agency emphasizes the application of intelligent media technology in news reform. It put forward the concept of “media brain”.3 Combining new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing and the Internet of things, it has been empowering the news industry. For example, intelligent technologies such as voice recognition and conversion, face recognition, verification and others have greatly improved the efficiency of news collection by journalists. In short, news production has witnessed the flexible adoptions of various new technologies and tools under the environment of the converged media. Peng Lan maintains that the reforms on the convergence of China’s news industry needs to take three paths: mobile, social networking and intelligent.4 Can intelligent technical tools fully empower the news industry? This remains to be seen, but at least it provides a technology-driven force and brings innovations in all aspects. The following will examine the four links of news collection, news production, news distribution and news consumption.

4.2 Changes in News Brought by Smart Technology With the application of smart technology, what new changes have occurred in the four major segments of news gathering, news production, news distribution and news consumption?

4.2.1 Smart News Aggregation Journalism is a beacon of contemporary society. This section will focus on the application of intelligent technologies in journalism. It contains four parts: news gathering, news production, news distribution and news consumption. We’ll talk about news gathering in this class, but we first need to take a look at the overall changes in journalism. With the continuous progress of media convergence, great innovative changes have taken place in journalism from concept to practice. Various kinds of media used to mind their own business only. Every media company had to gather news materials for production by themselves. We remember more than ten years ago when we went 3 Fu

et al. (2018). (2018).

4 Peng

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to a local TV station for a study. We watched programs of the TV station all-day long. Maybe there were no big news events that day, so every program was reporting the same traffic accident. However, each program used different news materials, because they sent their own journalists for the shooting. There’s no doubt that it was a waste of resources. Today, TV stations keep getting merged and restructured with radio and newspapers. There’re still morphological differences between them. So, has the situation of repetitive interview and shooting worsened? Not really. Digitization has broken through technical barriers between media. At the same time, institutional barriers are also being removed. Portable devices allow journalists to be expert in one thing and good at many, which makes news gathering more efficient. Now a consensus has been gradually reached in journalism, that is, in the environment of convergence media, integrated planning, on-repetitive gathering, multiple productions and diversified distribution should be adopted. The on-site journalist gathers information about the news event from various aspects. The editor produces multiple news products based on different media forms. And then the news products are distributed through a variety of media channels. It is based on the premise of integrated news planning. It’s a bit like cooking different parts of a fish in different ways. Following this philosophy, news media have gone through comprehensive reforms. For example, one important reform of People’s Daily is the creation of a Central Kitchen for news production. It involves innovation in many ways, including innovation in the business form, re-arranging the planning, interview, editing and distribution process, innovation in the technical form, building unified platform and production line, and even innovation in the spatial form, adapting the space of the newsroom to this philosophy as well. For another example, Xinhua News Agency stresses the application of intelligent media technologies in news reform and proposes the concept of Media Brain. It combines artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, the Internet of things and other new technologies to empower journalism. Intelligent technologies like voice recognition and conversion, and face recognition and verification greatly improve journalists’ efficiency in news gathering. In short, news production in the environment of convergence media is done flexibly using various new technologies and tools. The most critical thing about news gathering is that the on-site journalist should gather enough materials for multiple productions later. This requires the journalist to have the awareness, skills and knowledge of tool use to keep adapting to this new change. Now let’s take a look at the use of several new tools. The first one is the use of the unmanned aerial vehicle. As a new shooting tool, it can help journalists obtain richer news materials. It can easily take aerial photographs and videos for a 360-degree panoramic reproduction of the visual images of the news event. It can go to areas we’re not able to enter, such as valleys, sea surfaces, closed areas and so on, and bring us rich images of those areas. The panorama news or VR news that we often see today cannot be produced without unmanned aerial vehicles. The second is the use of sensors. Sensors can be regarded as the general name of various kinds of information gatherers. They can convert various kinds of information

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human senses can or cannot perceive into data and then store, compute and process the data. For example, our mobile phone has a sensor of the geographic location. The sensor can sense the temperature, humidity, gravity force, light, sound, item movement, air quality, levels of harmful substances and other information of the external environment. WNYC of the USA once did a “Cicada Tracker” project. They mobilized the local listeners to gather data of the soil that the cicada broke through as well as data of cicada chirping and produced news products using the data. That’s an example of data journalism, sensor journalism and participatory journalism. The third is the use of multi-channel live-streaming PTZ. During the two sessions in recent years, journalists of Guangming Daily wear a very noticeable newsgathering system. They are thus called Iron Men. The system is multi-channel livestreaming PTZ. It can provide 3 K-frame and 4 M stream videos and VR signals for 16 platforms at the same time, thus allowing one on-site journalist to provide rich and diversified materials for live streaming. In fact, news-gathering devices we can use are increasing in number. For example, our smartphones can be used for news gathering in convergence media. Today, a lot of news media and Internet platforms also widely collect and use content gathered by ordinary users with regular mobile phones as news materials or even as news products. This greatly lowers the threshold for news gathering. In addition, the way of Wemedia writing has changed as well. Many people are no longer contend with writing blog articles or posting pictures at “Moments”. They use convenient video recording devices to produce Vlog, that is, electronic journals. We can further imagine that with the development of the Internet of things, anything with a camera, sensor and RF unit can be the source of news material gathering. From traffic monitoring cameras to driving recorders and the mobiles phones in our hands, cameras everywhere can all be the myriad sources of journalism. Now let’s summarize. In the age of intelligent communication, news in convergence media requires integrated planning, on-repetitive gathering, multiple productions and diversified distribution. We have all kinds of new tools, new technologies and new ways to obtain and gather various news materials following our new philosophy. The omnipresent Internet will further make the gathering of news more ubiquitous, universal and regular. Journalism is bound to change as well.

4.2.2 Smart News Production In this section, we will discuss the intelligence of news production. A frequently discussed issue in recent years is whether robots will take away our jobs? Among the many occupations listed, we can also see journalists and news editors. The major reason is that we now have automated news production, commonly known as robot writing. Some news writing robots famous at home and abroad in recent years include Wordsmith of the Associated Press, Dream writer of Tencent, Kuaibi Xiaoxin of Xinhua News Agency, Xiaomingbot of Jinri Toutiao, DT Gaowang of China Business

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News, and so on. Let’s take a look at the works of these robots. This is a piece of sports news of Xinhua News Agency written on March 16, 2019. It’s the result of the playoffs of China Basketball Association. The news is very brief and concise. We can’t see any errors in the news. There are no factual errors or syntax errors at all. If not told, we can hardly tell its news written by a robot. Besides, we can’t see any personal style. We can compare it with another piece of short news. On June 21, 2017, the official account of Xinhua News Agency on WeChat posted the news that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia was deposed just now. This news is brief and concise as well. We find that although it is brief, there are three authors and one producer for the news. The news was written in an unconventional way. It used the words “just now” which is used in spoken language. If you read carefully, you’ll find there is a typo. “Fei Chu (in falling tone)” was mistakenly typed as “Fei Chu (in rising tone)”. But interestingly, it was this unconventional writing that aroused readers’ great interest. Xinhua News Agency’s editor on duty also interacted with the readers wisely and won users’ recognition with humour, which made this news an unexpected success. It was read over 100,000 times in just 10 min and attracted 500,000 fans within 24 h, causing a sensation and even making “just now” a new style. By comparing the two pieces of news, we can find that a robot writes faster and more accurately, while a human could make mistakes when writing. But human writing is also more flexible and can even break the rules to be more personal and distinctive. Of course, robot writing can also be combined with other technologies to enrich the writing style. For example, the writing robot of Jinri Toutiao Xiaomingbot tries to make his sports news more fun through the technology of automatic translation and human editing intervention. During the Olympic Games Rio 2016, Xiaomingbot published a large number of sports news products. This is the news about Series A written by Xiaomingbot on April 4, 2019. Phrases used in it like “make a contribution to the team”, “act in perfect unison” and “take a calm shot “are like those written by an experienced journalist. Let’s summarize. Robot writing has now been applied to news production, but its application is limited to certain areas. There’s still great difference compared with writing by journalists. It can be best applied to three areas: sports news, financial news and weather news. Speaking of weather news, China Earthquake Networks also has an earthquake information broadcasting robot which plays a similar role. What do these three areas have in common? They are similar in three aspects. Firstly, they are all highly data-based areas. Whether it’s the contestants, the score result and the time process of the sports competition, or the stock trend, financial statements and market indicators of the financial sector, or the magnitude and location of an earthquake in the weather reporting area, they are all highly data-based. Secondly, they are highly templatized. Such kind of news is simply for delivering message. The news events happen a lot. There aren’t any big differences between each other, so it’s easy to have news templates. Thirdly, they are all highly accurate. The most valuable part of all this news is the data. That’s the part artificial intelligence is best at. A human worker won’t add much value to it but may increase the chance of making a mistake.

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Speaking of data, one category of news receives much attention, that is, data journalism. Data journalism, also known as data-driven journalism, refers to reporting of news produced by analysis and filtering of data. It caters to the current data-based trend of the entire society, uncovering the implications of news events and social conditions through data. But data is often boring, so data-based news requires data visualization. The whole process of data journalism goes from data gathering to data filtering, then to data visualization, and finally to the production of an engaging news story, along with which its value to the public keeps growing. In addition to robot writing and data journalism, there’s still much to explore regarding the intelligent news production. One example is robot video production. There are increasingly more automated software and tools for video content production, as well as software providing accessibility for video clipping and packaging’s Tok has developed a lot of interesting filters, special effects, backgrounds, and so on. The face-covering technique used by a network host some time ago is a function of such software. Another example is the AI synthetic host. At the 5th World Internet Conference, held on November 7, 2018, Sogou and Xinhua News Agency jointly released the world’s first full-simulation AI host. By voice synthesis, lip synthesis, facial expression synthesis, deep learning and other technologies, an AI synthetic host with the same broadcasting ability as a real human host is created. Will intelligent robots really replace producers like journalists, editors and hosts in the future? It won’t happen in the short time. The robot is good at writing sports, financial and weather news. It does well data journalism, but there’re more areas it’s not good at. Areas like political news, interviews, investigative reports and news comments still require the wisdom and talent of human journalists. There are also many difficulties that robot writing needs to overcome, like how to be accurate while following the natural language habits, how to generate in-depth and complex content, how to produce multimedia content, how to create personalized content, and so on. News production in the future will require collaboration between human and machine. Only by combining human intelligence and artificial intelligence can we create real content value.

4.2.3 Smart News Distribution The focus of this section is on the application of intelligent technology in news distribution. Of all the parts of journalism, intelligent technology is best applied in news distribution. It mainly uses algorithms to recommend to users’ news products in which they may be interested, so it is called algorithm news by some people as well. In 2016, China Internet Network Information Center pointed out in its 38th “Statistical Report on the Status of Development” that algorithm distribution based on user interests was gradually becoming the main way of distribution for online news. Personalized recommendations are the most important principle of algorithm news, which fundamentally solves the problem of information matching through

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machine algorithms. Traditional news distribution is completely tied to news production and is done by professionals. The rise of algorithms makes it possible to record and store data of users’ different behaviours in different situations, so as to realize data identification and screening and match the data with user profile and user needs. Based on continuously optimized algorithms, it sets personalized agendas for different users. For example, Jinri Toutiao’s news client uses the advertising slogan of “Headlines You Care About” and mainly promotes algorithm recommendation mechanism. It builds an intelligent news platform, and by analysing the user profile, scenes and article features, it recommends different personalized news to different users. How does it achieve that? There are three supporting factors here. The first one is the user profile. It learns users’ characteristics and needs by capturing user information. The second is its mass content. Using the content posted by accounts at Jinri Toutiao and content captured by crawlers, it builds a rich content of storage warehouse. The third is algorithm recommendation. Based on user characteristics, information entered and history, it quickly searches for filters and recommends relevant content. Here the precise determination of user profile is a key point. In fact, it is e-commerce businessmen rather than Internet news applications that do best in this. Using captured information like labels, purchase history, keywords searched, people followed, friend categories, Microblog content, Comments, reposting preferences, locations, model and service time of mobile phones, and so on, e-commerce businessmen can recommend to us products we are most interested in. What contributions do we users make to realizing personalized recommendations? First of all, we allow the aggregation services of Jinri Toutiao to access all kinds of information. We let it read our location, so it can recommend local news to us. We build a friend list. It will make recommendations based on our friends’ browsing history. Secondly, we enter all kinds of information by ourselves. For example, we search for some keywords, and it gets to know our interest and needs. Thirdly, we actively subscribe to some accounts on Jinri Toutiao. It is equivalent to a personal customization, providing the basis for the aggregation of the algorithm. Finally, when we constantly browse news, the algorithm gets to know us better. According to the Control Theory, each browse of the user counts as an entry of feedback to the algorithm. It can better understand us and is capable of deep learning through massive browsing to develop itself. Here’s my personal experience as an example. Recently I’ve been quite interested in 5G news and have searched for corresponding news using related keywords. And the accounts I subscribed to show my content preferences. As a result, of the articles recommended to me by Jinri Toutiao recently, IT news accounts for an increasing proportion. Let’s compare it with other news applications, such as The Paper, one of the best quality news apps. The news content products, interface design and technical means of The Paper are all among the best. I once summarized in an article the innovations of The Paper in various aspects, including its application of long tail effect, its production of panorama news and data news, its use of social media, and so on. It has also adopted some AI technologies. For example, it cooperates with the intelligent assistant Xiao Bing of Microsoft and lets Xiao Bing discuss news with the users. Recently, it has introduced an AI synthetic host Xiaofei. However, it is difficult for

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The Paper to personalize content recommendations due to two reasons. One is the lack of mass and rich content. The other is the lack of an algorithm recommendation mechanism. Generally, algorithm-led personalized news recommendations are a feature of platform-based aggregation application services, and editors’ recommendations led by professional journalists are the choice of traditional media and self-controlling content providers. From this perspective, Jinri Toutiao is a typical aggregation platform, while The Paper is a typical self-controlling content provider. Of course, in recent years, The Paper is also developing the “Moments”. Whether it can develop into an influential platform is still unknown. In a word, the news we read comes from two different sources: editors’ recommendations and algorithm recommendations. Both of them have their pros and cons. The former ensures professionalism but lacks innovation. The latter shows characteristics of the time and high efficiency but can easily get stuck with Information Cocoons. To users, making use of the pros of the two is worth considering. Algorithm-based news recommendations are more advantageous in business operation. It can not only improve efficiency and attract users but also accumulate big data. During the process of two-way interaction, the news aggregation platform obtains a large amount of user data, builds a user pool and completes user grouping and model building, while collaboratively filtering existing content platforms and opening up channels to other resources, keeping user viscosity through multiple content distributions. This further brings the possibility of data use and the increase in and realization of data value. The process of matching users with personalized push of content will be more intelligent and more precise context-based matching will be developed. News distribution will be everywhere and will, by way of contextualization, put users in the news to complete the process of news consumption. We analysed the application of intelligent technologies in news gathering, news production and news distribution. Under such circumstances, journalism has shown four tendencies, summarized in four words, automation, data-based, popularization and contextualization.

4.2.4 Smart News Consumption This section will take a look at the new changes in users’ news consumption. The terminals from which users get news have shifted from newspapers and TVs to smartphones and news apps in it. With the popularization of mobile Internet terminals represented by smartphones in our life, the typical context where people, especially urbanites, obtain news have changed greatly. The context can be understood as the convergence of the geographic location, life situation and social environment of a social individual. Before the massive popularization of smartphones, it took a user quite some time to get news and it was usually done in a fixed space, mostly in the living room or at dining table at home, or in the office. Today, mobile technology has given news readers freedom in time and space. The time they use to get news becomes fragmented and random. News consumption is usually done in a mobile space using fragmented time. This puts new requirements on journalism. Among all

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the requirements, four new tendencies are worth our attention. They are personalized news acquisition, fragmented news content, participatory news experience and immersive news services. The first one is personalized news acquisition. In the pre-Web time, news communication was done one way from one point to many points, and from points to a large area, but news communication today is increasingly more of a process that starts with personalized users. As the number of information channels on the Internet grows explosively, mass media that provides the same content seems to be out. News receivers are no longer passive readers, but users who actively choose news to read. This consensus has been reached. Real-life users have their unique life experience, and thus have their unique interested areas. Personalized needs gradually emerge. This requires media to consider how to provide users with personalized news services that they need and are interested in, instead of just providing the same news. The second is fragmented news content. According to a study of China Internet Network Information Centre, news reading on the Internet has shown clear fragmentation. The proportion of netizens with a single news browse of less than 30 min is 62.4%, of which 26.6% of the users browse news for less than 10 min. The average number of browsing contexts is 3.1. Taking a rest at home, before bed and after meal are the most typical contexts for browsing news, respectively, accounting for 69.7, 67 and 52.1% of news and network users. Over 30% of netizens would read news during fragmented time, like in the morning after getting up, while taking public transportation or waiting in line. As news consumption becomes fragmented in time and mobile in space, and users enjoy much higher freedom and openness to choose news, media can no longer just provide large-capacity, high-density and centralized integrated news products, but need to subdivide news into more detailed categories or modify the news subjects. Fragmentation and secondary communication of TV news after it is broadcasted has become a common practice in television stations today. To some TV agencies, the first thing to consider when gathering and editing news is the possibility of fragmented communication on the Internet. The third is the participatory news experience. Whether it’s news acquisition or entertainment, users are always in the pursuit of presence, immersion and participation. With the development of media technology and other related technologies, users are able to get rid of the limits of geographic space and real time, and the shackles of the senses. Of the various new devices, VR and AR devices are the most noticeable ones. They bring people a new way to perceive the world and create an immersive environment beyond the world of symbols. People are not experiencing the world through symbols but are brought into a 3D virtual world similar to the real world in senses. The fourth is immersive news services. The media is evolving. It’s not something fixed to a certain space and immovable anymore, nor is it an item irrelevant to humans. With the development of intelligent terminals, media are more and more frequently seen in people’s daily life. Because of the mobility of news consumption contexts, and the fragmentation of news content, news starts to become a kind of personal and immersive service. People are using more senses to establish connections with news

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events, while news media also get involved in users’ personal environment. Immersive news has reproduced users’ new relations with the sites, while new technologies like VR and AR create immersive consumption experience for users. VR and AR technologies bring users new ways to perceive the world. They can go to the news site from the more authentic first-person perspective. Unlike the two-dimensional listening and watching process with the traditional media such as radio and television in the past, with VR technology, users can visit the news site without actually going there, experience the news event as if they were there, and reduce the loss of information caused by various subjective and objective factors in news coverage, thus creating more interactivity. This immersion is more than just an immersive feeling. The more important thing is that every user gets to capture all the details at the news site or obtain a perspective on the event based on their own interest and is thus less limited by the editor’s perspective. This gives the user an autonomous cognitive perspective to learn about and understand the news event. There are already many trials of VR news. For example, the New York Times produced a product called “The Displaced” on November 7, 2015, which tells a news event through the subjective perspective of some refugees. Users can use VR glasses to enter the news site and follow the heroes of the news to observe and experience everything. There’s another potential area for VR news, that is, sports news and live sports. Today, in many major sporting events such as the Olympic Games, National Basketball Association, European Football Championship and World Series of Major League Baseball, VR live broadcasting has been tried. In China, portals like Tencent and NetEase, and traditional media like People’s Daily and China Media Group are all trying VR technology. As with VR technology, AR technology is also immersive and strongly interactive. Based on this technology, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal of the USA, the Financial Times of the UK and Tokyo Shimbun of Japan have all launched AR apps to enrich readers’ experience. The application of new technology always has a trial period. VR glasses are not yet popularized and are facing some difficulties regarding the cost, shape and how to carry. Experience enjoyed with light VR devices is much worse. Limited by physiological conditions, users can easily feel dizzy in the VR and AR experience. As a result, VR and AR news mostly use panoramic still photos to interact with users. To some extent, these factors lower users’ enthusiasm and affect practical explorations. But VR and AR are getting more and more widely used. In brief, new ways, new means and new trends developed by artificial intelligence with the simulation of human intelligence at its core can be widely applied in future media development. In the short term, artificial intelligence cannot completely replace human labour, but it has gradually been involved in the various parts of news media and is likely to reshape the area completely. All these changes will greatly increase the possibility of human information communication and will inspire people’s potential to understand the world so as to change the world.

