CMN 170V FINAL EXAM QUESTIONS ANSWERED CORRECTLY LATEST UPDATE 2026

CMN 170V FINAL EXAM QUESTIONS ANSWERED CORRECTLY LATEST UPDATE 2026 What are the characteristics of digitalization? - Answers -Digital footprint -Timeless Time -Death of Distance -Poly-directionality -Network structure -Network externalities -Economies of scale -Media richness selection -Exposure selection -Algorithmification: A.I What is the digital footprint? - Answers -Storage and computation convergence -Examples: Google location tracker, video of amazing mind reader who was able to find out private information about people through the internet, recording everything, What is timeless time? - Answers •The social practice that aims at negating sequence to install ourselves in perennial simultaneity and simultaneous ubiquity •Technology allows you to have a real time communication with someone like through a chat or asynchronous communication (like a forum post) •Timeless time refers to the fact that the combination of synchronous and asynchronous information processing allows to negate sequences What is the death of distance? - Answers •You can communicate with anyone around the world, distance is no longer a factor What is poly-directionality? - Answers -From one to one: telephone, letter -From one to many: radio, TV -From man to one: election, applause -From many to many: meetings What is network structure? - Answers •The Internet and World Wide Web are NOT the same, even though they are often used interchangeably •Social Network Analysis DOES NOT exclusively applies to online networks like Facebook. Social network analysis applies to all kinds of social networks, also offline, for example when you think about with whom to go to the movies •There is a small average path length In regards to network structure, who is the father of the world wide web? - Answers Tim Berners-Lee In regards to network structure, what is homophily? - Answers Love of the like, like friendship by race or political blogs In regards to network structure, what is network centrality? - Answers Who is in the center of the network? True or False. In regards to space of flows, what matters is the network space not the geographic space. - Answers True What are the three characteristics of digitalization that make up of space of flows? - Answers -Death of distance -Poly-directionality -Network structure What are network externalities? - Answers When the value of a product to the one user depends on how many other users there are What is positive network externalities? - Answers Positive network externalities means the more people, the more benefit for everybody In regards to economies of scale, what is a fixed cost? - Answers land, machines, etc. In regards to economies of scale, what are marginal costs? - Answers workers, buy new materials, the more you produce, the cheaper it gets In regards to economies of scale, what is the variable cost? - Answers sum of all the marginal costs True or False. In regards to economies of scale, in digital products, most costs are related to fixed costs. - Answers True True or False. In regards to economies of scale, digital products have infinite economies of scale - Answers True What is media richness selection? - Answers The ability to: -handle multiple cues simultaneously -facilitate rapid feedback -establish a personal focus -utilize natural language -High media richness: face-to-face dialogue -low media richness: letter, email What is exposure selection? - Answers Selectable degree of privacy and identity What is algorithmification? - Answers •Previous tasks done by humans are now done by algorithms and machines •Web. 1.0 (Organizations) → Web 2.0 (People) → Web 3.0 (Semantic Web, Internet of Things) oThings capable of predicting own behavior, assessing own health, adaption to new environments, coordinating distributed resources, etc. What are the effects of digitalization? - Answers -Digital concentration -Crowdsourcing -Transaction Cost Reduction -Mass-Customization -Surveillance -Whistleblowing -Human-Machine Merger What is digital concentration? - Answers -Media concentration can work two ways: 1- previous competitors can join; 2- suppliers & providers can join. -Positive network externalities foster vertical ownership In regards to digital concentration, what is horizontal ownership? - Answers Horizontal ownership: one media outlet purchases or merges with previous competitor In regards to digital concentration, what is vertical ownership? - Answers Vertical ownership: in the production chain, you don't buy a competitor, you buy either previous supplier or client, if you are a newspaper, you might buy a company with investigative journalists, buy somebody before or after you in the production chain What is crowdsourcing? - Answers Source resources from the crowd, examples: Netflix through Kaggle, NASA through Kaggle What are some of the characteristics of digitalization that contribute to the reduction of transaction costs? - Answers o Timeless Time: not necessary for strict hours online like in a branch o Death of Distance: banks do not need as many locations to be close to you o Economies of Scale: only has to develop the banking software once o Algorithmification: instead of a person, an algorithm does it for us What are some of the "transaction costs" (in the sense economists use the word) involved in the retail music business? - Answers o Costs associated with searching for music o Costs associated with settling for a price (incl. time it needs to compare prices) o Distribution costs of music (incl. sales-personal or an internet connection) o Enforcement costs (incl. supervision of the seller and buyer True or False. If internal transaction costs are low than in source and grow the company. If external transaction costs are low than outsource and shrink the size of the company. - Answers True Does digitalization make companies bigger or smaller? - Answers We don't know yet, digitalization shakes up the traditional optimal size of a company What is mass-customization? - Answers •Think about a tailor at a high end cloth store, who takes personal measurements. Does the store go for individualization/differentiation or for scale/cost-leadership? individualization/differentiation What is whistleblowing? - Answers The disclosure by a person, usually an employee in a government agency or private enterprise, to the public or to those in authority, of mismanagement, corruption, illegality, or some other wrongdoing The relative cost structure of producing information consists of o high fixed costs and low marginal costs o low fixed costs and high marginal costs o low fixed costs and low marginal costs o high fixed costs and high marginal costs - Answers high fixed costs and low marginal costs The fact that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention" creates the much-cited information overload. Shapiro and Varian say that in the arising Economics of Attention, companies use all but the following strategies to confront this scarcity of attention: o designing information products that are highly customize o prohibiting the consumption of information products from others o making products incredibly cheap or giving them away for free - Answers prohibiting the consumption of information products from others Manuel Castells claims that the global financial crisis around 2008 was due to a variety of factors. He includes all but the following: o global liberalization and deregulation of financial markets, which overwhelms the regulatory capacity of national regulators o new technologies made possible the calculation of numerous exotic financial products o the size of the U.S. government, which is too big to fail and should be made leaner o globally interconnected financial markets with digital transactions effected at lightning speed - Answers the size of the U.S. government, which is too big to fail and should be made leaner Manuel Castells coined the concept of the "space of flows" in the digital age. He argues that the increasing importance of the space of flows leads to the end of cities, as advanced telecommunications make the spatial concentration of people and activities unnecessary, o True, he argues that with modern telecommuncation there is no need to live in cities as what matters, because what matters is the flow of information o False, he argues that the space of flows increases the importance of the global networking logic, leading to a concentration in metropolitan regions - Answers False, he argues that the space of flows increases the importance of the global networking logic, leading to a concentration in metropolitan regions Manuel Castells coined the concept of "timeless time" in the digital age, by which he refers to o the unimportance of time in the information age o systemic perturbation in the sequential order in the information age o the fact that nobody has time in the information age, due to the information overload - Answers systemic perturbation in the sequential order in the information age Empirical vs. Theoretical - Answers •Empirical: collect data, example: survey •Theoretical: logical conclusions True or False. The empirical leg of science is quantitative, while the theoretical leg is qualitative. - Answers FALSE. Theoretical work can be qualitative, but most successful scientific theories are very quantitative. Think about Einstein's formulas... Empirical methods often use statistics (quantitative) Theoretical methods often use pure math (also quantitative) True or False. Big data is analyzing digital footprints, basically a digital crystal ball. - Answers True True or False. Computer simulations explore scenarios that never happened, like a magic wand. - Answers True