Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 16
Posts 1 - 10

Googles künstlich intelligenter Chat-Freund

(Google's artificially intelligent chat friend)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 8.9.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google, marketing, social media
Summary | Google is launching a new messaging app called Allo. Messaging apps are hailed to be the new thing after social media. Especially messaging apps lie the Chinese WeChat or Allo which have an AI assistant with which users can easily get simple information from within the app, transmit payments, or open a small shop that operates through the app.
Image Description | Reuters image of a man presenting Allo at a conference and a few screenshots of conversations with Allo's chatbot.
Image Tags | Google, male(s), text

Ausländer raus

(Foreigners out)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 1.10.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | cyberbullying, social media, threat, word/writing
Summary | Online comment sections on social media and news sites are full of hateful, wrong language. The problem with this is that the discourse about, say, foreigners and asylum seekers is dominated by negative words like "flood" and "chaos". Even the word "foreigner" is misleading becuase the world is not fundamentally divided into locals and foreigners but all of them are equal humans who happen to be born in one place or another. If we want that discourse to change, we must use the platforms which we are able to influence by responding to every hate comment in order to neutralize the discourse.
Image Description | N/A

Auf die Bombe folgten die Explosionen

(The bomb was followed by explosions)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 10.12.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | Facebook, law, politics, privacy
Summary | Recently the news story about a company called Cambridge Analytica made waves: they claimed to have extracted an accurate psychological profile of all adult US citizens based on their Facebook likes. The company uses those profiles to target very specific audiences with political advertising. Such rigorous profiling based on data that was not willingly given for the purposes of such analysis would be illegal in Europe.
Image Description | Bloomberg image of a woman with glasses (only eyes portion of face visible), the glasses reflecting a screen showing the Facebook logo.
Image Tags | Facebook, female(s), logo

Auf Eigenständigkeit bestehen

(Insist on autonomy)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 14.3.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | language threat, texting, word/writing
Summary | Digital communication like texting or blogging offer Swiss people various possibilities to express themselves in their native tongue. Linguistic autonomy has always been very important to Swiss German-speakers. This makes it all the more disheartnening that more and more Standard German is finding its way into Swiss German speech and writing.
Image Description | N/A

Die Putzfrau ist schuld

(It's the cleaning lady's fault)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 15.2.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | texting, youth
Summary | The visitors of the carneval in Basel carry around lanterns on which they traditionally write political statements which are significant to them. One observer remarks that those political messages on the lanterns have become shorter in the past years, especially with youths. They resemble texting language.
Image Description | Image of the interviewee.
Image Tags | male(s)

Rauchstopp via Smartphone

(Stop smoking via smartphone)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 14.10.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | addiction, game, politics, smartphone, youth
Summary | The canton of Zürich has alotted some funds to go towards smoking prevention. Prevention organizations who try to stop youth and young adults between the ages of 12-25 from smoking cigarettes are sure that the brochures of the past decades are useless today. The digital natives need to be reached on their online channels via smartphone. Simple informative texts also won't do: the teens of today need quizzes, videos, images, etc.
Image Description | N/A

Ein Update für Emoji-Fans

(An update for emoji fans)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 13.12.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | emojis
Summary | The new Apple update includes 70 new emojis entered by the Unicode Consortium: various new animals, vegetables, bacon, doner kebab, a scary clown, a pinocchio nose, as well as a facepalm emoji. Thanks to the new pregnant woman emoji, pregnancy announcements can now be made with a minimal character count.
Image Description | Keystone image of hands holding an iPhone and another iPhone lying next to it.
Image Tags | hand(s), smartphone

Jetzt kommt die Sticker-Schwemme

(The sticker flood is on its way)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 15.11.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | abbreviations, emojis, Facebook, language threat, marketing, social media
Summary | Emoticons (f.i. ":-D") and abbreviations (f.i. "LOL") have trickled down from "geek speak" and established themselves in the mainstream. Emojis are nowadays ever present in our digital communication as well as in other arenas such as film or advertising. Now various social media platforms, among them Facebook, offer users various palettes of stickers. They are larger versions of emojis and are sent as an image file rather than included on the keyboard as a letter. Because many sticker palettes need to be purchased, a whole economy is beginning to form: The Japanese messaging app Line has sold over $250 mio worth of stickers last year. We do not need to fear that emojis and co. will replace language as we know it.
Image Description | Commodified emojis in various forms (as balls, as tattoos, as bed sheets, as food, on clothing, as masks, etc.) and Facebook messenger chats using/purchasing sticker collections.
Image Tags | emojis, Facebook, male(s), social media

Schweizer Firmen setzen auf Bots

(Swiss firms put their money on bots)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 27.12.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Facebook, privacy
Summary | Many companies in Switzerland are testing out chatbots to replace their telephone customer service. Many company chatbots can be contacted via the Facebook messenger. They are quite useful because they can organize tasks according to content and delegate them to the appropriate departments or help the customers themselves. Experts demand full transparency about what happens to customer data created in chatbot uses.
Image Description | Getty image of a woman's torso holding a smartphone, some chatbot chat screenshots and graphs.
Image Tags | female(s), hand(s), smartphone, text

«Sie agieren wie ein Schwarm»

(«They behave like a swarm»)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 12.10.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | social media, threat, Twitter
Summary | Extremist groups flourish on social media. It is designed to make users happy, to mirror their preferences, and encapsulates them in a bubble of their own interests isolating them from opposed content. This is very dangerous when people slip into violent extremist circles online. The government and social media corporations should work together on breaking this bubble effect to make sure everyone sees a piece of 'reality' every once in a while.
Image Description | Photograph of a smashed window in front of a Twitter icon.
Image Tags | logo, Twitter

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