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4.3 Reflections Prospects of Smart News Artificial intelligence technology has appeared in all parts of journalism. How would it be like in the future? We can think about and reflect on the future of intelligent news. Countless cameras unmanned aerial vehicles and various devices with sensors will become the main sources for capturing and gathering news. The advanced language processing system, image recognition system and deep learning system can produce news no inferior to that written and edited by the best journalist and editor today. An accurate data system can capture a user’s location, time and scene and provide the most personalized, personal and informative news content. With the overall advancement of the Internet of things, voice recognition system and wearable devices can free people’s hands and even their body, making the user feel as if they were on the scene. They can reproduce the news scene and recreate the relations between the user’s senses and the outside world. We can use two sentences to summarize this future picture. One is “everything is media”. Everything can be a component element in a media system. It brings essential changes to the overall way we gather and process information. Its professional threshold has been lowered and its popularity has grown. News is no longer limited to the minority but is shared by common people. The other is “intelligent media is not just media”. Intelligent media will not only have the functions of media but will also integrate news delivery with various other social practices. It breaks through all kinds of boundaries and combines all kinds of functions. The news industry is no longer dominated by one agency but will be full of competitions. Therefore, everything is media, intelligent media is not just media, media is everything, and everything is connected. News will become a more organic component in social system interconnection, co-construction and sharing. Its connotation and contents will be greatly expanded. Since modern times, journalism has made important contributions to social development. The application of intelligent technologies has changed its features and a series of its important rules. So, what reflection do we have on this? We can’t resist the big trend of intelligent media news, nor can we be blindly optimistic about it. Only by always thinking and moving forward, can we find a better way. There are three thoughts worth sharing, information cocoons, polarization of public opinions and concretization of pseudo-environment. The first one is information cocoons. By information cocoons, we mean that as news received by users are coming increasingly more from algorithm recommendations, personalized customization and social media sharing, the diversity of the news we receive may diminish. It’s harder for us to hear something different. It’s like we all cocoon ourselves like silkworms and live in an information cocoon. Most Internet users today first obtain news through social media. Then the people we follow are very important. Usually the people we follow are either a homogeneous group of friends and family or leaders of public opinions with similar philosophies.

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If we accidentally follow someone of different philosophies, we may easily blacklist that person once a disagreement occurs. On some social media, there is even the phenomenon of preventive blacklisting. In this case, we always hear what we want to hear. We always receive “likes”, rather than thought-provoking critiques. Some people call this echo chamber effect. Your opinion is liked by your network friends and then comes back to you, forming an echo. There is also a similar concept, philosophy bubbles. Social circles gradually appear on social media. The Internet itself provides the possibility of large-scale interaction, but people are more willing to live in smaller circles they are comfortable with. These circles lead to homogenization or even identification, which suppresses people’s reflection. From the perspective of psychological selection, people tend to acquire news that aligns with their attitude and thus neglect the diversity of the real world. Intelligent technology should be able to make judgement. There is already study on how to use the application of technologies to break the philosophy bubbles to facilitate diversified interaction, critical reflection and consultative democracy, and the study is worth thinking. The second one is the polarization of public opinions. The Internet has created a new field of public opinions, as well as unique rules for this field. For example, spiral of silence theory seems to be out of date now. If even it still exists, the direction of the spiral has changed. Due to dispersed news gathering and mass news data, traditional professional gatekeepers cannot screen the data effectively anymore. Wemedia provides a channel for people to express their opinions, but all kinds of chaos occur as well. One example is the clickbait titles that emerge in large numbers. To attract more attention to their articles, it’s understandable for people to write a compelling title, but some clickbait title writers garble quotes out of context and may even create something out of nothing or cross the line to cause a scream effect in the cyber world. This is a bad phenomenon that should be controlled. This causes the so-called “post-truth”. The fact is no longer important. The emotional reaction it triggers is even more important. The radicalized American public opinions during Trump’s presidential campaign and the constant reversals in online public opinion incidents in China are all reminding us of this situation. Beyond post-truth, we should be more wary of non-truth and opposite truth, which simply put is a rumour. Due to the lack of gatekeepers, rumours are often widely spread. Coupled with the flood of the online water army, and normalized, large-scale and industrialized Internet public opinion manipulation, public opinions are full of risks. Therefore, artificial intelligence should act as an intelligent gatekeeper while driving the development and reform of the media sector, using its more accurate data analysis to carry out corresponding fact-checking, thus killing rumours in massive and fragmented information and ensuring the accuracy and objectivity of news. The third is concretization of pseudo-environment.5 Intelligent technologies have reshaped the boundary between reality and the virtual world. How to look at the relations between people’s subjective world and the external objective world becomes a new topic. Plato once told an allegory, known as Plato’s Cave. He said we were 5 Lippman

(1922/2004).

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like prisoners in a cave, bound by chains and facing the stone wall of the cave. A fire was lit behind us and cast the shadow of the things behind us on the stone wall. What did we see? The real world or its shadow? Based on this allegory, Walter Lippmann proposed the concept of pseudo-environment. It refers to the shadow world created by mass media for modern people. If newspapers could create a pseudo-environment, it would be abstract text. Now with the development of virtual reality technology and the advent of the holographic world, the shadow world is becoming a concretized reality from a metaphor. Can users critically understand the whole picture of the external non-objective world, while travelling 80,000 li a day and watching numerous stars without actually moving to avoid falling into their own traps and going further away from the reality? The cultivation of users’ critical media literacy also needs to be put on the agenda and become an important task of society. Well, we have reflected on intelligent news from three angles: information cocoons, polarization of public opinions and the concretization of pseudoenvironment. There are many more phenomena worth reflecting on, such as privacy, right to be forgotten, and so on. In a word, humans are rational animals, but their rationality could be drowned out by the myth of technology. Max Weber talked about the conflict between instrumental rationality and value rational. If instrumental rationality is tools created by man becoming the masters of man, then value rational ensures that tools can truly serve the development of man. When the age of intelligent media is coming, we should use value rational to balance tool rationality, think about what the most valuable way of development is, and adjust the direction of technology accordingly. The functions of tools and human behaviour ensure that intelligent technologies bring better media and a better future for human society.

Chapter 5

Social Network—The Core of Smart Media Communication

Human beings are social animals, and social interaction is the most basic human activity. With the help of communication media, humans form social networks. In the contemporary Internet world, social networking platforms are the most popular and they are becoming increasingly intelligent.

5.1 Enter the Era of Social Intelligence With the advancement of smart technology, what new landscape of human social interaction has emerged? What are the new changes in the nature, process and subjects of social interaction?

5.1.1 From Public Society to Private Society Speaking of foreign social networking software, Facebook is a very important one. In 2018, the latest report released in the fall by US investment bank and asset management firm Piper Jaffray shows that only 5% of US teenagers think of Facebook as their favourite social media platform. In the American Youth Survey conducted in March and April of the same year, only 51% of respondents said they were using the platform. And this number was far below 71% from 2014 to 2015. Facing this situation, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a blog article of over 3,200 words named “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking” in March 2019. The article not only made clear that all messaging apps of Facebook, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, were encrypted end-to-end, and that the background was also integrated so users could send and receive messages across platforms. In addition, a setting for automatic message deletion was also

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added to give users the choice to have message history deleted automatically after one month or after a year. Mark Zuckerberg believed “the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever.” And that is the future he hoped his team would help bring about. Besides stating the latest developments of Facebook, the article also explained the development trends of social media, that is, the public social networking will shift to a mode cantered on private communication and small group chats instead of public sharing of photos and messages. Mark Zuckerberg also said, “Over the next 5 years, I think we’re going to see all of social networking reconstituted around this base of private communication.” People come to like chatting in small groups or one-to-one communication instead of making their ideas public. Traditional social space is divided into public domain and private domain. And boundaries between the two are quite clear and not confusing. But with the popularity of the Internet and the development of social media, social domain has changed and boundaries between public and private domains have also blurred. There is even a trend of the private domain becoming publicized. Traditional public social networking is basically open and transparent. People’s personal hobbies, information posted by them and their social networks are almost all publicly visible. At the same time, based on acquaintance mechanism, they gradually extend outward and expand relations, eventually forming a general and open platform where anyone can share information. But at the same time, with the development of public social networking, its own shortcomings are also increasingly prominent. The way ubiquitous social networking spreads has deviated from the original intention of many users to share information. Meanwhile, to attract more attention and achieve more reposts, clickbait titles emerge in large numbers. Boring and low-quality content, even with vulgar pictures, can be seen everywhere in our daily life. Besides, to gain a place in the traffic war, while racking their brains, many people even try going below the bottom line of social morality. User privacy and security issues have proliferated. When it comes to user experience, survey shows that 30% of teenagers say they don’t use Facebook just because their parents are using it. And from the study of Facebook’s friend relations, we can also find the vast majority of young users, especially students, refuse to add their parents as friends. The reason is that they don’t want to share with parents the information they post on the “public domain” of the social media. And this happens to us as well. We can recall if there was a time when we wanted to share something at “Moments”, we would think twice about who could or could not see it. This discomfort deriving from public social networking also puts new requirements on the transformation of the existing social networking model. People who often use Weibo, Douban, Facebook and Twitter may find that we can hardly control the direction and final effect of the communication of the information we post. Sometimes, maybe you just want to express some emotion or complain to your followers and friends about something, without any intention to attract widespread attention or exert any influence, but if your texts, pictures or other

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information happen to be controversial or fast-spreading, with the popular mechanism designed today, like reposting or recommending, what you say is likely to be seen by thousands of people. When the information explodes, its chain reaction and influence are probably beyond your imagination. When the communication effect of public networking gets increasingly uncontrollable, it becomes more and more difficult for us to express our views and opinions casually. When people express their emotions and show their real life in the public domain, there are many restrictions and considerations. After many trials, their real opinions are covered up and hidden. And the purpose of private social networking services is to provide a domain where we can express our inner thoughts without rigorous logic or clear language, just like when we are with our friends. We’re back to somewhere we feel free and comfortable. Based on the needs for strong relations, it allows users to choose the type and extent of information sharing while avoiding the lack of privacy and ubiquitous socialization, enhancing the effective and deep communication of information and eliminating the disadvantages caused by information overflow. Today, the private social networking ribbon contains multiple social networking models like Burn After Reading, Acquaintance Real Name, Acquaintance Anonymous, Stranger Social Networking, and so on. They are different from traditional public social application models, with very clear “private” features. It can not only create private and safe interpersonal and group communication modes, but also ensure the communication process is secure. The purpose of private social networking is no longer interpersonal relation broadening and extensive interaction, but is instead focused on strengthening existing relations, helping users to control communication channels and thus create a private social network. Besides, private social networking is also the “echoing wall” and “barometer” of public opinion to some extent and it has a profound impact on mass communication and political communication as well. And the mainstream communication platforms within organizations are also gradually shifting to private social networking, which further contributes to the transformation from public social networking to private social networking. Despite this, there is still much controversy over whether private social networking is a “private territory” or a “public domain”. We still need to note that there are hidden dangers in management blind zones and the control of unhealthy information due to the invisibility of private social networking. Therefore, we need to look at the overall development of private social networking rationally and build the private social networking management system in a scientific way so as to promote the continuous upgrading and evolution of social networking.

5.1.2 From Six Degrees of Separation to Smart Society In the 1960s, social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) at Yale University designed a small world experiment. He randomly mailed out chain letters to 160 residents living in Omaha, Nebraska. In each letter, there was the name of a Boston

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Fig. 5.1 Stanley Milgram

stockbroker. The letters required every recipient to send the letter to their friend who they believed was relatively close to that stockbroker. When their friends received the letters, they did the same thing. Eventually, most letters were received by that stockbroker after five or six steps, hence the concept, Six Degrees of Separation. This experiment embodies an objective law that seems to be very common. That is, socialized modern humans can all be connected by “Six Degrees of Separation”. There isn’t an A and B who are absolutely unrelated. Of course, it doesn’t mean any one person has to go through six degrees to be connected with someone else. In fact, the theory Six Degrees of Separation means any two people who don’t know each other are always definitely connected in certain ways (Fig. 5.1). User behaviour on social media differs from social networking in the general sense. It brings more connections between people and inspires more communication. But at the same time, it also brings information overload and communication overload. Information bubbles and information cocoons are nothing new to us today. Then what kind of crisis is communication overload? To put it simply, information that social media brings to us is not just the information itself. With it is the attention to the channel through which the information is received and the source of the information. As a result, we receive more information than ever before. We’re dealing with more than just the information itself, but the people and all the relations that come with people. In the face of such “overload” problems, “Intelligent Social Networking” is put forward. People even say that “Social Media 2.0 Era” is coming gradually. Against the backdrop of such an era, we have to mention Jinri Toutiao which stands out in the fierce Internet competition by relying on recommended algorithm technology. It not only changes the traditional way of communication but also brings content communication from traditional media to the time of new media networking. However, as recommended algorithm becomes widely used, its inner disadvantages

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such as content recommendations over-reliant on labels and the further generation of bundled information cocoons are becoming increasingly obvious. When this Jinri Toutiao is facing a recommended algorithm crisis, “Ta Zai”, based on intelligent algorithm technology, seems to have proposed a new possibility. The core technology of “Ta Zai” is a new group AI algorithm based on selfevolving AI technology. Different from headline recommendation, this algorithm is unlabelled. That is to say, this algorithm is not based on analysis of people or content. Instead, by analysing and counting users’ behaviour patterns, it learns people’s intelligence intuition and knowledge judgment. Based on such group intelligence, the platform can understand users more comprehensively. This algorithm can grow and evolve by itself and thus solves the problems of fixed labels and personal development limitations caused by recommended algorithm. Just as officially introduced by “Ta Zai”, they are based on group intelligence algorithm, and go beyond relation chains and labelled way of communication. They break the bonds of “Moments” and allow users to freely express their threedimensional and complete selves. Even if someone is not an Internet celebrity, good content posted by him can still be seen by the world. Recommendations based on interest matching help people find those with similar interest. “Ta Zai” in essence is actually an intelligent social media platform which promotes a new “zero social networking”. “Zero social networking” aims to go back to the origin to start from zero and maximize the communication of knowledge and content so the information can reach anyone who wants to see it. In traditional social networking, social networking means the establishment of relation chains. The problem of such social media is that the more complicated the relations are, the more restrictions on the communication of information there will be and the more afraid the users are to post, comment, or like something. Some even close their “Moments”. Because of this, content won’t get effectively communicated, and what social networking is finally glutted with is compromised and generalized. Based on such considerations, “Ta Zai” gives up “follow” chain in product design. That is to say, there are no numbers of “Fans” or “Followers” anymore. It greatly changes the traditional definition of “social networking” in social media. “Ta Zai” sets up a CIQ value for itself and uses it to describe the intelligence of the platform. The CIQ in the upper right corner of the home screen and the “Ta Zai Index” on the personal page show the intelligence evolution of the algorithm and their knowledge of a user. That is to say, if the CIQ value on “Ta Zai” platform is 18, it means “Ta Zai” has the intelligence of an 18-year-old human being. As evolution gradually stabilizes, there will be a well-organized knowledge structure and interpersonal structure. And when this relation becomes more precise and clearer, a huge knowledge system, knowledge map and knowledge base will eventually be created in “Ta Zai”. Each post is marked with seven colour symbols. Warm colours represent the mainstream and cool colours represent the niche. Colours from the warm to the cool respectively represent categories like information, knowledge, the unknown and so on. The development team says this setting is to speed up the precise distribution of long tail information so that more people interested in specific content could see this information in a timely manner.

