Emerging communication
technologies
Les 1: Introduction
In this course we focus mostly on: (1) what does the new technology substitute, (2) what are the
positive and negative effects of this technology and (3) who uses the technology (early adopters)?
Evolution over time: communication through technology communication with technology
Basic introducti on to the technology
Each emerging communication technology started with a technological development
VR requires: processing power of CPU, big and fast GPU (graphic) for realism, sensors for
interaction and haptic feedback
Chatbots require: processing power of NLP (written and spoken text) and NLU
(understanding), autoregressive language models and deep-learning for humanlike text
generation
Both these technological inventions only came to life when it was technologically possible. In this
view, this technologies were only made because of the technological imperative.
Explanation of some of the newest technologies:
Virtual reality: can be used to train people for certain situations. E.g. medical students for
counselling, obese people in a shop, smokers when seeing smoking advertisements.
Artificial Intelligence: can be used for personalized and adaptive communications. Adaptive: AI
learns from you from what you do and say throughout the conversation.
Chatbots: human-like conversations. The problem is that chatbots are not human. They forget
everything that has been said in previous conversations. There is a need for long-term conversations
with a chatbot. Theory of mind = ability to think about mental states, both your own and the others.
There have been several milestone in the field op natural language processing starting from neural
language models (2001) through pre-trained language models (2018).
What is emerging technology?
Every emerging technology that is developed right now will have a definite impact on our daily lives.
Communication technologies have the purpose of communicating and/or being communicated
to/communicated with.
Emerging: coming into existence
Technology: something that is build and not part of the natural environment
The similarity across emerging technologies:
It all begins with an technical development or innovation
It can take a long time to evolve. The first robot was designed in 1939, but they kept on
developing new robots to make them as realistic and useful as possible.
Differences in adoption
1
, Follow the same cycle (= Gartner Hype Cycle)
It doesn’t always last
It comes with pro’s and con’s. Example 1: social media can help to create your identity but it
is also bad for your mental health, sleep, … Example 2: a chatbot gives 24h service, fast
response and makes communication fast and easy but AI can go live it’s own life and turn
into an extreme chatbot.
Gartner Hype Cycle: it can educate us about the promise of an emerging technology withing the
context of their industry and individual appetite for risk.
1) Innovation
trigger: A
potential
technology
breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger
significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
2) Peak of inflated expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories — often
accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.
3) Trough of disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to
deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the
surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
4) Slope of enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise
start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation
products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative
companies remain cautious.
5) Plateau of productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing
provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology's broad market applicability and
relevance are clearly paying off.
Timelines
1943: Colossus Computer the first computer which had to be operated by 300 people. The
computer could process 5000 characters per second which is very fast. To operate and
programme it they used switch panels, cables and plug-ins.
1948: Manchester Baby was the first programme to store instructions in the memory of
the computer. It could make 1121 calculations per second.
2
, 1953: IAS Computer online was able to store both data and instructions in memory. It had
a programme called UNIVAC which could make scientific calculations. This programme
correctly predicted Eisenhower’s election in contrast to opinion polls.
1958: List Processing allowed a programme to see itself or another app as data. It is still
relevant in AI applications. John McCarthy is seen as the father of AI because of his legacy.
1962: LINC this is the first ‘personal’ computer. This computer was developed as an
answer to personal needs. Before this, computers were used for big cloths of data and for
business and science.
1962: Atlas Computer fastest computer at that time. The ‘Atlas Supervisor’ had control of
the computer. This is known as the 1 st operating system.
The telephone
(1) The telephone substituted the telegraph. (2) The telephone was more approachable for people.
They don’t need to know morse code and it’s a more humanlike connection. (3) Doctors and rich
people were the early adopters. The first one’s had it for practical reasons, the second had it to show
off.
Les 2: Communication on the internet
History of the internet
1969: APRANET is born. This connected 4 computers (2 in US, UK and Norway) with each other to
exchange information. The first message that was send was from UCLA to Stanford on October 29 th.
They tried to send the word ‘login’, but the system crashed after ‘lo’.
1989: The internet is born. This means that it is available for anyone who has an internet connection.
Not only big businesses and universities could use it now. The important person here is Tim Berners
Lee (CERN). The definition of the world wide web is now: The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area
hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of
document.
1993: The form of how to make a (www) site is put together. This is also called the HTML. Next to the
first HTML version, the first graphical browser was made: Mosaic Browser. This browser is the first
killer app.
Killer app = an app that demonstrates the value of a technology to a large population.
Mosaic Browser: before this browser it was very hard for a normal individual to find
information on the internet. Knowledge is scattered over different data bases around the
world. To then find information, a very accurate and complicated command was necessary.
With Mosaic this was made a lot easier. By clicking on words, many more information could
be found like text, data, photo’s and sound. Behind everything on your screen is a link to the
information you actually need.
Micheal & Cheuvront (1998)
Persuasive communication: The application of communication (methods, theories, techniques) to
persuade your target to do something (you want them to do, changing an opinion, …). This requires
relevant changes in people’s awareness, attitudes, norms and behaviours. Before the internet,
persuasive communication went through mass media campaigns and ads.
