Table Of ContentPredictive Technology in
Social Media
Editors
Cristina Fernández-Rovira
Department of Communication, University of Vic-Central
University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain
Santiago Giraldo-Luque
Department of Journalism and Communication
Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
p,
A SCIENCE PUBLISHERS BOOK
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ISBN: 978-1-032-10340-2 (hbk)
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Acknowledgements
The editors would especially like to thank Vijay Primlani and the entire CRC
PRESS team for the opportunity to publish this book. Likewise, the editors would
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interesting contents.
Preface
The months it takes in the editorial process to prepare a book determine its content.
The world can change suddenly and make the text obsolete. It may also be that the
book predicts what will happen just in the time that pass while it is being prepared
for publication. The battle to capture the attention and decisions of users through
technology, as well as the dispute over the possibility of predicting and shaping
the future, has only just begun. Facebook Inc. has changed its name and, at the
same time, has made the most blatant bid for the domination of social, economic
and cultural relations. The presentation of the Metaverse in October 2021, just as
this book was being prepared for publication, opens the door wide to the content
of its pages, which now become much more relevant.
Predictive Technology in Social Media takes a critical look at the main dangers
and potential of the use of technology to define, control and guide the future life
of societies. Written by academics from different universities around the world,
which allows for a global approach to the problem of technological domination,
the text becomes an essential tool for understanding how technology controls and
can predict the most intimate behaviour of individuals. The work explores the
problems of the predictive capacity of technology in relation to its algorithmic
definition, its potential to attract and control human attention, its complex scheme
of advertising management, the type of audio-visual consumption carried out
by people, its use within digital culture, its application to politics and social
mobilisation, its media impact and its ethical structuring. All these problems
have gone beyond the technical perspective and the seductive interface, and have
ended up affecting the type of relations between people, and between people and
machines.
The book approaches these aspects of the universe of technological prediction
from a mainly qualitative, explanatory point of view. It is a warning reading to
avoid, among other things, the destruction of free will, the disappearance of
identities (individual and collective), the collapse of will or personal values and
the disappearance of sensorial, human socialisation. It is an invitation to think
about a social relationship reconverted into perfect avatars-profiles constructed
with millions of sensors that now flood the intimacy and privacy of spaces and
bodies.
vi Preface
The text reflects, from a multidisciplinary perspective, on a very near future
in which humans cannot act as humans under their own freedom of choice. At the
beginning of the 21st Century, the book is a warning about the disappearance of
the Charter of Rights that built the liberal and welfare society. But it is also a call
to propose, to think and to build, from ethics and human values, a necessary and
urgent Charter of Digital Rights, linked to digital wellbeing and the protection
of people from the dominant platforms that have completely taken over the
contemporary digital ecosystem.
Cristina Fernández-Rovira
Santiago Giraldo-Luque
Introduction: From Delphi to
Zuckerberg – Conquering the Future
“So they put forth their hands to the good cheer lying ready before them.
But when they had put from them the desire of food and drink, the Muse
moved the minstrel to sing of the glorious deeds of warriors, from that lay
the fame whereof had then reached broad heaven, [75] even the quarrel of
Odysseus and Achilles, son of Peleus, how once they strove with furious
words at a rich feast of the gods, and Agamemnon, king of men, was glad
at heart that the best of the Achaeans were quarrelling; for thus Phoebus
Apollo, in giving his response, had told him that it should be, [80] in sacred
Pytho, when he passed over the threshold of stone to enquire of the oracle.
For then the beginning of woe was rolling upon Trojans and Danaans
through the will of great Zeus”. Odyssey, Book 8.
In the Odyssey, almost 3000 years ago, Agamemnon seeks the advice of the Oracle
at Delphi before setting sail for Troy. This was the usual practice taken before
any important decision had to be made in the life of the Ancient Greeks. During
the classical period, Delphi had become the most popular oracle in the Hellenic
world. It was so famous that its halo of divination reached as far as Egypt and Asia
Minor. Travellers came from far and wide to consult the future. Kings, politicians,
cities, businessmen and warriors submitted to the wisdom of the temple of Delphi.
For the pharaohs, the parallel between Apollo, God of the temple, and Amun Ra,
their own solar deity, was obvious.
The sanctuary of Delphi is so ancient that its origins are lost in mythology.
Legend has it that it was consecrated to Gaia, goddess of the earth, and her
daughter Themis, until Apollo arrived, deceived by the nymph Delphusa. She had
assured him that the place was ideal for founding an oracle, without warning him
that a monstrous serpent lived there. Apollo defeated the dragon by the Castalia
spring and left its body to rot (popular etymology relates the term rot to the Greek
verb “pythomai”, hence the relation between the death and decomposition of
viii Predictive Technology in Social Media
the serpent and the word python and, consequently, the word pythoness). After
punishing the nymph , the god went in search for the first priests for his temple.
To do this, according to mythology, Apollo took the form of a dolphin,
jumped aboard a ship from Crete, which he guided to the coast and offered the
sailors to a chance to enter his service in the temple, as priests. From then on, the
area was given the name Delphi (Greek for dolphin). Apollo would also be known
by the nickname Delphicus. It is possible that the story of the boat and the dolphin
has some historical basis, as the island of Crete is believed to be the place from
which the cult of Apollo spread throughout Greece (Echeverría Arístegui 2019).