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“Ta Zai” with its self-growing algorithm encourages users to share their observations, reflections and opinions on the world and themselves through pictures, articles and links. And through a user’s interactions with the system, the platform becomes familiar with the users and gets to understand them. It can not only build a complete self-world for users, but can also help them to look for, discover and connect to more about themselves that they don’t even know. Other users can also give a like through its “Give me more”. These instructions will be fed back to the machine learning model to give a more accurate picture of the user’s reading habits. In other words, every user of “Ta Zai” is a trainer of system intelligence. This sense of participation in the education simulation, when supported by the AI algorithm system, can effectively motivate users to create content and thus give them expectations. At the same time, users can hardly predict what they’re going to see today, which breaks information bubbles and stop a single source of information from limiting people’s judgment, value and aesthetic standards. Also, to avoid social networking bundles, users on “Ta Zai” platform can’t follow or send private message to each other. Personal privacy is better protected. Besides, “Ta Zai” also has a click button. Based on an evolutionary and understanding algorithm, the platform can recommend peers with “similar interests” to users. When the algorithm determines that one user “clicks” with another user, it will open a three-hour window for the two users, but after three hours, the two are strangers again. Just as “Ta Zai” has always stated, this is a great social networking experiment. There is still doubt whether “Ta Zai” could fully reproduce users’ hobbies and interests, users’ posting motivation due to lack of direction still needs to be studied in depth, how to equate content posted by users to “knowledge” remains to be answered, and the leap from interests to social networking requires a long time of persistence with faith. Maybe it’s too early to draw a certain conclusion, but “Ta Zai” has undoubtedly opened a new door to private social networking different from the past. In the world it leads to, there are infinite possibilities waiting for us to explore, and numerous unknowns waiting to be discovered. At the same time, we should always look rationally and objectively at the social media that has become an indispensable part of our lives and keep our life clean and independent while dealing with complex and varied relations and endless information around us.

5.1.3 From Interpersonal Interaction to Human–Machine Interaction Human–machine interaction is nothing new today. Whether it’s the shopping guide robot in a mall, or the interactive immersion experience we have when entering the virtual world with VR glasses, or the AlphaGo Go Showdown that attracts worldwide attention, the keywords to describe relations between humans and machines are no longer simple ones like “use” and “efficiency” popular in the background

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of industrialization. With the development of AI technology, the field of interpersonal interaction has been moved to infinite web platforms and virtual world. “Close contact” with machines gradually becomes normal in people’s daily life and gets into every part of social interaction. If you’ve watched the movie “Her”, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the 86th Academy Awards, you must have been impressed by the AI sound partner Samantha who accompanied the writer and fell in love with him. During the process of AI development, human beings must have considered relating it to “love”, whether by having someone fall in love with a robot or using it as a witty adviser for people in love. In April 2019, Baidu officially announced that a social software called “Cupid” went live. Almost all people in love keep guessing what the other one is thinking. Used for improving relationships between couples, the software “Cupid” is based on technologies like Baidu big data, cloud computing and machine learning, combined with AI vision and interaction, integrating micro-emoticon recognition, visual analysis, intelligent suggestions and other features into one. It is a new trial in the social field of love. In 2018, Baidu Brain provided a face recognition detection interface. Technology provided through the interface allows users to use AI to recognize seven facial emotions. By evidence-based algorithm and deep learning of artificial intelligence algorithm, after training with over 100,000 micro-expression pictures in the early period, “Cupid” can accurately identify and label the actions and micro expressions of the target object. After acquiring and analysing the target’s real-time emotions and state of mind, Cupid can provide the most appropriate advice for the user via intelligent voice interaction in milliseconds. We can say that with the development of AI technology, human–machine interaction has greatly updated the original way of interpersonal interaction and become an important way of interaction in people’s lives. On one hand, harmonious human– machine interaction will put them in a state of natural integration. The virtual reality and augmented reality technology with the basic features of interaction, immersion and presence are expressive of real-time 3D space, providing a natural human– machine interactive operating environment and making people feel as if they were actually there. The boundary between the virtual and real worlds gradually blurs or the two worlds may even blend into one. But on the other hand, this also reveals a shocking fact. With increased opportunities of human–machine interaction, interpersonal interaction is dehumanized without being noticed. When communicating with AI systems, whether making a request or response, we are using words as simple and short as those used by robots. This tendency will completely change our habits of language use in interpersonal communication over time. Humans are getting used to the keywords for intelligent systems. For example, when searching for something, we will say “XXIV Olympic Winter Games” directly instead of “Please help me search for photos and information about the XXIV Olympic Winter Games.” At the same time, the AI systems start to guess what we want to say and very thoughtfully enter a complete sentence. It can even reduce the amount of text you need to enter according to our language habits to improve communication efficiency. In that case, words we use will undoubtedly become less rich. It may reduce our burden of thinking hard to find the right words, but it also takes away our personal uniqueness.

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Guy Hoffman, a professor of robotics, once said that people today were speaking in an increasingly similar way and what they were going to say was also becoming more predictable. We can imagine if our everyday communication becomes order giving and human communication becomes similar, won’t our diversity and unknowns also be gone? With the development of human–machine interaction, questions like this are also popping up. For many researchers, exploring the influence that AI has on humans, society, communication and other respects is somehow different from the study on the relations between technology and humans in the past. Traditionally, study on human–machine interaction was mostly done from the perspective of social psychology related to interpersonal communication and tended to apply the theory and mechanism of interpersonal interaction to human–machine interaction. However, the relevant application of AI is no longer a simple machine as the object but is a new object with self-thinking and self-learning abilities. Discussing human–machine relations in a bilateral opposite structure isn’t accurate enough anymore. Philosophically, after reflections on and explanation of early humanism by Michel Foucault, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant, postmodern philosophy has a new deconstruction of humanism, trying to break out from the narrower and Eurocentric “humanism” with implicit cultural hegemony. As a result, in today’s human–machine interaction studies, researchers begin to try not taking a human-centric or machine-centric perspective. They no longer regard a machine as the product of the “objectification of man’s essential power,” but build an “intersubjective” relation with blending and interpenetration. Dynamic value in human–machine interaction is gradually created and becomes the key to the transition from interpersonal interaction to human–machine interaction. From the beginning when human hands were enslaved by machines and humans were deprived of their abilities by machines to when AI frees human bodies, human– machine interaction has been by no means limited to the production and communication of information. Also involved in the interaction are various complex forms of connection like emotional communication and the perception of human bodies. Human–machine interaction opens up a new interaction mode and relations between human and machine have also come to a new turn. Researchers’ perspective has also gradually changed from confrontation between subject and object to intersubjectivity. In a word, the advent of human–machine interaction didn’t create a completely separative or substituting relation with interpersonal interaction. How to, by using the study of it, turn to intersubjective affective turn and body turn of a deeper level and study the new relation structure that will soon be generated between humans and technologies are new propositions in the era of human–machine interaction. Facing the unknown and the future, we need to think more creatively and in depth.

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5.2 Ubiquitous Smart Communities What new forms of human community construction have emerged as a result of the intervention of smart technologies? What are the new entrances, new connections, new roles?

5.2.1 Voices as a Smart Gateway In the previous section, we learned that social network has become a hot spot in artificial intelligence. Facebook, Toutiao or Baidu, more and more social platforms are actively embracing artificial intelligence and entering the age of social intelligence. In this section, I will start with intelligent community to introduce to you some new trends of social intelligence. In this lesson, I will first introduce how does voice become a daily entrance of intelligent interaction. Looking around, you may see that in our daily life today, intelligent voice service is increasingly indispensable. Whether it is WeChat voice messaging, smartphone voice assistants, or smart speakers represented by Xiaodu, the dialogue ability of such chat robots (chatbots) is based on the exploration of massive online public data. Different from the training of early expert systems, namely teaching artificial intelligence to speak, today’s chatbots depend on artificial neural network technology to find out the law of interpersonal dialogue from online data, so as to provide humanized response to various words. Let’s check out how Xiaowei, a leader in the intelligent voice industry, has grown. Xiaowei is an intelligent service system provided by WeChat’s AI team and also an open platform for intelligent services. Hardware connected to Xiaowei can quickly have auditory and visual perception capabilities, thus helping intelligent hardware manufacturers realize human–computer voice interaction and audio and video service capabilities. When using Xiaowei, by just calling Xiaowei, you can start playing music and videos, listening to stories and news, inquiring about the weather, learning English, chatting with friends, creating task reminders, setting alarm clocks, and so on. Xiaowei can also interact with various intelligent devices, controlling lighting, air conditioning and TV, for instance, and can also learn a lot of things through image recognition. Sounds cool, right? Well, let’s welcome the Age of AI, and connect the physical world with voice. Specifically, Xiaowei has the following five advantages. Firstly, accurate phonetic and semantic understanding. Secondly, support for diversified dialects. Thirdly, efficient voiceprint recognition. Fourthly, quick humming recognition. Fifthly, accurate original sound removal. Just like the tenet to make the world more open and connected stressed by the natural language processing and speech recognition function research team of WeChat, language service is an inevitable way for social software. Xiaowei’s AI language ability is also reflected in the following four aspects. Firstly, voice recognition. It means to apply linguistic and psychological knowledge, with the support of the built-in chip, and through the design of neural network, to intelligently convert

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text into natural language flows, which is part of man–machine dialogue to make machines speak. Secondly, emotion recognition. It means to analyse the emotional conditions in the user’s language instructions with specific algorithms. And at the same time, emotion recognition of language can be reflected on devices with screens through visualized expressions. Thirdly, real-time translation. It supports real-time translation between Chinese and English, which can be broadcast by voice. Fourthly, man–computer dialogue. After providing enough dialog data, Xiaowei can help users provide the automatic dialogue capabilities of machine based on such data, and is willing to be used for making personal dialogue robots, customer service robots, chat help plug-ins, and so on. Xiaowei’s AI voice can: Firstly, help with the access to family devices with screens to realize functions such as interactive video calls and visualized interaction. Secondly, through the combination of voice and vehicles, realize voice-controlled navigation, music playback, voice interaction, in-car control and other operations. Thirdly, the combination of voice and sports headphones can realize such functions as waking up the headphones, and connecting to mobile apps to achieve interaction, so that people can do exercise outdoors more conveniently and freely. In particular, the smart chat function of Xiaowei integrates the chat capability as a supplement to intelligent services, making the dialogue more interesting. Besides, it provides the chat mode in addition to professional customer service to reject mechanical answers and improves user experience. Moreover, while the users search for entertainment or We-media information, it can chat with users, which can improve user activity and stickiness. Just as the WeChat team insists, dialogue is a natural way of interaction, robots are the best carriers of dialogue and communication. Besides, a robot should also be an emotional and personalized entity providing services to users. In this respect, WeChat has unique advantages, such as the IM platform, which is permanently online, big data, user portrait and closed-loop service, connecting people with services and people with people through AI robots. WeChat’s robot research also focuses on this idea to provide over ten million service accounts with automatic, real-time and intelligent services. It is also expected that one day, it can become a close friend of users to solve some problems in user’s daily life.

5.2.2 Ubiquitous Smart Connection This section will re-examine your social network and discuss its new trends and characteristics during the process of becoming intelligent. You can first open your QQ, WeChat and Weibo, and check your friends lists on these three platforms. It is not difficult for us to find out that whether on a closed social media platform, QQ or WeChat, for instance, or on an open social media platform, such as Weibo, to make friends with others, we need to follow two principles: the law of familiarity or seeking like-minded people. Our friends lists include not only people who have intersections with us in real life, such as parents, friends, working partners, and even hairdressers, fitness coaches, but also people who have never met in real life but having similar

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interests and hobbies, for example, members of a reading group, a mothers group or a traveller’s group, and so on. On this basis, let’s further imagine two cases. Case one, after buying a commodity, one can commend on his shopping experience, rating the newly bought item, putting personalized tags to indicate the significance of such item to him, and commend on other blogs or news websites that mention this item, and then his participation will help those who later find out and see these comments. In such a case, in all social networks owned by networked individuals, a new layer called the audience layer is added. It is next to the weak ties layer. In this layer, even strangers can play a constructive role. Networked individuals can create new communities according to their interests and even their diseases, online, offline or a combination of the two. They can also use social media, such as Weibo, to find people who have something in common with them and establish connection with them. Case two, Peter and Trudy have established a social circle about the Jazz musician Kurt Elling. They lead a meeting on Elling, publish articles, news, comments and personal information. At the same time, they also write supportive and informative comments on other people’s blogs. They work hard to maintain the activity of this Elling network. Networked individuals not only participate in social networks, but also play professional roles in these groups. Many interpersonal relationships are based on some characteristics instead of complete characters of these people. For example, a social network involving personal health may include family members, neighbours, colleagues, members of online and offline supporting organizations, people who collect relevant information in professional articles and medical reports, and some strangers who can help. Shuttling through different relationships and circles, networked individuals can form their unique multiple identities according to their own preferences, beliefs, lifestyles, professions, interests and other personal characteristics. For example, in different environments, a networked individual may be a jazz fan, a consultant, a researcher, an advocate of sustainable development, a software designer or a friend at the same time. However, no matter what circle he participates in, he is still who he is. While participating in multiple circles, one always keeps part of himself, the core part of himself. Networked individuals make working organizations more decentralized. The Internet and the mobile revolution have made remote coordination and control possible, and therefore, goods and services can come from many different places, documents and drawings can become attachments on the Internet, or stored in the clouds, allowing access by people from anywhere. Mobile phones and Wi-Fi-enabled computers have result in the scattering of workers, who can connect with others at home, on the road or in a coffee shop. The two cases above represent the networked individualism in the age of Social Media 2.0, which is proposed by the Canadian communication scholar Barry Wellman. Networked individualism is a brand-new understanding of the structure of social relations, meaning that the units of social interaction have converted from groups into individuals embedded in the network of social relations, or that the units of social interaction have changed from groups into individuals carrying diversified and interweaving social relations. Everyone runs a separate and unique personalized

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network of relations and can rapidly shift in multiple sub-networks according to his own demands. The Internet and other new communication technologies are helping individual develop his own individualized network of social relations, which, in a sense, is actually a state of semi-intelligence. However, the users need to make their own choices. Let’s move on to the second scene. For example, I posted some messages about BMW on Weibo one night. The next day, I received an advertisement from BMW. On the third day, I received advertisements from BMW, Toyota and Mercedes Benz. Obviously, I was defined as a typical car enthusiast. So, can this be called intelligent media? Obviously. But it is the primary stage socialism for intelligent media. So, what can be truly called intelligent media socializing? That is combining machine learning with artificial intelligence to promoting user behaviours based on big data mining and to move on to a more intelligent direction. Now we will take WeChat as an example. This is a group of user portraits. Using big data mining and deep learning, we encode basic information and other data of users, such as sex, age, interests, social networks, liked official accounts, and shortterm interests, to label user characteristics, and look for similar samples in another set through known samples. An important meaning of this is that through calculation, we can encode human communication to make human social behaviours commercial resources. For example, through visualization of the analysis result of the loss of users of a WeChat game applet, we can find the main reason for the loss of users is that the final exam for students is approaching. Through scientific computing, we can group such users. At the upper right corner is a visualized result of user groups on a two-dimensional plane, which can help operators establish corresponding operation strategies according to the characteristics of each group. However, we would think that when we modify products with big data, are we trying to spy on users or trying to provide users with higher values? No matter what website we visit, or what social products we use, when we know that we’re leaving our footprints there, are we feeling that we’re being watched and trapped, or getting better user experience? Is human social communication based on algorithms really a good trend?

5.2.3 Beware of Social Bots Internet trolls have been existing as a black case operation of the Internet. However, compared with the Fifty-Cent Party who posted on Tianya and Mop in the past, social bots in the virtual world are a group of trolls more orderly operated and more elusive. Social bots are computer programs that can automatically control social media accounts. They can behave like real users to post on social platforms on a certain topic or forward contents of other accounts, commend, or like the comments, or even participate in online dialogues and discussions. Today, we’ll learn about the harms of social bots. First, let’s learn what social bots are.

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Social bots are automatic programmed intelligent bodies without material bodies running on social media platforms that can automatically generate contents and participate in human social interaction, and virtual robots existing in the digital social space.1 They learn human natures by simulating real users on social networks. They can update social status, automatically communicate with other platform users, and automatically send and receive friend requests. So how can we identify social bots? (1) mode of speech. Anonymity, high activity, as well as expansion and amplification of specific users, topics and tags; (2) completely identical posts; (3) account name mode; (4) date and time of creation; (5) the same posting mode; (6) the same place of posting. The 2016 US Presidential Election stirred the nerves of the world. And social bots also stirred the nerves of the Americans. The American people couldn’t know for sure how many social bots had posted remarks in favour of Trump on Twitter and Facebook. According to Xinhua News Agency, at the 2016 US Presidential Election, some computer scientists were surprised to find that those guiding public opinion on Twitter and other platforms were not an ordinary Internet trolls, social bots had replaced zombie fans in the past, becoming an important factor affecting American politics on social media. Unlike zombie fans, which appeared a few years ago, Internet trolls made of social bots not only work to increase the fans of some politician and make him more popular, but participate more in the discussion of political topics, interact with other users, and affect their political views and decisions. According to a recent study in the United States, at the 2016 US Presidential Election, the elected president Trump, Hillary Clinton and other candidates also fought hard on social platforms. Many related remarks came from social bots. Researchers found through detection algorithms that about 19% of election-related tweets came from social bots. According to Emilio Ferrara, a scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute, multiple studies have shown that people’s opinions will be affected by the information they acquire from the Internet. And these social bots can play an important role in shaping people’s views. Philip N. Howard, Professor at Oxford Internet Institute, also said that Robot accounts would be used by people in more complicated ways in the future to influence public opinion and blur the truth, accompanied by false news propaganda.2 The practice of social bots in the US Presidential Election also shows that in the politics, robot trolls will cause the political views of Internet users to become more extreme, and even cause an uncontrollable ripple effect on social media. In view of the worries about the robot trolls, computer experts are designing methods to identify such accounts, such as analysing online behaviours of suspected robot trolls and their social relations on the Internet using machine learning algorithms and AI technology. However, although technically finding out these robot trolls is relatively easy, it is very difficult to identify the people behind them. Computer experts pointed out that parties, governments and even individuals could send and deploy a large number of 1 Gehl

and Bakardjeva (2017). and Killanyi (2016).