Benefits of mass media:
3
technologies
Les 1: Introduction
In this course we focus mostly on: (1) what does the new technology substitute, (2) what are the
positive and negative effects of this technology and (3) who uses the technology (early adopters)?
Evolution over time: communication through technology communication with technology
Basic introducti on to the technology
Each emerging communication technology started with a technological development
VR requires: processing power of CPU, big and fast GPU (graphic) for realism, sensors for
interaction and haptic feedback
Chatbots require: processing power of NLP (written and spoken text) and NLU
(understanding), autoregressive language models and deep-learning for humanlike text
generation
Both these technological inventions only came to life when it was technologically possible. In this
view, this technologies were only made because of the technological imperative.
Explanation of some of the newest technologies:
Virtual reality: can be used to train people for certain situations. E.g. medical students for
counselling, obese people in a shop, smokers when seeing smoking advertisements.
Artificial Intelligence: can be used for personalized and adaptive communications. Adaptive: AI
learns from you from what you do and say throughout the conversation.
Chatbots: human-like conversations. The problem is that chatbots are not human. They forget
everything that has been said in previous conversations. There is a need for long-term conversations
with a chatbot. Theory of mind = ability to think about mental states, both your own and the others.
There have been several milestone in the field op natural language processing starting from neural
language models (2001) through pre-trained language models (2018).
What is emerging technology?
Every emerging technology that is developed right now will have a definite impact on our daily lives.
Communication technologies have the purpose of communicating and/or being communicated
to/communicated with.
Emerging: coming into existence
Technology: something that is build and not part of the natural environment
The similarity across emerging technologies:
It all begins with an technical development or innovation
It can take a long time to evolve. The first robot was designed in 1939, but they kept on
developing new robots to make them as realistic and useful as possible.
Differences in adoption
1
, Follow the same cycle (= Gartner Hype Cycle)
It doesn’t always last
It comes with pro’s and con’s. Example 1: social media can help to create your identity but it
is also bad for your mental health, sleep, … Example 2: a chatbot gives 24h service, fast
response and makes communication fast and easy but AI can go live it’s own life and turn
into an extreme chatbot.
Gartner Hype Cycle: it can educate us about the promise of an emerging technology withing the
context of their industry and individual appetite for risk.
1) Innovation
trigger: A
potential
technology
breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger
significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
2) Peak of inflated expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories — often
accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.
3) Trough of disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to
deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the
surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
4) Slope of enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise
start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation
products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative
companies remain cautious.
5) Plateau of productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing
provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology's broad market applicability and
relevance are clearly paying off.
Timelines
1943: Colossus Computer the first computer which had to be operated by 300 people. The
computer could process 5000 characters per second which is very fast. To operate and
programme it they used switch panels, cables and plug-ins.
1948: Manchester Baby was the first programme to store instructions in the memory of
the computer. It could make 1121 calculations per second.
2
, 1953: IAS Computer online was able to store both data and instructions in memory. It had
a programme called UNIVAC which could make scientific calculations. This programme
correctly predicted Eisenhower’s election in contrast to opinion polls.
1958: List Processing allowed a programme to see itself or another app as data. It is still
relevant in AI applications. John McCarthy is seen as the father of AI because of his legacy.
1962: LINC this is the first ‘personal’ computer. This computer was developed as an
answer to personal needs. Before this, computers were used for big cloths of data and for
business and science.
1962: Atlas Computer fastest computer at that time. The ‘Atlas Supervisor’ had control of
the computer. This is known as the 1 st operating system.
The telephone
(1) The telephone substituted the telegraph. (2) The telephone was more approachable for people.
They don’t need to know morse code and it’s a more humanlike connection. (3) Doctors and rich
people were the early adopters. The first one’s had it for practical reasons, the second had it to show
off.
Les 2: Communication on the internet
History of the internet
1969: APRANET is born. This connected 4 computers (2 in US, UK and Norway) with each other to
exchange information. The first message that was send was from UCLA to Stanford on October 29 th.
They tried to send the word ‘login’, but the system crashed after ‘lo’.
1989: The internet is born. This means that it is available for anyone who has an internet connection.
Not only big businesses and universities could use it now. The important person here is Tim Berners
Lee (CERN). The definition of the world wide web is now: The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area
hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of
document.
1993: The form of how to make a (www) site is put together. This is also called the HTML. Next to the
first HTML version, the first graphical browser was made: Mosaic Browser. This browser is the first
killer app.
Killer app = an app that demonstrates the value of a technology to a large population.
Mosaic Browser: before this browser it was very hard for a normal individual to find
information on the internet. Knowledge is scattered over different data bases around the
world. To then find information, a very accurate and complicated command was necessary.
With Mosaic this was made a lot easier. By clicking on words, many more information could
be found like text, data, photo’s and sound. Behind everything on your screen is a link to the
information you actually need.
Micheal & Cheuvront (1998)
Persuasive communication: The application of communication (methods, theories, techniques) to
persuade your target to do something (you want them to do, changing an opinion, …). This requires
relevant changes in people’s awareness, attitudes, norms and behaviours. Before the internet,
persuasive communication went through mass media campaigns and ads.
Benefits of mass media:
3