The sanctuary also attracted intellectuals: Plutarch was a priest at Delphi,
Pythagoras trained a priestess, and Socrates ironically claimed that the oracle had
named him the wisest among men precisely because he recognised his ignorance
(Echeverría Arístegui 2019). It is difficult to know why Delphi was more
successful than other religious centres, such as the oracles of Zeus at Olympia or
Dodona (the latter also consulted in the Odyssey).
According to legend, King Croesus of Lydia once tested the most famous
oracles by sending them all the same question. Only Delphi got it right. It was
also said that the sanctuary stood on the exact spot where two eagles, sent by Zeus
from opposite ends of the earth, had crossed their flight, right over the slope of
Mount Parnassus. At that point the king of Olympus deposited the Omphalos, the
navel of the world (Martínez 2015).
Delphi was therefore considered the centre of the known world. Two oval
stones (the omphalos), one inside the temple of Apollo and one outside, reminded
visitors of its history. Beyond the myth, Delphi was the heart of classical Greece,
the most influential and well-informed destination of its time. Every day news
came from distant regions, carried by those who came to consult the priestesses.
Although pilgrims flocked to the sanctuary in search of guidance on decisions
to be taken, the essential function of the oracle was not to predict the future, but to
provide divine sanction to the political decisions of the cities: it ratified laws and
even constitutions, approved the founding of new cities and colonies, advised on
warlike enterprises, or censured them (Movellán Luis 2017). And although Delphi
did not intervene directly in the politics of the cities, its oracles could be used as
a political weapon if necessary.
Although the Oracle of Delphi originally offered consultations only once a
month and never in winter, its popularity meant that its fortune-telling services
multiplied. “The auguries became more and more frequent, and at the height of
their popularity, two pythonesses attended to visitors simultaneously, while a third
waited her turn” (Echeverría Arístegui 2019).
The interest in knowing the future and the large congregations of citizens who
flocked to the oracle catapulted the power and wealth of Delphi. At the same time,
the temple became an important focus of political influence. Different territories
(first Chrysa, and later Lacedemonia, Athens, Delphi and Phocis) engaged in
sacred wars that ended with the neutrality of the oracle. History also meant that
conflicts with the Persians, the Galatians and among the Hellenic peoples played
Introduction: From Delphi to Zuckerberg – Conquering the Future ix
a part in the temple’s loss of credibility: “it inevitably lost its aura of neutrality.
The Greeks ceased to trust its omens blindly, at least in political matters (...) and
the oracle went into a slow decline” (Echeverría Arístegui 2019).
The fascination with knowing or predicting the future has always had a
magical and inexplicable ingredient for human beings. Palm readers, crystal balls,
prophets, seers, witches, pythonesses, and other mythological or religious beings
have tried to claim the gift of predicting what might happen. In the same way,
divination of the thoughts of others, mind-reading, or the discovery of the desires
of others are faculties that, from fiction, have given heroes or imaginary characters
supernatural powers that give them dominion over the will of other people.
Scientifically, predictive functions (weather, rainfall, natural disasters,
diseases, pandemics, election results or a country’s GDP growth) determine
people’s daily decisions by reading data, facts, and available information. Both
the tarot (irrationally) and the weatherman (with scientific and rational precision)
influence the behaviour of individuals. They are agents of prediction.
On a historical level, algorithmic predictive capability is at the root of the
beginning of computing. Alan Turing formulated one of the main questions about
prediction in his essay: Can a Machine Think? (1974). Although the technology
was still in its infancy and the capacity to produce, collect and analyse data was
small, Turing predicted that technological science would advance so far that it
was only a matter of time before technology would be able to make accurate
predictions, based on information and data, about everyday human operations.
His Enigma machine, capable of deciphering the encrypted messages of the
Nazi forces in World War II, was a pioneer in reading, analysing, and processing
information to predict the future, based on data. Tragically, Turing, who can be
considered one of the main pioneers of the conceptualisation and development of
the algorithm, was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952, a fact that ended his
brilliant career and, two years later, his life.
Enigma’s predictive power gave the Allied forces a significant advantage
and, according to Jack Copeland, professor at the University of Canterbury, its
work saved millions of lives by significantly reducing the duration of the war
between two to four years (Copeland 2012).
The fascination that hides the power to know the future or to know how to
predict, delineate or lead it, has also marked the course of technology since the
consolidation of the second wave of the internet, in which it is the users who
produce, every second, information and data that are recorded by supercomputers.
After the failure of the first internet, which occurred with the dot.com bubble at
the end of the millennium, the new collaborative web or 2.0 O’Reilly and Battelle
(2009) were able to identify new economic strategies for internet companies.
The fundamental framework of the new strategy was found in leveraging user-
generated data (or content) to establish additional values on that previously
unanalysed, free, and highly valuable product.
Google and Amazon, the only major companies to benefit from the turn of the
millennium, were the pioneers in approaching the prediction domain and gradually