2 Howard

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robot trolls. In fact, tools are already available on the Internet to build social bots with different degrees of complexity. In addition to politics, social bots can also invade our daily life. Human beings never lack imagination. I believe that you used to have or are having a lot of wonderful imagination for your future partner, as well as various expectations about being in love with him or her. Today, the Internet is more and more developed, and people spend more and more time immersed in the Internet. Many people choose to find their partners through platforms like Jiayuan or Baihe. Someone asked on Zhihu how the chatbots of Jiayuan are working? And the most liked response is as follows: Many people worry that the purpose of Jiayuan to make an AI is to make users chat with robots. That’s not true. All letters from Jiayuan are sent as triggered by the users. However, robots can indeed be used to assist users to chat with people of the opposite sex. One frequent embarrassment for the chat between two strangers is that they don’t know what to talk about next. We are considering customizing a robot chat instructor for each user of Jiayuan with AI. It can provide the user with suggestions on how to talk with the other person, thus improving the users’ communication ability. Since AI can help users to chat up girls, one day, smart social bots can completely replace the users to chat with and be in love with real users. However, people can hardly tell that they are actually chatting with a social bot. Microsoft Xiao Bing has already had such potential. It is fully competent to disguise itself as a person to date with a human in the virtual world. We’re not speculating whether Microsoft’s social bots can offer such service, we only talk about the possibility in reality, as a reference for the future. On the harms of intelligent technology, there are a lot of more examples. For example, on Tinder, a mobile dating app, there are often robots disguised as human beings, in order to get the access to the cameras or credit card information of the users. We should be more vigilant against the technical breakthroughs and applications of social bots in simulating human emotional communication behaviours and their replacement in human emotional labour, which will deepen the commercialization and rationalization of the motional labour market, cause emotional labour to be mechanical and algorithm-based, tools be rationalized, and the private domain of human emotions be commercialized by capital, and further rationalized and automated as driven by technology. Emotional communication will be brought into the market by social media platforms and become commodities that can be bought with money; human emotions can be computed, encoded and copied, then be valued, produced and sold, and eventually becoming part of the capital market. Finally, what we are concerned about is that if someone operates social bots to penetrate into people’s real social life, trying to influence people’s voting, guide people’s views and steal people’s privacy, that will be a very dangerous thing.

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5.3 New Social Network Ecosystem in the Smart Era This section will lead you to think about a question: driven by intelligent technology, has there been a new ecosystem for social network? Today, in the age of intelligence, social media has become a polymer of commercial platform databases and algorithms. Let’s take a look at their respective characteristics. Beyond all doubt, behind each social media platform we’re using today, they are commercial companies, the BAT, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. So, we are not surprised at all that social media under capital control are achieving their goals of commercialization and entertainment by selling hot searches that make people consider that everyone is paying attention to them. Then let’s see what social media platforms are doing under the monopoly of capital. Making money. What do they make money from? Data. As users of social media, we contribute a variety of data, for example, the state we share on WeChat Moments, the selfies we uploaded, advertorials and songs we sing on Changba. In addition to the ability to collect massive data, social media have an important ability, processing data with algorithms to make data meaningful. Algorithms embedded in online platforms can offer corresponding search results according to the area, time and previous activities of users. Such recommendation algorithms for providing filtered results after personalized search are called filter bubbles. The websites are like bubbles, which isolate users from other information on the websites, making people immersed in their preferred information world. In fact, in social media, everyone lives in his own world. Algorithms make everyone immersed in his own information silo. When an earthquake occurred in Sri Lanka, I asked three students to enter the keywords Sri Lanka on Sina Weibo at the same time, and the results shown on the cell phone screens of the three students were different. You can also do similar experiments at home. Enter the same keywords on the same social software, see what will happen. Let’s look at the present times now. With the rapid development of mobile networks, and other technologies like the coming 5G high-speed network, big data and cloud technology, the intelligent ecosystem will face unprecedented blow-out development, making the intelligent industry gradually developing from hardware to software and platforms, from single technical applications in the past to the evolution towards intelligent network ecosystem. It is worth noting that intelligent technology itself has social attributes. In the age of mobile Internet, products with social attributes are under viral growth. People’s demand for social intercourse have caused the popularity of QQ, WeChat, Facebook and even danmaku. WeChat has more than 300 million users already. According to the statistics of Globalwebindex, 44% of the people spend more than 1 h on the Internet each time on average, and 18% of them even spend more than 3 h per day. And many intelligent devices are based on or equipped with social functions. For example, the smart bracelet Jawbone, which allows users to share personal health monitoring results, and Jiayuan’s smart love bracelet. Based on the development of social needs, the IoT company, Shanghai Yujing Automotive Information is also developing based on the social needs of drivers. The emergence of big data has

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digitized everything. There is no qualitative change in itself. Data are still data, at best, it has become regular data. But when such data encounter another factor: social interaction, just like a violent chemical reaction, another attribute of data, value, is generated. And then regular data become regular data that can be valued. And it is just these regular data that can be valued that have become the precious soil to make the IoT and AI produce real values. If we study carefully, we can see that what plays an important catalytic is social interaction. In the new form of social interaction, the social interaction between things is just the Internet of things. Everything connected through the integration of the IoT with social networks, such as a building, a car or a store, generates information continuously, and interacts with people. There are other people and things at the same time interacting with each other. And there will be secondary and tertiary interactions between them, just like the processing of information by human brain. According to this theory, the new form of social interaction will go through three stages. The first state is the interaction among people on the Internet, namely, the basic unit of social information generation. For example, you like a post of the WeChat Moments of a friend, which is a traditional activity of social interaction. The second stage is the social interaction between “people and things” guided by the interaction between “things and things”, such as the IoT or cloud computing we have today. On the established results that traditional social interaction has incorporated, the social interaction of things is introduced. This stage can be regarded as the initial stage of intelligent social interaction; for example, sports community social platforms built based on sports bracelets, Internet social entrepreneurs and IoT entrepreneurs. The third stage is the intelligent social interaction based on the interconnection of all things, so greater social network for exploring people and things. Finally, let’s return to social bots. Because of the relationship between intelligence and people, this will be a field that needs continuous attention and construction. According to our previous lectures, the key information is already very clear. As robots become more and more networked, and because they can communicate with human beings with natural language, you have to be highly vigilant about the object and content of your communication. When robots have the ability to record all of your moves, we still need to think hard about more problems. How will they store and share such information? The original intention of some information recording devices maybe just for fun, but they can be easily used for more unbearable purposes. Wearable camera Nixie, for instance, can take off from your wrist at any time to take aerial photos of your surroundings. It is not difficult to imagine that there is a high possibility that such technology may be used by malicious people. If the technologies around us can record and process languages, images and actions, they can easily record the deepest secrets in your heart. Where will such information go? Where will it be stored? Who has access to such information? If we refer to our online records, it’s easy to image that such information can become a gold mine for advertising agencies. If we get used to the life with robots, every move, every word of us may be overexposed. How can we introduce robots into our families, public places and social life in the safest way? We should stay cautiously optimistic with these intelligent machines instead of simply believing that they will

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be our intimate companions. We should see clearly that we must draw a clear line from the robots that have the ability to deceive or control us. Maybe we should consider extending the reach of consumer protection agencies or establish policy mechanisms with the core purpose to supervise robots. Just like the birth of broadcasting, which gave birth to the US Federal Radio Commission, with the progress of robot technology, we may also need to set up a special entity to be responsible for integrating this technology into the society. In this way, when robots try to steal our credit cards or grip our hair, we can complain to the competent authority.

Chapter 6

Platform Society—The Trend of Smart Media Communication

The platform is not only a popular concept in the Internet economy but has also become the key to the current social transformation. It uses smart technology to build new communication mechanisms and social ecologies that have an overall impact.

6.1 New Smart Mechanism of Platform Society The three core features of the platform society are datafication, commercialization and selection. How should we understand these three characteristics, and how should we reflect on them?

6.1.1 Datafication This section will lead to into the platform society to learn about the new intelligent mechanism and ecological application of the platform society. Speaking of platform society, we have to mention a latest book of Oxford University Press, “The Platform Society”, written by José van Dijck, a famous professor at Utrecht University; Thomas Poell, a senior lecturer at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam; and Martijn de Waal, a lecturer at the Drama and Citizen Media Research Group of the Department of Applied Sciences, University of Amsterdam.1 It is written in the first chapter of “The Platform Society” that everyone in the world can rent an apartment abroad via Airbnb, a short-term rent platform based in the USA, find statistics courses via Coursera, a public free online course, join the patients’ social platform PatientsLikeMe to exchange disease information, call a taxi via Uber or 1 Van

Dijck et al. (2018).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 P. Duan et al., Communication of Smart Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9464-9_6

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read news in real time via Facebook. In this world, the influence of various platform organizations has penetrated into the core of the society. The commitment of Internet platforms is that they provide personalized services, contribute to innovation and economic growth, and avoid cumbersome institutional or industrial burden at the same time. According to Professor Hu Yong of the School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University, to judge whether a company is an internet platform, from the perspective of the company and the industry, there are four major standards.2 The first is that the company has financial strength, whether in huge market value, abundant cash or reliable core profit-making machine. The second is that the company has direct access to a large number of consumers. The third is that the company has in-depth cooperation with a large number of consumers and obtain massive data through continuous and meaningful participation of the users. The fourth is that the company is built on the basis of platform operating systems and has rich experience. These platform operating systems are defended and supported by vibrant developer communities. In the book “The Platform Society”, the three authors have a comprehensive analysis on today’s complicated world. In this world, the influence of various platform organizations has penetrated into the core of the society, for example, disrupting the employment market and labour relations, deliberately avoiding the mechanism, changing the ways of the citizens in practice and social interaction, and affecting the democratic process. This book questions the roles played by network platforms in western social organizations. First of all, how do the platform mechanisms work? What are their effects? Secondly, how are the platforms incorporate public values to ultimately benefit the public. “The Platform Society” analyses the competition of ideological systems as well as the fierce competition among social actors, the market, the government and organizations. It also proposes the question that in the platform society, who is or who should be responsible for establishing public values and standards of common interests. Public values certainly include privacy, accuracy, security and confidentiality, but they also involve aspects with wider social impact, such as fairness, democratic management and accountability mechanisms. These values are the key to the platform competition in the global community. From the social perspective, the platform society has three core characteristics, datafication, commercialization and selectivity, which are also the trends of intelligent media communication. Today, we’ll first explain to you the mechanism of datafication. You will not feel strange about big data. After the debut of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, the pioneering work of Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, we suddenly found that we live in data every day.3 For example, in the past, we just needed to wave on the street to call a taxi, nothing about data; and now, the taxi-hailing platforms have turn taxi-hailing behaviours into data such as rating of taxi drivers, and travel routes. That is to say, the characteristics of datafication is reflected by that many aspects of the society that were not quantified in the past 2 Hu

and Ren (2019).

3 Mayer-Schönberger

and Cukier (2013).

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have gradually been quantified into data. In this highly interconnected era, almost all behaviours can be traced. Big data analysis combines tracking data from various sources to work out the trends and assist in business decisions and the improvement of users’ interactive experience. Those who have obtained data and make full use of big data will take the lead. At present, various mobile applications and social media tools have become important sources of traceable information. Smartphone locating, near-field communication, iBeacon and other technologies have also made information tracking easier. Your social network friends are no longer simply friends, but data of commercial value. Facebook’s built-in INSIGHTS report is an example. With INSIGHTS report, users can learn posts they have or have not interaction with, so as to wisely judge what contents on the homepage can arouse the most resonant. Such analysis results will help users build audiences, attract more users to interact with them through Facebook homepage. Specifically, with INSIGHTS report, you can know how many users have viewed, liked, shared and commented on your posts, which helps people know what posts are more attractive, and then create more such posts to promote user interaction. You can also know how many users have viewed you homepage, and which sections of the homepage have they viewed, and then you can view detailed statistics of the audience by age, sex and region. People can use such information to post articles or ads for different audiences or customize contents that they are interested in. With INSIGHTS report, you can also learn about the operators of the users on their own homepages, such as visiting websites or clicking the call-to-action button, which can help us to adjust the homepages to attract users, take actions we hope they to perform, view breakdown data, and learn about the performance of posts on different Facebook homepages within a specific time period. We can know about the number of people covered by each post, their moods when clicking or posting, the number of responses and types of related posts so as to quickly analyse which posts perform best. We can also view statistics like age, sex and region, learn about the audience, and learn about the time they view the homepages, and channels they use to find the homepages, which helps us to create posts in a targeted way and get the best responses. The cases above show that datafication will help intelligent communication achieve a qualitative leap. As for this, Dr. Xiong Hui, chief scientist at Baidu said that the age of data-driven artificial intelligence has arrived. He pointed out that the main feature of being data-driven is that refined data collection will cause everything to be clearer. Baidu, as a data-driven company, is also engaged in the integration of data, computing ability, algorithms and application scenarios, for building a wholeecosystem digital AR platform. Apollo, the open source platform for autonomous driving, refined and personalized Baidu search and push platforms, the open platform DuerOS based on Baidu’s voice technology and video processing technology, and so on are all embodiments of such concept.

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6.1.2 Commercialization In this section we will learn a second new mechanism of intelligence of platform society, which is commercialization. Let’s first learn what commercialization is. Commercialization means to create economic value from data flow. Airbnb is just a typical example of generating new industries and profit models by establishing an information platform. As a world famous short-term shared rent platform, Airbnb has been developing as a textbook in the field of shared accommodation in recent years. It is hard to imagine that beginning from the first shared inflatable mattress ten years ago, Airbnb has now been capable of providing tourists worldwide with 5 million homes in 192 countries. Adhering to the concept of Airbnb for everyone, Airbnb is continuously developing in China. With the wave of shared economy in China driven by time-shared bicycles, Airbnb, conforming to the concept of shared accommodation is accelerating the pace of localization in China. It has begun to be integrated into the Chinese market, and keeps making timely adjustments according to the preferences of Chinese consumers. In 2018, the growth of Airbnb’s business in the domestic market exceeded 50% of its total business volume. In addition to the reservation volume in Beijing, Shanghai and other first-tier cities which continuously grows, Airbnb’s reservation volume in other cities of China grew by 170% over the same period last year. The accommodation sources have also grown by 2.5 times over the same period of last year. Airbnb is not only a travel company and an Internet community company, but also a technology company. At the beginning of its development, Airbnb, through the backflow of its own robot, Craigslist, built its popularity. Now Airbnb has gradually had a firm footing in data analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning. It has not only set up a special artificial intelligence laboratory and a machine learning infrastructure team, but also established a general machine learning platform for modelling training, feature extraction online prediction, offline evaluation, model deployment, and so on. At present, Airbnb is widely used in market pricing, search sorting, anti-fraud, accommodation quality assessment and natural language understanding. Moreover, Airbnb is also driving business development in other fields through technology. For example, Airbnb supports more than currencies of more than 190 countries and dozens of payment modes, so it’s facing the unique challenge of the whole industry as for the payment system. In respond, Airbnb, under the design concept of service-oriented architecture, has designed new payment gateway, and upgraded the technologies in payment status tracking and payment consistency measurement, and so on. As for security and credit issues, Airbnb conducts realtime analysis and tracking for every reservation, thus enhancing the mutual trust among people on the platform; as for the work efficiency of the customer service team, Airbnb has developed technologies such as automatic Q&A, thus improving the ability of the customer service team in serving users. Of course, the adoption of new technologies does not mean blind expansion and pursuit. What more needed is to integrate the technical applicability in their own business scenarios for analysis

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and verify the technologies in the scenarios to solve the problems and create greater values. For Airbnb, constantly focusing on solving specific problems and promoting the application of technologies is also an important task. For example, as for the housing prices of the landlords, because of the supply–demand relationship in the design market, locations, service performance of the landlords, tourist preferences and other complicated factors, Airbnb’s team has, through analysis and modelling of data, provided a complete set of algorithms to help the landlords in pricing. As proved by A and B tests, these algorithms will be more efficient than pricing by the landlords themselves, not only increasing the income of the landlords but also increasing the reservation rate of the tenants. With the continuous upgrading of technology, Airbnb has fixed its eyes on the Asian Market. Airbnb’s focus in 2014 was on developing products suitable for the Chinese market. In view of the particularity of Chinese social networks, Airbnb gave up its advantages accumulated on Facebook, Twitter, Google and other platforms, and began to seek for cooperation with local Chinese social networks, app store and payment software. According to relevant data, since entering China, Airbnb has continued its submission of patent application to the National Intellectual Property Administration of China through PCT. The patents involved include, for example, firstly, determining the probability that the accommodations on the listing will be reserved based on prediction model; secondly, providing listings to clients by the online reservation system according to the rating order; thirdly, modelling of the preferences of the landlords according to the relationship between the reservation requests and the reservation requests accepted by the landlords. Besides, in order to better fit the local development strategy of Airbnb in China, Airbnb is also leveraging WeChat applets to increase its local technical strength. In 2017, Airbnb released its first WeChat applet. This version combines existing open source tools and Airbnb’s existing technical architecture experience and adopts technologies like TypeScript and Webpack to offer more detailed experience that is most suitable for Chinese users. In the future, Airbnb will gradually explore new features of applets to optimize user experience and bring greater convenience to users’ journeys. From the above we can see that while providing global users with unified product experiencing, aiming at different markets, Airbnb takes localized operation strategies to meet local needs, pays attention to local intellectual property rights, and builds a global platform for creation and communication. Personalized push notification advertisements on platforms like Facebook and Google based on big data analysis have also brought great economic benefits to these platforms. Such advertisements locate users with online user data and offer more relevant contents, so they can provide both users and advertisers with better experiences. Furthermore, in Google’s advertising policy, it is made clear that personalized advertising is a very powerful tool which can help improving the relevance between the advertisements and the users, thus improving the return on investment of the advertisers. In addition, major Internet platforms are also actively cooperating with third-party data service companies. For example, CHARTBEAT NEWSWHIP, DATALOGIC and CORELOGIC to detect website traffic in real time so as to create greater economic values.

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Commercialization of artificial intelligence is also reflected in the traditional TV industry. For example, in 2013, the BBC joined hand with a well-known British radio and television creative organization, Red Bee Media, to develop a man–machine interactive trailer cantered on social experience for the third season of Sherlock, which the audience has expected for two years. Using Wirewax Technology, Red Bee Media embedded clickable hotspots in the interactive trailer. Users could click on the hotspots to seamlessly connect to exclusive video clips, bloopers, behind-thescenes interviews of Sherlock Season 3 provided by BBC. But to get such contents, users need to find codes hidden in the trailer to unlock them. In addition, by watching the live preview produced by Red Bee Media, users can also be directed to BBC’s official website, as well as Facebook and Twitter pages to watch the official promo and participate in the interaction. Moreover, Red Bee Media offered interactive hot search topic of Sherlock on Twitter to promote the return of Sherlock. Through the above measures, the trailer for Sherlock Season 3 generated more than 300 clicks per second within just one hour after its debut and attracted about 500,000 views and millions of tag clicks in 48 h. This shows that today’s basic artificial intelligence technology has gradually been mature enough to be commercialized and can thus realize its value in a more scenario, which is the premise of its commercialization. In China, on March 19, 2019, at the 7th session of the Central Committee for Deepening Overall Reform, the committee reviewed and passed the guidance on promoting the integration of artificial intelligence with the real economy, putting forward the overall promotion of the integration of artificial intelligence of the real industry, which is another policy bonus for the commercialization of artificial intelligence.

