Now more than ever people are using social media and computer analysts along with marketing companies and commercial industries are taking advantage of this.
First lets look at how they predict your personality/ behavior. Social and outgoing people will have larger social circles, very open people are likely to have smaller social groups, agreeable people will have low conflict with their peers. Computer analysts will look at the amount of activity in the social group and the distribution of this activity over time, they will look at the type of messages between people within the social group (do they contain links, have they been forwarded, do they contain pictures) this shows their behavior in public toward their friends, they will look at their behavior with friends and the deviation of their behavior across friends/ followers this indicates how close they are to specific people (social distance), and then look at the degree to which their actions are responded to. They will look to see what specific actions are uniform across the group or if the actions is specific to a small amount of people to find how informative the information they gathered. Finally one of the most important, Homophily, this states you find and befriend people like you. So, your friends should have similar likes dislikes and their actions can reflect on you. (Homophily will be mentioned later talking about marketing)
www.cs.umd.edu/~golbeck/pubs/5.Predicting%20personality%20with%20social%20behavior.pdf (article)
First lets look at how they predict your personality/ behavior. Social and outgoing people will have larger social circles, very open people are likely to have smaller social groups, agreeable people will have low conflict with their peers. Computer analysts will look at the amount of activity in the social group and the distribution of this activity over time, they will look at the type of messages between people within the social group (do they contain links, have they been forwarded, do they contain pictures) this shows their behavior in public toward their friends, they will look at their behavior with friends and the deviation of their behavior across friends/ followers this indicates how close they are to specific people (social distance), and then look at the degree to which their actions are responded to. They will look to see what specific actions are uniform across the group or if the actions is specific to a small amount of people to find how informative the information they gathered. Finally one of the most important, Homophily, this states you find and befriend people like you. So, your friends should have similar likes dislikes and their actions can reflect on you. (Homophily will be mentioned later talking about marketing)
www.cs.umd.edu/~golbeck/pubs/5.Predicting%20personality%20with%20social%20behavior.pdf (article)
With this information we can look at an example of how homophily impacted a calculation. At a point in time the top 5 indicators of intelligence on Facebook was calculated. One of the top 5 ended up being, liking a page about curly fries. The content of the page was completely irrelevant, many people who aren't blessed with higher IQ's enjoy curly fries too, but in this case the page was most likely started by a more intelligent person who most likely had smart friends (hemophily) which saw this person made this page and it continued to spread as smart people liked the page smart friends saw it and liked, of course other people liked the page too but the page was mostly seen by more intelligent people. The act of liking the page said more about the person than the actual content of the page. With hemophily commercial companies can target a specific group look at their likes and dislikes, activities, and best market to that group of people.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_golbeck_the_curly_fry_conundrum_why_social_media_likes_say_more_than_you_might_think (video)
https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_golbeck_the_curly_fry_conundrum_why_social_media_likes_say_more_than_you_might_think (video)
Now lets look at how a company had used a pregnancy equation to market. (Pregnancy equations sounds odd sorry about that, ignore the awkward, this is actually interesting/ freaking) Computer analysts have created a pregnancy equation, they look at the activity of previous pregnant women (what they bought, liked, posted, etc.) and created an equation, based on these prior pregnancies to predict the likeliness of upcoming pregnancies. Stores like target can then access this equation and see how many points they got and then send ads for diapers, formula, baby clothing to the residence of this pregnant woman. A while back this had happened with a teenager, she had gotten ads for baby supplies sent to her home before she had told her father. Little things like buying more vitamins and a bigger purse ( one that could hold baby supplies) that individually mean nothing were added together to determine she was most likely preggers. Target saw her score and send her the baby ads. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ (article)
(Does this creep you out yet? just wait) Computer analysts have equations to help them predict your personality, sexual orientation, political preference, IQ, things you may not want to share. All this information is available to companies, they can market directly to you using your social media. Companies could target you or a group, already knowing you are likely to enjoy the product and leave a good review contributing to others seeing this not only in your social group but people considering buying products from the company. Not only is this information about you sold to commercial firms, but somebody could open a business where they could give the information they found out about you to somebody looking to hire you. They could see you work well with others or maybe it was computed you were likely to be an alcoholic? How good are your chances of getting a job with a company that knows you almost as well as you do, they'll look for characteristics they would want in an employee and you may not fit the bill. How about somebody who has made poor choices and is deciding to turn their life around but a company knows all about their past from a background check and knows about their current personality and this person has no chance of a new start because of their social media? None of it would be illegal, your computer history and social media are considered public, maybe not to you, but in the eyes of the law this information is available to others. It seems wrong doesn't it? Like an invasion of privacy?
This information relates to chapter 9. Chapter 9 and Chapter 13, looking at the tertiary sector of the economy, relating to the job you tried to get but didn't because of what your social media said about you, and looking at market segmentation, companies looking at groups of people knowing their likes and dislikes and marketing to their wants, needs, and etc.
ap_human_geo_project_autosaved.docx |
Research notes and citations ^^