6.1.3 Selection This section will take you to learn about the last new intelligent mechanism in the platform society, selectivity. Selectivity can be understood as personalizing contents, services and advertisements through algorithms. In this respect, a typical case is Toutiao. Now let’s check out how does Toutiao achieve personalized recommendation? In fact, Toutiao’s personalized recommendation algorithm is based on voting. Its core idea is voting, one vote per user. If a user likes an article, he can vote for this article. After statistical analysis, this final result may possibly be the best article for this group, and the process to recommend this article to users of the same group is personalized recommendation. In fact, personalized recommendation is not made by machines to users, instead, it’s the mutual recommendation among users. Although seemingly simple, it in fact requires data mining and analysis based on massive user behaviours. So how does Toutiao divide people and articles? Content recommendation must be based on the audience, and only after determining the audience group can the contents be determined. Targeted recommendation is accurate recommendation. Suppose there are 80,000 people in the group

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shown in the figure, and there are only two categories, one called technology lovers, and the other entertainment lovers. We first divide them into these two categories, 40,000 people each. And then we find another dimension, region, Shanghai and Beijing; there are people who love technology in both Shanghai and in Beijing, and people who love entertainment in both Beijing and Shanghai. We can then divide the 80,000 people into four groups, 20,000 per group. Then we further divide them by age, above and below 30 years old, into eight groups, 10,000 people per group, the first being technology lovers, located in Beijing, over 30 years old, 10,000 people in this group. And next, entertainment lovers, located in Shanghai, 10,000 people, which are characterized by name, age, region and occupation. Similarly, the articles also be classified in this way. What celebrities are mentioned in the articles? When were the articles published? Where were the articles published? and so on. There are many characteristics, which can be combined for analysis. How does Toutiao judge to which group a person belongs? It is relatively simple to judge which group a person belongs to. For example, region. You can judge the region of a user according to his mobile phone number. Or a user’s hobbies, for instance. We can judge according to the reading habits of a user. If he often read articles about science and technology, we can judge that the user belongs to the group of technology lovers. And the user’s friends; for instance, if the user registered on Toutiao, and his friends are all people of the entertainment circle, then the user is most probably to be in the showbiz. So through the behaviours of a user on Toutiao and his objective geographic location information, we can judge to which group a user belongs. The most difficult thing for accurate recommendation is not grouping, nor judging to which group a user belongs; let alone article attribute judgment since one person can belong to more than one group and he has many articles for selection. So, the most difficult thing is to choose one for recommendation. So how does Toutiao calculate its recommended contents. This is owed to Toutiao’s personalized algorithm recommendation formula. In general, personalized recommendation technology itself is not mysterious. In the final analysis, the key to the recommendation algorithms lies in data analysis and mining of massive user behaviours. Perhaps the algorithms are slightly different, but they have the same ultimate goal, making efforts to achieve the most accurate content recommendation. When personalized choices become popular, although the ubiquitous networks have provided a technical basis for the platform society, the reputation system is the cultural foundation for the platform society. The reputation system is a reputationbased trust procedure formed through comments, ratings, recommendations and other mechanisms in online communities. Looking around, although various online platforms provide user rating systems, the reputation systems are still fragmented. Users can establish trust and reputation for individual platforms, but often fail to bring such reputation to other platforms. As time goes by, among various types of collaborative consumption, networks integrating reputation capital will surely emerge. In the future trust economy, everyone in the digital world has unique digital reputation and digital identity. However, can such trust through personalized choice really make every one of us preserve our sanity in the future world?

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Episode 1 of the English TV Series Black Mirror Season 3 shows us such a future world. It is a world of rating. Every law-abiding citizen will have special chips implanted in the eyes for viewing ratings of people in his field of view in real time. The mobile phones are equipped with rating systems, allowing people to rate anything of the others from one star to five stars. Even when one is sharing photos with friends or greeting strangers, he can give ratings to those people. These ratings add up to form an overall evaluation of everyone. One who gets a 4 + rating is respected, one who gets a 3 + rating is an ordinary person, one who gets a 2–3 rating is despised, and one who only gets 1–2 lives hard. Lacie, the heroine, lives in such a world where personal ratings are highly valued. In this world, you can rate everyone you meet. One with a higher rating will have higher weight for rating others. A person’s rating determines the life he can have. She is an ordinary woman who lives on rating. At ordinary times, she tries to smile at others and always gives 5-star ratings to others at first, afraid that others might give her low ratings. In this way, she lives on with a high focus on rating. However, at the end of the story, Lacie removed the crystal from her eyes. She curses a prison man in a straight suit on the opposite of the corridor of the prison, who also curses her. They curse each other unscrupulously while laughing out loud. Is this the future you want? Another phenomenon worthy of your attention is that under the joint action of capital and data and algorithms, fake news has become a phenomenon that cannot be ignored in the cyber world. During this process, we have to mention algorithm with personalized selectivity again. Just as Professor Philip Holton of Oxford Internet Institute said, algorithms will make fake news generated from untrustworthy news sources and rapidly spread on social network platforms like wildfire. After the Brexit and US presidential elections in 2016, Facebook was involved in a crisis of fake news and started continuous struggle against fake news.

6.2 Smart Platform Ecosystem Applications As smart technology drives the platforming of society, all sorts of social boundaries begin to converge. From driverless to smart cities, from medical robots to smart healthcare, from online classrooms to smart education, what else is possible when smart technologies are applied to platform ecosystems?

6.2.1 Smarty City and City Image Communication With the continuous development of AI and robot technology, our attention, behaviour, decisions and ideas are increasingly influenced by science and technology. Self-driving cars have changed urban planning and smartphones have changed our buying behaviours, sleeping habits and relation preferences. A smart city life is gradually being built supported by technologies.

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What technology applications can drive the construction of smart cities? How to maximize new technology application efficiency in smart cities? These are questions considered by all urban planners and researchers. From the applications in global smart city construction in recent years, we can find that different types of new technologies are used in the construction of urban infrastructure and living facilities, covering common areas such as smart parking, smart street lights, smart traffic, smart energy, smart medical care, smart buildings and smart environments, driving the construction process of smart cities with full strength. Back in 2008, IBM proposed the concept of smart city and prepared complete set of smart city solutions, involving traffic, medical care, energy, government, water resources, and so on to manage the city more efficiently, environmentally friendly and scientifically. Today, smart city has become a direction that many cities in the world follow when planning and designing their futures, aiming to use a variety of new technologies to improve the work and life of urban residents. The construction of smart city not only changes everyone’s life, but also inspires great business opportunities. According to a report released by an international data firm IDC, smart city construction attracted over 80 billion USD technology investment worldwide in 2018. It’s going to grow to 158 billion USD by 2022. In our country, since the Ministry of Housing and Urban–Rural Development of the PRC officially started national smart city pilot work in 2012, 95% of cities above subprovincial level and over 76% of prefecture-level cities, altogether over 500 cities in the country have clearly proposed to build or are building smart cities. Take smart traffic as an example. According to ITS114 statistics, the market size of our smart traffic projects in our country excluding highway informationization reached around 20.856 billion in 2018, and the number of projects was 1,167. In terms of market size, the market of China’s urban smart traffic projects of 10 million or above in 2018 increased by 13% compared to 2017. As a strategic emerging industry with new economic growth, smart traffic is of good market benefit. Taking into account future market demand analysis and related policy planning, we can say in the next few years China’s smart traffic industry can be expected to maintain highspeed growth. As the future direction of traffic system development, smart traffic systems are under construction. The integrated transportation management system, based on advanced information technology, data communication and transmission technology, electronic sensing technology and other technological means, can be effectively integrated and applied to the management of the entire ground traffic and play a real-time, accurate and efficient role all around in a wide range. Traffic congestion is the biggest problem of major cities today. It not only wastes a lot of time but also affects the city’s air quality. In this respect, the application of smart parking technology comes right on time. By using GPS data from smartphones and sensors embedded in the parking space floor, this technology provides real-time parking maps and parking information for drivers nearby. Technology is used to “reduce congestion, improve traffic management, minimize impact on the environment, and benefit commercial users and public transportation”, thus making urban traffic more efficient and environmentally friendly overall.

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Smart traffic can also achieve regional synergy of signal lights, variable lane, ramp control, guiding display and vehicle navigation and make the most of the road network’s capacity based on the real-time changes of collected traffic data. In addition, it can also send the real-time signal light status to vehicles, advise the driver to drive at a proper speed and reduce the possibility of lower traffic efficiency caused by human factors. The twenty-first century will be a century of smart road traffic. The last 7 to 8 years have been a golden age for the construction of smart traffic in China’s cities. Currently, some relatively simple business linkages have been implemented. For example, Xiaoshan City Brain allows the use of the special service system of signal control for medical rescue, so the ambulance can drive all the way with the traffic light green. Another example is on-board RFID in Nanjing used for vehicle exhaust emission estimation and air pollution prevention and control. Business in many fields like public security, weather report, education, health and environmental protection requires linkage to traffic. There will be even more business linkages in the future as well. Urban space, as a carrier of memory and culture, is also the space for physical feelings and experience. It is a key detail of modernity. And urban spatial relation is exactly what includes politics economics, culture, traffic, education, and so on. When all kinds of social relations come together and keep interweaving and extending, they contribute to the sustainable development of the entire urban space. The entry of intelligent technology builds a new mode for multi-dimensional information flow in the urban space. When we build a smart city with a stronger media attribute, a more communicative form of urban space is also created. Deputy Mayor of Tours, France and expert in overall public transport design Hekina once pointed out that, “A city’s public traffic system is a signature product of the city. It works with fixed traffic and municipal facilities, constituting a welldeveloped public traffic system. It’s like a landmark building of the city.” Urban public traffic culture is a microcosm of the city’s space for public culture and is a display of the city citizen’s ethos and cultural qualities. Therefore, urban traffic communication shoulders the important responsibility of highlighting the city culture and building the city image. Only by making good use of the latest science and technology for actual data collection and integration and full business linkage and collaboration, can we keep the urban traffic communication system running efficiently. This not only brings new possibilities to the problem of the urban traffic information provider being the government and an enterprise at the same time, but also through the extensive use of technology establishes effective communication with the public, reflects real-time public satisfaction with the communication of urban traffic information and follows the comparison of the communicative effects between information communication and control. A real smart city is undoubtedly built with the original intention to serve the public. In a word, as AI and big data technology gradually penetrate into urban space, especially in the collection of media, a modern transformation and reform is also started. Key nodes like space, traffic network and media are connected by the smart city. Whether it’s the fusion of virtual space and real space, or more interactive and

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immersive urban experience, smart city and smart traffic have undoubtedly strengthened the communication mechanism of a city as media and opened the door to urban traffic communication.

6.2.2 Smart Healthcare and Health Communication As the average life expectancy grows, the birth rate drops and people care more about their health, and people in modern society put higher requirements on the scientific and smart medical care system. The well-established IoT medical care system built using smart equipment with IoT, cloud computing, AI technology and embedded systems can be said to have realized to a great extent the interaction between patients and medical personnel, medical institutions and medical equipment. Informationbased medical services have already occurred. By use of AI, sensing technology and other high-tech, medical services will also become truly smart. The combination of AI and healthcare has always been regarded as a highly promising emerging area. According to data from CB Insights, a company that follows venture capital trends, in the private market, medical AI start-ups have raised 4.3 billion USD through 576 transactions since 2013. Capital-raising in AI field goes ahead of all other industries. In the next few years, AI-based applications are expected to improve the health and quality of life of millions of people. Ways of communication between health workers and patients will be changed greatly as well. Major application areas of “AI + Medical Care” include clinical decision support, patient monitoring and guidance, assisted surgery, automated equipment for patient care, management of the medical and healthcare system and so on. Examples include the use of social media to guess possible health risks, the use of machine learning to predict diseases, the use of robots to assist with surgery and, of course, the communication of healthcare information by media. The overall development of smart medical care based on advanced IoT technology is divided into seven levels: business management system, electronic medical record system, clinical application system, computerized physician order-entry system (CPOE), chronic disease management system, regional medical information exchange system, clinical support decision-making system and public health system, respectively. Remote medical care develops quite fast domestically. Relatively more advanced hospitals have actually moved forward with information-based applications. For example, about 38,000 medical institutions have a WeChat account, of which 60% institutions allow users to register online. Over 2,000 hospitals accept WeChat payments. In addition, medical records, patient information and patient’s conditions can now be transmitted and processed in real time. This allows the internal staff of a hospital and different hospitals to effectively share relevant information in real time through the Internet, which plays a very good supporting role in telemedicine, expert consultation, hospital referral, and so on. Through this digitalized and visualized mode, limited medical resources can be shared with more people. Seen from the development of medical informationization, medical care becomes increasingly

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community-based and goes in the direction of health protection. Related terminal equipment like RF instruments can be used to track and monitor the physical signs of the family in real time. Through effective IoT, hospitals can diagnose patients’ or sub-health patients’ problems or provide health suggestions in real time, thus effectively reducing and controlling the occurrence and development of diseases. Besides, IoT technology will also play a huge role when applied to drug management and medication. With the development of the mobile Internet, medical care will also get more personalized and mobile in the future. Compared with traditional medical care, the introduction of AI into medical services can help balance differences in medical levels, improve the accuracy and efficiency of medical diagnoses, help doctors achieve early screening of diseases, and search a large number of past cases, treatment programs and literature through AI’s strong searching capability to propose a comprehensive treatment plan, reducing the possibility of misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis. The introduction of AI undoubtedly pushed the progress of modern medicine, but we should know there’s still a long way to go before it is widely used in practice. From construction to being experienced by all, it keeps updating and iterating quickly, and receives more use feedback, but we should believe that a smart city makes it possible to connect everything, integrate people, buildings, traffic and environment into the entire data network, thus improving urban services and achieving a higher level of health communication. China Anti-Cancer Association and Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention once defined “health communication” as the process of using a variety of media channels combined with a variety of means of communication to produce and share health information for better protection of our health and lives. It’s a social practical activity conducted in a particular social and historical background to communicate information and popularize health knowledge. To be more specific, health report by the mass media, the communication of some health policies of our country we may want to know, and social culture are all very important contents in the study of health communication. Specifically, compared with traditional media, health communication through mobile medical care app has shown the following features: multiple communication agents, experts coexisting with common people, communication content more comprehensive, and communicating both professional knowledge of disease prevention and control and information of healthy lifestyle and health philosophy. In terms of communication channels, several new media platforms like Weibo, WeChat and social Q&A sites have been made full use of. Smart wearable devices can also be used at the same time as offline channels for three-dimensional communication. In terms of communication object, there’re increasingly more young users with stronger autonomy and participation. However, like everything else, it has two sides as well. For example, health communication through mobile medical care app has a two-way impact on users and society. On one hand, it does raise users’ health awareness, help them turn health philosophy into effective health behaviours and play a positive role in improving the medical and health service system, building a harmonious doctor–patient relation, and popularizing health knowledge, but at the same time, problems that occur during

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the health communication process of smart systems cannot be ignored, such as low frequency of use due to product feature defects, doubts about the credibility of health information due to lax supervision, health knowledge not easy enough to understand due to lack of communication skills, too much health merchandise marketing due to commercial pursuit and limited number of communication objects due to insufficient product promotion. In addition, the long-term operation mode of small-scale and non-clustered industrial development, and problems like high costs, security and user privacy have also restricted the further development of smart medical care. Our government released its AI plan in 2017, hoping that by 2030 we can be a global leader in AI research. Medical care is one of four focus areas for the first AI applications in China. When Chinese investors increase investment in overseas start-ups, our local medical care AI start-ups are thriving as well. Chinese tech giants are also introducing products of other countries into China by cooperation. Only a few years ago, China’s trading activity was still negligible, but today our ranking in the global medical care AI market has climbed dramatically. In the first half of 2018, China had surpassed the UK and become the second most active country in global medical care AI trading activity. Policy implementation and technical support will surely drive the development of smart medical care. Besides, we also need to use technical means like intelligent media, by perfecting product quality, building professional operation teams, improving ways of communication, strengthening industry supervision and valuing brand promotion, to overcome traditional medical practice, change the existing process, and thus give full play to health communication.

6.2.3 Smart Education and Education Communication How do you study? Do you study in a classroom together with your classmates or are you sitting anywhere with Internet having online lessons? How is your homework handed in and checked? Do you write on an exercise book or just click the “send” button? On July 20, 2017, in “New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” released by our country, the concept of “intelligent education” was clearly proposed, aiming to create a learner-centred educational environment, push welltargeted education services, and customize routine education and lifelong education. The proposition of this concept clearly shows that our country strategically attaches great importance to AI education. The emergence of high-tech technologies like AI has broken the traditional educational mode and made great breakthroughs in ways of communication, information updating efficiency, information content, convergence media education, and so on. In the face of the specific requirements in education, now intelligent infrastructure, intelligent support for the learning process, intelligent evaluation means, intelligentassisted teaching means and intelligent education management have become the basic application of AI technology in education. To be more specific, the first thing to mention is adaptive learning. According to “Annual Report on China’s Education (2017)”, our country plans to eliminate

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large classes of over 56 students in 2020, so as to provide personalized education for every child and strive for the comprehensive and harmonious development of each student’s personality. Adaptive learning analyses the obtained learner’s data through algorithms and feedback to the existing knowledge map, so as to provide the learner with “digitalized” textbooks, courses and exercises of personalized difficulty at a personalized pace. With each individual as a unit, it accepts different learning progress and content and help learners memorize and master what they have learned. Secondly, virtual learning assistant has also become a key part of intelligent education. The combination of AI technology and education makes the detailed and trivial knowledge acquisition during the learning process more efficient. AI can not only automatically execute trivial operations like checking homework, scoring papers and checking the absence table in a few minutes, but also use virtual roles and augmented reality to create trusted social interactions, and provide learners with such services as exercise partner, Q&A, customer service consulting and teaching assistant. With it, companies can provide learners with standardized services at a low cost and obtain lots of user data feedback. For education activities in a broader sense, intelligent education also brings an expert system. Combining AI with big data, the system is self-learning and is able to make comprehensive analysis. It can obtain and update knowledge, not just presenting rules and facts anymore. To put it simply, a complex problem that could only get resolved by an expert in a certain field can now be fixed in real time by referring to the digital experience and knowledge base of the expert system. Besides, intelligent education also greatly expands the scope of education. One example is narrowing the physical and mental capability gap between the disabled and the normal population, contributing to a fairer starting point of education. As the domestic curriculum reform progresses continuously, intelligent education has entered people’s daily life. When watching MOOC now, you are also a participant in the application and popularization of intelligent education. Educational communication is a special form of communication. With the development of media technology, all the parts of the educational communication system are undergoing corresponding updates and iterations. When Internet technology and educational communication are combined, educational communication has a superimposed effect and releases a tremendous amount of energy. Teacher-guided learning model is broken, educational information is more diversified and the identity of the educated is generalized and they are also given more freedom and rights. Online learning started rather early in Western Europe and North America. Not until 2016 did Asia take the place of Western Europe and become the world’s second following North America. China’s online education industry started in 1996. In 2012, the world ushered in the “Year of the MOOC”. It can be said that intelligent media gives educational communication unique charm of this era. The boundaries of teachers and learners are eliminated, and multiple subject selection coexists with two-way interaction. Extension of educational information, varied education media and the creation of an immersive communication environment inspire great creativity of educational communication.

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Although the use of intelligent media has given birth to the vitality of educational communication, its problems also require our attention. For example, the cycle of AI education applications is increasingly shortened, and the threshold is also lowered. Therefore, educators should correctly grasp the essence of AI technology and its way of application. Correspondingly, intelligent education mostly uses adaptive learning and personalized learning systems as well as comprehensive intelligent teaching systems. The ability of “learners” to understand AI technology and their all-around abilities lag far behind. At the same time, there’s still possibility that intelligent education may break education laws in a social context of many interwoven factors like different cultures, systems and value orientations, and so on. Its potential dangers of over-education forced education or spoon-feeding education are worth our attention too. Some pessimists even believe that intelligent education changes learning path, learning pace, learning environment and performance, and so on, but its influence on the nature and structure of education is very limited. Besides, some criminals attack and falsify legitimate user accounts, copy true information and spread false information, which directly endangers the security of educational information. According to statistics of Qihu 360, the websites of almost all well-known universities in Shanghai have been falsified. Students’ personal information, test scores and so on are all placed in a grey area with huge security risks. We can see that screening and filtering of mass information, hidden worries caused by deepened knowledge gap and uncertain education quality caused by the generalization of education subjects are all problems to be solved in the future development of intelligent education communication. This is also the key to improving the effectiveness of educational communication. We have to admit that the coming of the age of intelligent media has brought great power to various areas and industries of society. However, when technology lights up our way forward, how to prevent loss of value due to inhibition on our reason by technology is worthier of our study and consideration. Only by keeping a critical thinking mind when welcoming everything that technology brings us and taking preventive measures to bring the focus of intelligent education to “people”, can education always move forward and develop with vitality.

6.3 The Advent of Smart Society With the accumulation and breakthrough of key elements such as algorithms, data and computational power, artificial intelligence is accelerating the expansion of application scenarios and is increasingly integrated into people’s daily life. Today, artificial intelligence is no longer a proper noun in science fiction. It has broken through the technical turning point from being not workable, not easy-to-use to being usable, and entered a period of explosive growth. Through what we’ve learned from previous lessons, we learn that in reality, self-driving vehicles are constantly upgrading. Intelligent robots can provide efficient community services, and relying on deep learning algorithms, artificial intelligence can rapidly diagnose diseases, or complete the

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workload for a security analyst to analyse data codes for a year in only one minute. According to relevant reports, in 2017, China’s core industry of artificial intelligence exceeded the scale of over 70 billion yuan, and according to the estimates of the International Federation of Robotics, the robot revolution will create a market of trillions of dollars. As a matter of fact, the new generation of artificial intelligence is booming around the world, profoundly changing people’s production mode and lifestyle, and has a vast market space. With the evolution of technology, we will gradually shift from the Internet society to the intelligent society. According to Yu Kai, former executive director of Baidu Research, Founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics, the intelligent society, in essence, is a change in the production mode and lifestyle of the whole society, and the farreaching influence brought by the improvement of productivity. With the improvement of production efficiency and quality, smart home, smart education and smart travel will be popularized, and the quality of life will be greatly improved. This will be an all-round change. The intelligent society is a new concept following the agricultural society, the industrial society and the information society, and a more advanced social form. At present, with the coming of the global tide of intelligence, intelligence will become a new factor of production with the position as important as land, labour and capital. And the production mode and lifestyle see new changes symbolized by intelligence. International industrial chain layout and division of labour system usher in new patterns as guided by intelligence. With the accelerated integration, innovation and drastic changes and developments of various emerging technologies with intelligence as the core feature, human society is approaching the critical point of a new round of changes, the social form will evolve in an all-round and systematic way, and the intelligent society will become a more advanced social form following the agricultural society, the industrial society and the information society, whose arrival is being accelerated. As said by Stanisław Ulam, fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences, accelerating scientific and technological progress and the changes it has brought to human life patterns seem to have brought human beings to a staging point. After this stage, the art and life patterns in the human society we now know about will no longer exist. Therefore, the intelligent society will be an all-round systematic change in the course of human development. Its scale, impact and complexity will be beyond those in the past. It will completely change the way people produce and live, and reconstruct the interaction between among individuals, enterprises, government and the society, and change the social governance modes and international competition patterns, thus bringing lasting and far-reaching impacts to the development trend of human society. Inter-platform competition will become the main form of competition among enterprises. Platform enterprises are increasingly becoming the most dynamic part of the smart economy. Major multinational companies are evolving from the integration of industrial chains to the integration of platforms. Through the aggregation of resources and information, the industrial chains involved in the platform economy is also extending. It is estimated that by 2050, more than 90% of enterprises in the world will rely on various platforms. Major changes led by intelligence will occur in the

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production mode. For information sharing platforms requiring accurate perception, intelligent production lines for flexible manufacturing can be provided, which will lay a foundation for the transformation of the allocation mode for production factors into reverse integration centred on consumption. Production and manufacturing will transform from offering products to offering services, from one-off product transactions to long-term service transactions, from low value-added manufacturing to high value-added service, exploring possibilities of added value from multiple dimensions, such as R&D and design, performance improvement and transaction convenience. Meanwhile, the production mode will increasingly show such features as openness, sharing and collaboration, promoting flattening, networking and decentralization to be an important direction for the innovation in corporate organization. With open innovation and collaborative innovation breaking through the traditional boundaries, innovation resources will no longer be bounded by fixed organizations. Barriers to knowledge dissemination will be significantly eliminated. Innovation cost will be continuously reduced significantly. The symmetry of the information will be broken through. Innovation subjects, processes and modes will undergo major changes accordingly. Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, crowd-intelligence and other emerging innovation platforms keep emerging, innovation resource organization modes and transformation modes of innovation achievement will be more networked, open and convenient, and a new age of mass entrepreneurship, mass innovation, iterative innovation and micro-innovation will be initiated. Observing such changes from the perspective of information, we can see that the Internet makes the production and consumption of information more convenient, faster and cheaper, namely, the Internet makes information flatter. And in the face of massive information, artificial intelligence can make information absorption more efficient, intelligent and personalized, namely, artificial intelligence can add value to information. Artificial intelligence can also be seen as a funnel of excess information. And the information after filtration, refining and procession is knowledge. In the general trend, people are looking for opportunities in artificial intelligence. However, just as a child will face the pain of physical and mental growth, artificial intelligence also has to solve such urgent pain points. First of all, artificial intelligence is a machine simulation of human brain intelligence. The principle for the generation of human brain intelligence has not yet been clearly worked out. The brain science research is still in the exploratory stage. This is the first pain point to be solved for the development of artificial intelligence. The second pain point is computational power. Behind the victory of AlphaGo over Lee Se-dol, there were a lot of CPUs and GPUs. Huge computational power is required to complete such a single task. A go game alone requires such huge computational power, then what a future should the development of artificial intelligence go to? The third pain point is data. Artificial intelligence needs to be combined with various industrial scenarios and various industries and generate massive data to be provided to artificial intelligence for continuous learning so that it can be more intelligent. However, in the current industrial environment, there are no such conditions. Therefore, in terms of data, artificial intelligence has not yet got enough support.

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So how can we realize an intelligent society in the future? Firstly, technological innovation, and building full-stack technological capabilities. Secondly, creating a social shared data platform featuring intensive layout and interconnectivity of information resources, strengthening the application of data in the whole society, comprehensive integrating public basic data, optimizing the sharing mechanisms, consummating the sharing platforms, and promoting various data to converge sharing and exchange platforms. Thirdly, establishing the development concept of intelligent society featuring people orientation and national participation. Fourthly, it is suggested to develop and establish a standard system of the intelligent social integrating intelligent transportation, intelligent governance, intelligent medical treatment, and so on, and strengthen the application and implementation of the standard in all fields of the society to achieve cross-field horizontal and vertical information resource sharing and business collaboration.

Chapter 7

The Push by 5G

The commercialization of 5G has greatly accelerated the mobile Internet and has led to disruptive changes in the new concepts, models and practices of communication and media.

7.1 Disruptive Communication in the 5G Era 7.1.1 From Full Space and Time to Full Media On the morning of January 25, 2019, the 12th Collective Learning of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee on all-media era and media convergence and development was held at the headquarters of People’s Daily. General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Xi Jinping presided over the learning and pointed out that to promote the media convergence and development and construct all media had become a pressing task we faced. He emphasized that whole-process media, holographic media, all-people media and all-effect media had appeared with the constant development of all media. Whole-process media is one of the four kinds of media proposed by General Secretary Xi Jinping. What is whole-process media then? Scholar Hu Zhengrong believes that all media is whole-process media, that is, all media will be full spatiotemporal communication media and it is the carrier that can cover the whole process of the people’s information exchange. What does full spatio-temporal communication mean? The so-called full spatiotemporal communication is the information communication of the human society. It will unprecedentedly make information communication uninterrupted and ubiquitous. Information communication can break through the largest obstacles, that is, the spatio-temporal restrictions on communication, in the human communication history to the greatest extent. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 P. Duan et al., Communication of Smart Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9464-9_7

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Taking the 2019 CCTV Spring Festival Gala as an example, the 5G technology application of Central Radio and Television Station in Shenzhen Sub-venue of the 2019 CCTV Spring Festival Gala achieved the trans-time-and-space communication of the 4 K ultra-high-definition video contents. The CCTV Spring Festival Gala, which had been successfully held for 36 years, achieved the 5G transmission of the 4 K ultra-high-definition video contents for the first time at Shenzhen Sub-venue. It was also China’s first 5G transmission of the 4 K ultra-high-definition video contents. Guangdong Mobile, Guangdong Telecom and Huawei are the 5G transmission technology supporters at Guangdong Sub-venue of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala. To achieve the real-time communication of 5G signals between Guangdong and Beijing, the technical teams from Guangdong Mobile, Guangdong Telecom and Huawei guaranteed the on-site 5G signal transmission at every link of the live broadcast chain. The live video pictures were very stable all the night. The average end-to-end latency was shorter than 40 ms. This was the first 5G network application in the 4 K live VR broadcast of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala. It mainly solved the speed and latency problem that the 4G network could not solve in the past. Meanwhile, the fastest speed was used to ensure the ultra-high reliability of the live broadcast of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala video. According to the data prepared by Innovation Institute of Peking University Science Park, the transmission rate of the 5G network is 10 times to 100 times as fast as that of the 4G network. The peak transmission rate of the 5G network can reach 20 GB/s. A 1 GB classical film can be downloaded within several seconds in the 5G era. The end-to-end latency of the 5G network has reached the millisecond level. The connected equipment density has increased by 10–100 times. The traffic density has increased by 100 times. The spectral efficiency has increased by 3–5 times. It can ensure the user experience at the speed of 500 km/h. It can be found from the data that the transmission rate of the 5G network is extremely high. The capacity is extremely great, and the latency is extremely low. The advantages are not limited to those above-mentioned. The base stations of the 5G network include micro-base stations and they are mobile. It is not difficult to find that the realization of the full spatio-temporal information communication will be accelerated due to the technical advantages of 5G. People can spread information at any time nodes and anywhere. In the background of full spatio-temporal information communication, an event is always in a spreading chain; in another word, it can become some public information at any time, from its beginning to its end. Full spatio-temporal communication has replaced the time and space concepts, and it has changed and rewritten the news communication process of the traditional media era. The communication can occur anytime and anywhere. Full spatio-temporal communication has great effects on the traditional collecting and editing process. It is requested to build whole-process media, that is, the whole-process trace with the whole chain broadcast from the beginning to the end of an event. Media need to follow up the event in time, participate in the whole process and go deeply into it. The news event should be reported step by step, deeply and comprehensively.

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At present, in the whole-process media construction process, the overwhelming majority of traditional media have successfully achieved the whole-process communication, especially reports on unexpected events such as earthquakes and chemical explosions. The specific manifestations are shown as follows: Firstly, when some news event occurs, the whole-process communication is basically implemented. Generally, the interviewers and editors come to where the event occurs, report within half an hour, report in detail within two hours report deeply within six hours, and synchronously provide text, picture and audio reports. Secondly, in the whole news report process, communicate and exchange with users in time and begin to pay close attention to the user experience. However, the key and precondition of all media are complete reconstruction and optimization of the interviewing and editing flow. Otherwise, the whole-process media will become a mere formality. At present, only a few media organizations such as Xinhua News Agency, Cover News and West China City Daily have completely reconstructed the interviewing and editing flow. Taking Xinhua Cloud as an example, fully considering the general trend of media convergence and development, Xinhua Cloud has completely reconstructed and rebuilt the whole flow of the media from the interviewing and editing to the releasing and monitoring by integrating the all-media resource library system, the all-media interviewing and editing system, the new media release system, the big data spreading effect analysis system, the all-media performance appraisal system and so on. Though a few media such as Xinhua News Agency and Cover News have made some achievements in the all-media construction aspect by completely reconstructing and rebuilding the interviewing and editing flows, the overwhelming majority of traditional media have not completely reconstructed their interviewing and editing flows, which have caused the whole-process media to become unsustainable. Therefore, in the future whole-process media construction process, the interviewing and editing flows of media must be completely reconstructed and optimized to build a new mechanism and system for all-media news production. Firstly, the systematic thinking and the overall effect should be strengthened. In the whole-process media construction, close attention must be paid to both news production and audience feedback so as to practically strengthen the overall effect. For example, during the two sessions of China in 2019, Cover News launched a new reporting method, VLOG entitled My Sessions. Though, the video pictures showing audience the interviews of the reporters were neither professional nor stable because the interviews were shot while the reporter was walking. However, just the non-professional video production brought many audiences intimate feeling. Secondly, implementation of the media flow optimization and platform reconstruction enhances the news production capacity. For example, based on AI construction, discovery, writing, editing, release, traditional effect monitoring and intelligent mobility for examination, the beehive system independently researched and developed by Cover News has integrated the interviewing and editing system and promoted the intelligent change of the whole news production flow. Thirdly, achieve the integration and interconnection of the information content, technical application, platform, terminal and management means. The wholeprocess construction requires that a relatively closed news production and spreading

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process from the content, technology and platform of news spreading to the media management should be built. In the near future, with the application of the 5G network and the development of AI technology and the Internet of Things, it can be predicted that the full spatiotemporal communication of media will be quickly achieved and the news production and spreading flow will be further reconstructed. Human communication can be conducted at any time nodes and in any space, and it will release the four most important resource potentials of human race, that is, people, material things, financial resources and information, to the greatest extent.

7.1.2 From Full Connection to All Personal Media All-people media refers to great reduction of the media entry threshold and significant increase of participants due to the popularization and application of smart terminals such as smartphones. The opinion field for publicly managed and strongly guided by one organization becomes a flexibly balanced public opinion field governed by multiple sides. The unidirectional transmission becomes the multi-directional interaction. Similar feelings cause resonance, and everyone has a microphone, which is the media ecology and the current opinion field situation. Almost everyone can carry out news reporting and information spreading. Facing the real-time on-site reporting requirement, news media are in urgent need of more all-media reporters with expertise, to better give play to their roles in guiding mainstream opinions and enhance the media quality of all the people. All-media reporters refer to the talents with multiple abilities such as the thinking and ability to break through traditional media boundaries, the ability to adapt to the mobility and interaction of integrated media posts, multiple skills such as interviewing, writing, camera shooting, recording, editing and networking, and the ability to operate modern equipment and devices. The media all over China have begun to transform one after another since 2016. In the general trend of convergence media, the reporters for the two sessions were all specially equipped with octopus and spider-man devices in 2017. The multichannel multi-dimensional all-around convergence media require the reporters for the two sessions to have keen eyes and quick legs and be able to skilfully use various communication tools. With the advent of the 5G era, the requirements for all-media reporters with expertise ill become higher and higher. What are the characteristics of all-people media? First, all the media people carry out the whole-process holographic production. Live Cloud is a service platform of Xinhua News Agency for the whole country. Take it as an example. The application range of Live Cloud in media has undergone three phases. At the beginning of the online application, only live broadcast personnel of new media departments used Live Cloud. In the second phase, the application of it extended from the live broadcast department to all the departments. In the third phase, the application of Live Cloud extended from new media departments to all the people. The integration of new media and traditional media has changed greatly

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in the third phase. A reporter needs to distribute news dispatches immediately after his or her interviews. The first round of new media reports ends when the interviews are over. The reporter can easily turn some live broadcast materials linearly arranged according to the time sequence into a structured narrative news release or into a video news clip by editing the materials by using the editing tools of Live Cloud. At this point, the reporter is both a new media reporter and a traditional media reporter. The integration of new media and traditional media was achieved by integrating new media and traditional media into larger media. Secondly, a socialized production is achieved. A lot of correspondents cooperate online. In the past, correspondents often failed to find reporters and reporters failed to find correspondents. Now correspondents can shoot scenes anytime as reporters. They can find news anytime and anywhere, which has greatly reduced reporters’ transaction (such as editing and connecting) costs and laid the foundation for largescale online cooperation. The all-people production mode has shown extremely high marginal effect. Thirdly, the participation of non-media and self-media in the mainstream information production has been positively promoted. Users from many industries such as public security and fire control and rescue are now very active users of Live Cloud. They provide quick, fresh, vivid and true reports and the communication effect of the reports is very remarkable. To further copy and promote the mode, the relevant functional departments have reached their strategic cooperation agreements. The application of Live Cloud in whole industries has been promoted. Live Cloud has initiated a video blogger plan and organized self-media into a production system on a large scale. At present, everything is media, and traditional media adopt the crowdsourcing strategy one after another to lead more users into participation in it and achieve various effects. Firstly, lead local government agencies into establishment of government affairs accounts. Many news clients such as People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, Southern Home, The Paper, Cover News and Yangtze Cloud have led many government agencies into establishment of government affairs accounts in them. Secondly, experts and famous people from various fields have been attracted. People’s Daily has set up People’s Self-media Platform, which has attracted many experts to it. Thirdly, at some places such as universities Cover News has attracted numerous students. Cover News has led numerous students into participation in it. Fourthly, a Q&A board has been set up and experts from various fields have been attracted to it to answer questions. The Q&A board has become an important traffic source for traditional media and news clients. Based on their own strong content production capacity, traditional media have attracted more users to them and led the users into participation in them, which has enriched the contents of the media. Compared with the internet platforms, traditional media is far behind in the allpeople media aspect. The following are the two major deficiencies of the traditional media: Firstly, traditional media dare not attract numerous users and make users produce and share their contents due to their relatively poor technical capacity, which leads to low content production capacity and low traffic and further causes it difficult to attract many ads to them. Secondly, lack of the tools and means facilitating

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participation of users leads to poor user experience and a weak degree of participation. Many tools with excellent experiences such as WeChat, Weibo, Tik Tok and Kwai are all easy-to-operate tools with excellent experiences tailored for users. They can help users, even illiterate users, participate in and share the experiences well. However, traditional media lack corresponding tools and means. As for the all-people media construction, the following three suggestions are offered: Firstly, call on all employees to have correct convergence media transmission concepts, stick to the principles of the Party, adhere to the Marxist news viewpoint, have the right political tendency, keep a suitable working attitude and maintain the style and manner of the mainstream media. Though there is division of labour among the employees in the communication work of convergence media, the consciousness and style of the employee at each post should serve centring on correct news values and should not be kidnapped by traffic. Secondly, the mechanism and traffic reconstruction should reflect all-people’s participation, strengthen cooperation, opening up and the newspaper operation concept with an open mind. The convergence media construction needs to be strengthened too. To build a self-media alliance platform of online correspondents and strengthen online community maintenance and development of users, not only increases adhesiveness of users but also helps explore content materials and increase content production in turn. Thirdly, learning new technology cannot be neglected. All media people should be good product managers. They should research and pay close attention to new technology, new things and new phenomena, create new user relationships, build new media platforms, initiate new lifestyles, set up new traffic portals and design product cores with media characteristics well by escaping the traditional thinking and using the internet thinking and the methods according with the internet rules.

7.1.3 From Full-Feature Communication to Full-Effect Media In his book Men, Women, Message, and Media: Understanding Human Communication published in 1982, Wilbur Schramm summarized the functions of mass communication from political function, economic function and general social function. Environmental monitoring, social connection and coordination, and inheritance are included in the category of political functions. Social control, criteria delivery, entertainment and so on are included in the category of general social functions. According to Schramm, the economic function of mass communication is not only limited to providing other industries with information services, it is an important part of the knowledge industry, and holds an important position in the entire social economy. In addition to affecting individuals, the mass media will also affect communities, society and culture. Audience media and the society interact with each other, independent from and consistent with each other, restricting and promoting the development

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of each other. Schramm believes that the communication effect of mass media is longstanding and subtle. Mass media delivers information to people day and night. People trust the media with the most of the responsibility for the information provided and ask them to provide information from the whole world. Therefore, communication determines the ways people search and send the information, most of the ways people live and spend time, and the images of the surrounding environment and people’s own images in their brains. The so-called full effect refers to the comprehensive effect of the media. The characteristics of Internet technologies have provided the Internet media with an obvious trend of platform-orientation. Various applications converge on the same Internet media platform, which has rich functional spaces, far beyond that of traditional media, which is limited to information communication alone, and is becoming a hub for social data collection and operations. Therefore, everybody uses it. On this basis, the communication effect of the platforms will also be greatly improved and can be accurately measured. This belongs to the dimension of media functionality. The so-called full-effect media, from the perspective of communication effect, means that to achieve all-round effect, media, as a whole, should first have the communication ability based on traditional media, and rely on the modern spreading power of the Internet, especially the mobile Internet; secondly, have both the ability to guide public opinion and the ability to serve; and thirdly, have both social benefits and economic benefits. For a piece of news, it is also required to be subject to allmedia all-process evaluation, namely, not only evaluating its communication effect on traditional media but also evaluating its communication effect on the Internet. Traditional media are actively transforming themselves according to the laws of the Internet and have achieved certain results in the construction of full-effect media. On the one hand, the communication ability based on the traditional media is strong, and on the other hand, they are actively expanding the modern communication capability based on the Internet. Today, although the communication ability of the traditional media has been weakened due to substantial loss of the audience, but the modern communication capability based on the Internet has been greatly improved, which, to a great extent, has made up for the reduction of the traditional communication capability. According to the 2018 Report on Media Convergence Indexes of China, Convergence communication matrix construction has made the China’s media reach a wider user base. In addition to users of websites and WeChat, on average, each newspaper covers 9.797 million users through convergence communication, which is 24.7 times the average circulation of traditional newspapers. Each radio station, on average, covers 22.258 million users through convergence communication. Each TV station, on average, covers 49.931 million users through convergence communication, which is 20.3 times the average audience of traditional TV stations. The numbers of media users on various platforms are growing. In 2018, the Weibo followers of newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, increased by 14.1, 12.8 and 25.8%, respectively, over that of 2017. User subscriptions to RSS clients increased by 243.8, 169.7 and 279.4%, respectively, and downloads of their own clients increased by 50, 113.8 and 37.7%, respectively.

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Judging from the channel platforms with increased user coverage, it is in line with the trend of being mobile and social. Secondly, the service capability of some media has been greatly promoted. Southern Metropolis Daily is actively implementing the transformation of Data Think Tank, providing the local party committee and government with a good leverage for the modernization of the governance system and ability by exploring local service potential. Ruian Daily, positioned as an urban service provider, has built a bridge for effective communication between the government and innovators and entrepreneurs through the construction of various industrial parks, effectively serving both the local government and local innovators and entrepreneurs. Foshan Daily, based in the local area, through communities and other means, dedicates itself to local government service and community service markets. Thirdly, the economic benefits of some media have been greatly improved. Under the impact of the Internet, the business model of secondary sale of traditional media has collapsed, and there is an urgent need to achieve economic benefits and nurture social through innovative business models and profit models. In 2018, through elite personnel, innovative products and other measures, Southern Metropolis Daily realized 30% of its operating revenue from data products, achieved sharp rise in its net profit and made new progress in the intelligent transformation of its cover news. In 2018, the operating revenue from Cover News grew by 81% over 2017 and became profitable. Cover News’ revenue grew against the trend and reversed the situation of decline for six consecutive years. Fourthly, some traditional media have begun to conduct full-channel evaluation on news communication, and guide news production and employee compensations by the evaluation results. Full effect requires the media to pay more attention to the communication effect, improve the accuracy of communication, to fully promote the communication power, influence public credibility, and guiding power. To improve the communication effect, it is required to develop production modes according to the communication laws of emerging media. In the two-skin phenomenon of new media and traditional media, most of the “headline news” cannot be directly converted into “screen-flooding news”. The obvious contrast is shown in the production of mobile terminals, which is directly aligned with mobile communication from the very beginning, thus effectively promoted the “mortise and tenon joint” of supply and consumption. To improve the communication effect, it is required to grasp the audience’s demand for information reading and the prospects of the reading market to achieve targeted classified supply. Live Cloud’s live reports, with high documentary nature and sense of déjà vu, can satisfy people with rigid demand for close and constant attention to the news; while short videos can satisfy consumers with the demand for low-cost reading and fast reading of general information. The former is dominated by localized communication with high proximity, and the latter is dominated by mass communication with high documentary nature. To improve the communication effect, it is necessary to grasp the audience’s reading psychology. In international communication, foreign audiences are more interested in news containing love, human nature, stories and plots. Live Cloud’s massive vivid reports from the grassroots have been widely popular. In 2018, the news “Stop for Love: Warmhearted Rider Blocks Traffic

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for Old Lady” harvested 188 million views on the overseas social media platform of Xinhua News Agency. To refresh the record and improve the promotion effect, the media are also required to grasp the time, degree and effect. A Live Cloud report of the convergence media centre of Xuanhan County, Sichuan Province, entitled Path to Alleviate Poverty, Love in the Gorge of the Daba Mountains attracted over 7 million views and over 50,000 likes, and the negative comment rate in the over 10,000 comments was only 0.2‰. The time, degree and effect of communication were combined with specific scenes, and the love for the hometown served as a tie to connect all natives of Xuanhan in the whole country and the whole world. A strong mainstream public opinion field has been established on the mobile Internet. Of course, the full-effect media construction of the traditional media has just begun, and there is still a long way to go, which is mainly reflected in the following aspects: Firstly, the number of Internet-based users, as a core indicator to measure the modern communication capability, is still low. There is still a long way to go for the construction of modern communication capability. Secondly, on the whole, the service capability of the traditional media is relatively weak, which has greatly affected its transformation. Thirdly, the vast majority of traditional media, especially market-oriented media, have very poor economic benefits, and many of them are already unsustainable. Fourthly, the full-effect evaluation of most traditional media is still very extensive and has poor effect.

7.2 Financial Media Development in the Context of 5G Intelligence 5G provides a solid infrastructure for the development of artificial intelligence. On top of that, what prospects may lie ahead for the construction of melting media?

7.2.1 Refactoring the Information System An information system generally refers to a system using computer hardware and software, and network communication devices, and so on for the collection, transmission, processing, storage, updating, expansion and maintenance of information. For the media, especially during content production and communication, the following five basic processes are essential: input, storage, processing, output and control. In the age of traditional media, these processes were usually separated and were often subject to such problems as inefficiency and repeated use of resources. With high and new technologies like Internet technology and computer technology growing stronger and stronger, the media field is gradually showing a trend of diversification, continuously promoting the industry to reform in the direction of integrated development.

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As early as 2007, the BBC already proposed and practiced the idea of unified editorial department for centralized processing of news from all channels by utilizing cross-platform digital collection, processing and distribution systems and packaging such materials into products suitable for release through different media. This effort realized an all-round innovation of the news editorial department from organizational structure to technical basis and then to collection and edition. With the arrival of the 5G era, which features high speed, high capacity and low latency, as well as the development of the IoT, cloud computing and other technologies, the information processing, storage and transmission capacities will be fundamentally expanded or even changed, which will drive information systems to further undergo major changes. As for live video broadcast, a traditional live broadcast system is usually composed of the relay vehicle system, the signal transmission system, and the live light and sound systems, and the live content is transmitted to the relay vehicle from the cameras. After some technical treatment, the content is sent to the television studio through return signal transmission by means of optical fibres, satellites or microwave. However, with 5G webcams, the limitations of location and return transmission can be broken through, thus enriching the visual angles and scenes of programs. In addition, 5G return transmission also solves the limitations of satellite and optical cables, and greatly reduces the cost of remote live broadcast. In 2019, at the World Conference on Ultra HD Video Industry, Huawei showed a portable 5G backpack, which, with an embedded 5G CPE terminal, can be connected with UHD cameras and encoders and with existing 5G network with wide coverage, high bandwidth and low latency, can transmit video streams to the studio in real time. A large number of optical fibres, microwave systems and satellite relay vehicles are no longer necessary. The signal transmission system is simplified into a small backpack. You can complete the on-site collection and edition with just a backpack. While the relay technology is becoming lighter in weight, the whole collection and edition process is optimized. With the development of the 5G network, users will have strong demand for UHD audio–visual experience of 4 K/8 K. Meanwhile, under the technical conditions of 5G, 4 K/8 K videos will be standards for live video broadcast of grand sports competitions, concert, and so on in the future. In the face of huge data transmission volume, the requirements for network environment and bandwidth are very high. The commercialization of 5G naturally becomes an important promoter for HD video broadcast. 5G features of ultra-high bandwidth and low latency make the transmission of UHD videos possible. 5G networks can be used to make HD video contents with better transmission effect, allowing users to enjoy UHD video contents above 4 K anytime and anywhere, and can support 4 K, 8 K, VR and other new video presentation forms. 5G, with low latency, can also support remote interaction and collaborative synthesis of content, to provide content production with more space and possibilities. At the 2019 Spring Festival Gala, China Mobile and China Central Radio and Television Station joined hands to complete the first UHD live broadcast of 5G plus 4 K for the Spring Festival Gala. With 5G network and 5G CPE terminal, the 4 K

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HD image of the Shenzhen Sub-venue for the Spring Festival Gala was transmitted back to the relay vehicle and the studio of the China Central Radio and Television Station in Beijing through 5G base stations and showed to the audience. 5G plus VR panoramic video, similar to 5G plus UHD video, relies on the low latency and the strong wireless transmission capability of 5G. The transmission of VR communication data is smoother, and the definition can be further improved, thus the experience problems of current VR images caused by low resolution and low frame rate can be solved. In addition to media content production, with the integration of 5G and artificial intelligence, the Internet of all things can also become possible. Sensors can make people and things interact in an intelligent environment constructed by data, where every object will become an information source, and 5G has brought about the change that everything is media, allowing us to use various devices anytime and anywhere as an interface to the Internet to lead us into the virtual world and gradually live a pattern of coexistence between man and machine. Let’s take smart home as an example. With the action of 5G low latency and the IoT, intelligent interconnection of more home appliances can be realized, and the response speed between devices can be improved. Compared with human abilities, sensors on the Internet of things have obvious advantages in terms of breadth, depth and accuracy of sensing. They can report predictably, provide accurate and reliable data, achieve powerful computational power through the IoT with multi-dimensional perception, seamlessly provide you with personalized information with the collected information, so as to meet your life demands and create a virtual and immersive experience. Relying on the transmission capability of 5G networks, the information collectors, no matter where they are, can upload the images, text, audio and video information obtained at the site to the cloud through mobile devices in a timely manner, and send the original data obtained to the editors for centralized processing, forming a modularized material library, and building a streaming media database in the cloud. Besides, it is also possible to take the cloud database as the centre, to realize specific business production through platform-driven business processes, complete the integration of content review, distribution and management through the integration of operation support platforms. When all the materials and resources are gathered in one database, the editors can combine the resources to produce corresponding content products according to different media forms and communication characteristics as required, and then transmit the content through the cloud streaming media servers to different media channels. The live content can also be connected directly to the live broadcast platforms or Weibo, WeChat and news client through private lines or network systems to provide users with convenient live experience with low latency and finally realize all-media communication, connect different types of users and enhance media competitiveness. In the management and control of information systems, the in-depth integration of artificial intelligence technology with 5G will also bring about new changes. Artificial intelligence can help 5G in aspects like deployment, planning, operation and maintenance to realize high degree of automation and intelligence, and according to the current network capabilities and different demands of users for service quality,

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based on such features of 5G networks as being virtual, flexible and customizable, to realize the deployment of online and platform resources to provide users with services with different emphases. On the other hand, it is also possible to introduce AI technologies such as face recognition to realize tag-based management of resource contents, assist in cataloguing and retrieval, improve overall work efficiency and realize full-day monitoring of content resources, accurate data statistics, facilitating the management of content and user resources. The integrated development of 5G and AI will continue to create huge values, release our personal potential, enrich people’s life and further stimulate the innovation ability of organizations.

7.2.2 Reconstructing the User Platform Relying on the Internet network with ultra-high capability, 5G technology has brought all walks of life creative changes by integrating artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, and so on into it. As for users, however, the application of 5G technology is valuable and meaningful only if 5G technology can improve the user experience. In the advent of the era of 5G technology, a new generation of mobile communication technology, “The user is always right” is still the innermost core service concept, which is the same as that in the 4G era. First of all, the most fundamental thing is that all the existing contents and forms will be greatly improved and optimized. As for the existing news clients, WeChat, Weibo, videos, live broadcast, games, etc., especially short videos, 5G technology can greatly improve their Internet speeds and bandwidths. The expenses will be greatly reduced while the latency is reduced. Meanwhile, the 4 K and 8 K ultra-high-definition videos will be gradually popularized on a large scale with the improvement of the technical capability. Ultra-highdefinition videos can greatly improve screen image quality. It can highly restore real scenes and the quality is very close to the feeling of human eyes, which can greatly please users and meet the requirements in the consumption and entertainment field and some application fields such as the monitoring field. In addition, 5G technology can give play to the huge development potential of media and promote the upgrade and innovation of content products. The high bandwidth and low latency brought by 5G technology greatly facilitate the further development of the VR/AR industry. The existing VR devices are restricted by the current wireless transmission rate and transmission latency. The usually adopted HDMI cable connection greatly restricts the application range of users and affects the user experience. To implement the perfect VR experience, the latency shorter than 20 ms must be achieved. 5G technology has the millimetre-level end-to-end latency characteristic and it can be used to solve the problem. In addition, VR devices need to precisely draw pictures and a lot of data need to be transmitted between a helmet and a host. The ultra-high transmission rate of 5G can also meet the requirements of VR for data transmission well. Through organic integration of real world and virtual

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world, VR, and so on can offer users immersive experiences and better attract and serve users. Different from the user-centred concept mentioned in the previous days, scenarized experience refers to more emphasis on concern for user scenarios and understanding of them taking the individualized scenario of users as the centre. Scenarios include not only hardware elements, geographic space and time, and surrounding sceneries, but also software environment such as psychology of users and social atmosphere. Taking specific scenarios of users as the starting point, explore information requirements and service requirements of users in specific scenarios, then match the corresponding information and implement information services based on user scenarios. In the mobile Internet era, WeChat, Alipay, Baidu Map, Meituan and other tools have all started to use the scenarized thinking to enhance the user experience. Based on the LBS positioning system, the scenarios used by users can be precisely positioned according to the behaviour traces of users. Based on the scenario, information that can directly affect surrounding merchants and service agencies is provided. Then the big data on the terminal users are collected and analysed and individualized contents and services are provided for users. The advent of 5G technology can preliminarily overcome obstacles of the Internet of people and Internet of things and implement the brand-new media experience of the Internet of everything. Driven by 5G technology, the Internet of things can be used to connect a million devices per square kilometre, which is nearly 100 times as high as that of the current mobile network. Then all the things around us will be connected by the same network, which can greatly enhance the ability to collect and analyse user data. Data collection and big data analyses based on various sensors can help more accurately analyse users. Requirements in different scenarios and different states provide more precise scene adaptation and corresponding high-quality contents for users to achieve accurate and intelligent matching between information services and user needs and create good user experiences. Clouds and networks are infrastructures of the 5G era. Ends and screens are interactive interfaces of the 5G era. In the 5G era, each terminal device connecting with the Internet of things can become an interface for human–machine interaction. Viewing from the audio and visual medium angle, we have moved from the singlescreen stage to the multi-screen stage and we are moving toward the cross-screen era. User content consumption by using televisions, computers, mobile phones and tablets will be no longer carried out by using a single terminal. It will be accomplished by simultaneously using multiple terminals. The high transmission rate of 5G has enhanced the interactive frequency of user terminals. Multiple terminals including mobile phones, televisions, wearable devices, smart home and sensors can become media together and jointly create an interactive scenario for the user when they are connected with the Internet of things. To make a user simultaneously use multiple screens means that the demand for switching between different scenarios becomes inevitable. In this case, 5G and the Internet of things are especially necessary and scene adaptation and vertical adaptation of AI are also essential. For example, use mobile phones as input terminals of the Internet of things, make large screens work

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by operating on small screens and build a more diversified, interactive, service and experiential cross-screen ecosystem. In addition to that, cross-terminal interaction will also bring users further changes. In the current mobile media era, smartphones are core terminals of users. However, it is not sure that they will still be core terminals in the 5G era. The medium terminal evolution from televisions to computers and then to phones has the following two characteristics: Firstly, the terminals become lighter and more flexible. Secondly, they become closer and closer to our bodies. With the development of the Internet of things, speech interaction, virtual reality and other technologies, wearable devices, VR glasses and smart home are gradually entering the carriers from which we obtain information. Though some time is needed to observe whether they can replace our mobile phones, the interactive cooperation among multiple terminals will be one of the future development trends. Another important innovation of the 5G era is cloud computing. The advent of 5G greatly benefits the development of cloud computing. In the 5G era, the network speed will be quickly enhanced and the Internet of everything will enter its new intelligence era. However, the data behind the great development need great computing capacity and storage capacity. In the consumption-oriented Internet field, the migration of terminal computing to cloud platforms can greatly reduce the terminal hardware cost and this trend will lay the foundation for popularity of terminal products. The faster data transmission rate and data throughout brought by 5G technology will make cloud games and cloud computers become possible. Cloud games can be played only after terminals are connected with corresponding cloud platforms. Users will no longer need downloading any game resources. Games can be played once they are selected. All the game resources are used in the cloud servers of cloud manufacturers. We operate and control cloud hosts in real time through our user terminals and we can enjoy the game pictures sent back in real time. The ultra-high 5G Internet speed causes us to fail to feel any delay. Huawei used to launch a product, Huawei Cloud Computer. A remote cloud desktop can be easily used by connecting a phone with a screen. There is no difference between the remote cloud desktop and a computer desktop. All the operations can be carried out in a virtual machine of Huawei Cloud and neither computing resources nor storage resources of the phone are used. Application programs can be run through cloud data transmission and the only cost is traffic. The three major characteristics brought by 5G, that is, high transmission rate, high bandwidth and low latency have obviously enhanced the network response efficiency, reliability and unit capacity. Therefore, a lot of local computing work can be migrated to clouds, which enables cloud computing to give full play to its own advantages. The cloud computing era in which all things can be done in clouds is approaching.

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7.2.3 Reshaping the Media Industry The collection of news clues and materials is the forefront of news production. With the mobile Internet terminals, the traditional collection methods such as telephone breaking news, manual registration and passive waiting have undergone revolutionary changes. With Rich Communication Suite technology and the support of interface protocols, on the new collaboration production platforms, the collection and aggregation of clues have become massive, rich and fast. The colourful raw materials of breaking news and the collected clues can be output in various ways through various output interface protocols. Editors in charge and producers select the useful information, and quickly identify clues for the reporter’s tasks and topics. This accelerates the collection, categorization and filtering of clues. Interview tasks can be assigned faster and resources can be allocated quickly, which fully meet the news program’s high demand for timeliness. When the approved news script is put into production, the edited subtitles and words will be sent directly to the captioning machine and the online packaging workstation according to different paragraph marks. And the news presenter’s lines will be sent directly to the teleprompter. This greatly improves the efficiency of news production. The list of the actual broadcast contents and the news script will be linked to the video and together they will be archived in time through a digital content management platform. So, it will be easier to reuse them. Based on the list of actual broadcast contents, the news will then be submitted to different new media distribution targets where they will be automatically generated into matching formats and released to the Internet TV, mobile applications and other new media platforms. In this way, the program is recycled easily and efficiently. With the development of the Internet and social media, users have more and more channels for receiving information. So, the traditional media integrates the channels into the all-media platform that contains Weibo, WeChat, micro-content videos and one client to release mixed information. For example, on the eve of the New Year’s Day of 2016, CCTV News New Media New Year’s Special Report launched an interaction platform connected to Weibo, WeChat, micro-content videos and one client. This platform effectively integrates the interactive needs of each column of the news channel. And its technology links TV to the four types of mobile apps mentioned above. The user will get into the interaction platform when he opens WeChat on the mobile phone and shakes it in front of the news channel. The four apps can show the interactive content simultaneously, achieving cross-platform interaction. A variety of original interactive content about the New Year’s Eve countdown was created and released simultaneously through multiple platforms. In the activities like “Still browsing WeChat Moments? Join the CCTV news circle with everyone!” “My Annual Posters,” “V-View 2015” People watching CCTV News Channel and using CCTV News new media completed the special report with CCTV News while watching TV, shaking their phones, taking photos, writing messages and other interactive activities.

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When the user receives personalized recommendation content, the algorithm will outline the user’s media consumption behaviour based on the user’s clicks, the length of stay, and the report, block, forward, comment and like feedback, and then perform parametric analysis on user behaviour in a more systematic and comprehensive way. Such a user feedback system can grasp the user’s views or opinions on social issues and adjust the information content and distribution according to the user’s feedback. The measurement indicators abstracted from the news recipients can be divided into five categories of demographic attributes, source of following, credibility, activity and correlation. Among them the demographic attributes are the demographic related indicators commonly seen in user surveys, such as the follower’s location, gender, age, income level, education level, occupation and hobbies. The source of following refers to the devices and channels through which the user receives the information. Interaction indicators do not focus on the content production ability of interaction but are mainly limited to two types of indicators: platform usage frequency and user interaction frequency. The measurement of credibility is the same as that of publishers, that is, it is measured by mechanisms such as VIP and real-name authentication. In particular, it measures the proportion of the comments made by Internet mercenaries. Correlation is mainly used to reflect the degree of relevance between the information recipient and the target audience. As the latest application of artificial intelligence in the field of news, news robots have been adopted with high frequency in reports on industry verticals. In fact, before the AI reports on the Jiuzhaigou earthquake was known to the public, robot reporters had already drawn the attention of mainstream media worldwide and put into use. Overseas, there are WordSmith of the Associated Press abroad, Heliograf of the Washington Post, and Blossom of the New York Times. In China, there are Kuaibi Xiaoxin of Xinhua News Agency, Dreamwriter of Tencent and DT Gaowang of China Business Network. The full automation of news production relies on artificial intelligence algorithms. Computer programs can analyse the input data and write articles accordingly. And some of the existing robot reporters can even imitate human writing style and writing language, realizing more intelligent personification. Low cost rate of news production. Robot reporters do not need to get paid. Full automation of news production helps accelerate the news production and saves the cost of news production. Super effectiveness of news production. Robot reporter can quickly capture data and ensure the timeliness of news. The platform for analysing big data and the ability to predict trends have been used by the media in sports news and financial news reports. Contextualization in journalism means in a certain time and space, the process of meeting the needs that have been highlighted and enhanced by the mobile Internet and social communication. Contextualized communication is the specific information or service matching based on the real-time status of individuals. With the combination of personalized push notification by algorithm and LBS and other technologies, information transmission is conducted through social media. For example, the intelligent recommended and algorithm recommended information based on the user’s location. The computer abstracts the tagged article model and the user model based on the article’s interest tags, quality tags, and so on, as well as the user’s reading

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habits, browsing records, and so on. Also, it automatically filters out effective information by sorting, categorizing and correlating, forming article and user portraits. When publishing the news, the algorithm recommendation needs to match the article characteristics such as category, keyword and heat with user characteristics such as age, occupation and hobbies as well as environmental characteristics such as time, geographical location and weather conditions. So, the filtered information can be sent to users accurately. Different from the traditional way of releasing news which centres on events, the algorithm recommendation establishes a user-oriented model that gives attention to both users and events. Essentially it takes the event that the user cares about as the core and gives the user customized information. This not only saves time and cost, improves the acquisition rate, but also satisfies individual needs, making the model of customized information delivery for each different user a reality.

Chapter 8

Reflection and Future of Smart Media Communication

The trend is for artificial intelligence and communications media to become deeply intertwined. Where is the future heading?

8.1 The Future of Smart Media Era From traditional media to Internet media, social network and then to smart media, in the past 10 years, the media industry has experienced changes and innovations that have never occurred in several decades before. Disruptive changes in media forms have given everyone a highly personalized media attribute and handed over the right of communication and commendation to them. Then how will the media ecology evolve in the future, and where are the development directions of future media and future society? We might consider from the following aspects. First of all, the fusion of virtuality and reality. Future media will break the boundary between reality and virtuality, and, with intelligent technologies, promote the “integration” of the virtual world and the real world. We can conclude that the future media will make the “pseudo-environment” put forward by Lippmann become true. Human beings will be able to create one after another worlds “integrating” the virality and the reality based on reality and in line with their subjective imagination according to their own wishes with future technologies with intelligent characteristics. And such virtual worlds can not only connect ancient and modern times to create a “sense of time travel” for users, but also bring this place together with another place to provide users with a “feeling of freshness”. Driven by future media, the real society will be closer to people’s subjective world, and the enrichment of the subjective world will enhance people’s experience and feelings about the real society. The communication and interaction between the objective and the subjective, the real and the virtual can inspire people’s senses, psychologies and experience anywhere at any time, allowing people to roam freely in a world where the “circumstances change with the heart”. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 P. Duan et al., Communication of Smart Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9464-9_8

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However, human beings still need to be vigilant that future intelligence, while bringing to them “enjoyment” and “freedom”, is also some “restriction” and “restraint”. To some extent, it retrains the “rationality” of human beings, and let the value become “meaningless”. Perhaps in the future society, we can no longer tell simulated experiences from our personal experiences, or from our real memories. Perhaps, it will be memories from dreams. Just as the concept of “implosion” proposed by Baudrillard in “The Implosion of Meaning in Media”, although media information is everywhere in the contemporary society, most of the information and meanings are “imploded” into meaningless “noises”, without any contents. Under the continuous action of future intelligent media, the media between the real and the virtual in society will be gone, and the interference between the media and the reality will also disappear. The “blending” of the virtual and the real is likely to develop into an “implosion”, thus losing its meaning. However, we should not worry too much and give up eating for fear of choking. When using the future media, as long as we can keep rational thinking at all times, values, meanings, experiences and new social realities will be re-constructed. With the construction of future media, the future society will become more refined and beautiful. Secondly, future media in the context of artificial intelligence will be all-round “extensions” of people’s senses. McLuhan, a Canadian scholar, had a famous view, that is, “media are the extensions of man”. Future intelligent technology, as a core force of media, will support the future communication forms. And the future media technology in the intelligent context can promote the “blending” of the external world and the virtual world by realizing the all-round extension of people’s senses, so as to make the objectivity “blended” with human subjectivity. In the future society, the boundary between future intelligent media and human body will be broken, and human senses will continue to evolve into usable media, or even integrate with intelligent media. All-round intelligent human beings and a deeply intelligent society will become a reality. Besides, “Being In” intelligent image will also be an important trend in the future society. Future image is the core factor of future media. Just as “Being Digital” as predicted by Nicholas Negroponte. He said, “virtual reality would allow you to put your arms around the Milky Way, swim in the human bloodstream, or visit Alice in the Wonderland.” Future image in the context of intelligent media can create an experience environment like “being in intelligent image” for human beings. In the living conditions of the future society, you can stroll in the world of intelligent image as you wish, to feel and experience. At that time, reality and virtuality are “blended”, the subject and the object are “blended”, and human sensory experience and psychological imagination are “blended”. Future image can bring users to “inaccessible places” anytime from any place, to make them feel on the scene and get realistic experience. In the future society, “being in intelligent image” will provide human beings with an opportunity to seamlessly connect ideal with reality. With the application of intelligence, people can create a new possibility in the era of “Zero-point intelligent media”. With the development of brain science, the ultimate progress of human information and communication technology in the future should be to decipher the secrets of the natural human brain, and then integrate brain–computer interaction technologies

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with media technology to simulate and reconstruct natural human intelligence, as well as the information transmission between human brain entities beyond time and space. In this way, living organisms can realize information exchanges of knowledge and ideas through passwords. The future, a human brain or “intellectual brain” will develop into a terminal for sending and receiving information, social information will be shared directly by the whole society through intelligence, and the brain can always be in a state of information exchange. Of course, this is still an ideal and predictable state. The media is heading for the era of intelligent media with the support of intelligent technology, which has been the consensus of the industry and academia. Driven by the high-speed mobile Internet, intelligent technology will accelerate the vanishment of media boundaries, and finally usher in the age of intelligent media featuring all things being media, man–machine integration, and self-evolution.

8.2 A Vision of 5G Intelligent Media Communication The mobile network in the 5G era features high speed, high capacity, low latency and low energy consumption, and 5G, in combination will technologies like AI and cloud computing, will push the human society into an intelligent world where everything is interconnected. And what a leap will intelligent media take by virtue of 5G technologies? It is worthy of our expectation. The above four features of 5G will provide the development of media communication with the strongest foundation guarantee. 5G will push the media to realize disruptive changes. As mentioned in previous lectures, the media will transform from full spatial–temporal communication to whole-process media, from full-reality to holographic media, from all-connection communication to all-people media, and from all-function communication to all-effect media. The upgrading and iteration of media communication modes will reconstruct a more complete information communication pattern. In addition to changes in the modes of communication, AI will surely become one of the basic media technologies in the 5G era, thus affecting the construction process of convergence media, for example, reconstructing information systems, rebuilding user platforms, and reshaping media operation modes. We have briefly introduced the impact of 5G on media information communication modes. So, what impact does 5G have in our daily life scenes? With high speed, high capacity, low latency and low energy consumption, users can use mobile networks more efficiently. And low energy consumption allows a large number of sensors to be installed in our life scenes, thus realizing the interconnection of all things. The development of the first four generations of mobile communication is to solve the connectivity among people. 5G, however, targets to solve the connectivity among people, between people and things, and among things, which is the core essence of the interconnection of all things. If we say 4G has changed life, then 5G is to change the society. In the 5G era, whether commercial or home applications, the popularization of artificial intelligence cannot be realized without the support of 5G technologies.

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In home applications, the most typical media communication terminal is TV. Nowadays, home TV sets are mostly Internet TV sets, which integrate satellite live broadcast, program platform subscription, live VOD and other functions. However, a TV set still exists as an independent subject in a home. Imagine that when 5G and AI technologies are popularized, home TV terminals will change along the development path of Internet TV into information screens for smart homes, namely, players for massive, diversified online media information contents, which can not only realize remote control, but also support voice interaction; not only serve as a home cinema, but also be connected to VR glasses to realize further immersion experience; and also be connected to all sensors in the home to become a hub for managing a smart home, providing every family with a customized smart housekeeper. In commercial or corporate applications, intelligent media with targeted services can provide enterprises with more convenient and quicker use experience, automatically collecting and distributing news information for employees at all levels according to the fields of the enterprises and the work of each employee. As for internal communication within an enterprise, it allows for viewing permissions by department level and other settings, deeply combine documentary communications, calendar, online documents, cloud disks and applications, and, with open and compatible platforms, enables the members to not only achieve efficient communication and smooth cooperation to improve the efficiency of the enterprise in an all-round way, For example, software such as Lark or Ding Talk, is just media software for internal business communication within the enterprise and collaboration within an enterprise. After entering the 5G era, due to the great optimization in speed, capacity and latency, the role of such media software will be fully played to achieve ultimate improvement of office efficiency. Secondly, during the promotion of media convergence, the operation of the convergence media centre also relies on mobile communication systems. The convergence media centre can realize the integration of collection, edition, review and distribution, and the transmission speed of each process has crucial impact on the timeliness of news. The real-time connection of collection and edition can substantially reduce the time cost for news production. The emergence of AI robotic presenters is an innovation of the news industry in the era of intelligent communication. And the presentation modes of news are also affecting the user experience. When 5G is popularized, VR live broadcast can be used as one of the routine modes of news communication. Immersive impressions will enhance the viewing experience of users. In a word, the comparison between 4 and 5G is not only represented by speed, capacity, latency, and so on. Compared with traditional media, intelligent media is not only a change in the form of communication. The application of VR requires a great deal of network transmission data. 4G networks cannot satisfy the network speed conditions for its popularization. Therefore, VR, under the well-known conditions, still cannot be fully popularized. However, the emergence of 5G has provided the popularization of VR with necessary conditions. It is predictable that when 5G is commercially available, the VR industry will also rise and become a phenomenal product, and media users can obtain immersive viewing experience in various scenarios. Secondly, the characteristics of 5G also allows for the existence of a huge

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number of sensors, which, can be connected to each other to realize the interconnection of all things. There may be new information varieties in the media in the future, sensor consultation. The sensors operating in a smart city can report real-time news to the public through intelligent media to realize efficient operation of the city. 5G will provide the Internet media with a wider development space. The development of the traditional media towards whole-process media, holographic media, all-people media, and all-effect media, and the construction of the convergence media in the intelligent prospect require the support of more consummated networks; the continuous development of intelligent media also needs high-speed networks as the foundation for communication. 5G and the development of intelligent media complement each other. In the 5G era, we also need to be people-oriented to explore new directions for the development of the media.

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