What happens when media technologies are able to interpret our feelings, emotions, moods, and int... more What happens when media technologies are able to interpret our feelings, emotions, moods, and intentions? In this cutting edge new book, Andrew McStay explores that very question and argues that these abilities result in a form of technological empathy. Offering a balanced and incisive overview of the issues raised by ‘Emotional AI’, this book:
- Provides a clear account of the social benefits and drawbacks of new media trends and technologies such as emoji, wearables and chatbots.
- Demonstrates through empirical research how ‘empathic media’ have been developed and introduced both by start-ups and global tech corporations such as Facebook.
- Helps readers understand the potential implications on everyday life and social relations through examples such as video-gaming, facial coding, virtual reality and cities.
- Calls for a more critical approach to the rollout of emotional AI in public and private spheres.
Combining established theory with original analysis, this book will change the way students view, use and interact with new technologies. It should be required reading for students and researchers in media, communications, the social sciences and beyond.
Creativity and Advertising develops novel ways to theorise advertising and creativity. Arguing th... more Creativity and Advertising develops novel ways to theorise advertising and creativity. Arguing that combinatory accounts of advertising based on representation, textualism and reductionism are of limited value, Andrew McStay suggests that advertising and creativity are better recognised in terms of the ‘event’. Drawing on a diverse set of philosophical influences including Scotus, Spinoza, Vico, Kant, Schiller, James, Dewey, Schopenhauer, Whitehead, Bataille, Heidegger and Deleuze, the book posits a sensational, process-based, transgressive, lived and embodied approach to thinking about media, aesthetics, creativity and our interaction with advertising.
Elaborating an affective account of creativity, McStay assesses creative advertising from Coke, Evian, Google, Sony, Uniqlo and Volkswagen among others, and articulates the ways in which award-winning creative advertising may increasingly be read in terms of co-production, playfulness, ecological conceptions of media, improvisation, and immersion in fields and processes of corporeal affect.
Philosophically wide-ranging yet grounded in robust understanding of industry practices, the book will also be of use to scholars with an interest in aesthetics, art, design, media, performance, philosophy and those with a general interest in creativity.
The Mood of Information explores advertising from the perspective of information flows rather tha... more The Mood of Information explores advertising from the perspective of information flows rather than the more familiar approach of symbolic representation. At the heart of this book is an aspiration to better understand contemporary and nascent forms of commercial solicitation predicated on the commodification of experience and subjectivity. In assessing novel forms of advertising that involve tracking users' web browsing activity over a period of time, this book seeks to grasp and explicate key trends within the media and advertising industries along with the technocultural, legal, regulatory and political environment online behavioural advertising operates within. Situated within contemporary scholarly debate and interest in recursive media that involves intensification of discourses of feedback, personalization, recommendation, co-production, constructivism and the preempting of intent, this book represents a departure from textual criticism of advertising to one based on exposition of networked means of inferring preferences, desires and orientations that reflect ways of being, or moods of information.
The ever-evolving nature of the digital media is quickly re-writing the rulebook of advertising a... more The ever-evolving nature of the digital media is quickly re-writing the rulebook of advertising and marketing. Using technological innovations and our online habits, advertisers have a variety of new promotional opportunities at their disposal that bring products and services to the public's attention. This book examines the cultural, commercial, creative and regulatory practices of advertising in these digital environments.
From viral campaigns and in-game advertising, to audience profiling and dataveillance, this book gives a comprehensive exploration of digital advertising. It traces the growth of digital media uses, starting with its use as fringe advertising media and moving beyond the pop-up to become a dominant global advertising media form. Taking a look at the advantages, disadvantages and ethical dilemmas of using digital media, the text encourages readers to consider their own ideas about the field. The chapters combine industry and critical perspectives alongside inspiring example material and interviews with senior figures in the international advertising industry. Analysing key theories and emergent trends in the field, Digital Advertising explains complex ideas in a truly accessible way.
Privacy decision making can be surprising or even appear contradictory: we feel entitled to prote... more Privacy decision making can be surprising or even appear contradictory: we feel entitled to protection of information about ourselves that we do not control, yet willingly trade away the same information for small rewards; we worry about privacy invasions of little significance, yet overlook those that may cause significant damages. Dichotomies between attitudes and behaviors, inconsistencies in discounting future costs or rewards, and other systematic behavioral biases have long been studied in the psychology and behavioral economics literatures. In this paper we draw from those literatures to discuss the role of uncertainty, ambiguity, and behavioral biases in privacy decision making.
1. Introduction 2. Strangely revealing 3. The poetics of advertising 4. A Playful combinations 5.... more 1. Introduction 2. Strangely revealing 3. The poetics of advertising 4. A Playful combinations 5. Sensational dimensions 6. I'm with stupid: vivid living, transgression and dirt 7. Creativity and the Counter-Enlightenment 8. Embodying culture 9. Concrescence and the unfashionably new 10. Excessive media 11. Conclusions
What happens when media technologies are able to interpret our feelings, emotions, moods, and int... more What happens when media technologies are able to interpret our feelings, emotions, moods, and intentions? In this cutting edge new book, Andrew McStay explores that very question and argues that these abilities result in a form of technological empathy. Offering a balanced and incisive overview of the issues raised by ‘Emotional AI’, this book:
- Provides a clear account of the social benefits and drawbacks of new media trends and technologies such as emoji, wearables and chatbots.
- Demonstrates through empirical research how ‘empathic media’ have been developed and introduced both by start-ups and global tech corporations such as Facebook.
- Helps readers understand the potential implications on everyday life and social relations through examples such as video-gaming, facial coding, virtual reality and cities.
- Calls for a more critical approach to the rollout of emotional AI in public and private spheres.
Combining established theory with original analysis, this book will change the way students view, use and interact with new technologies. It should be required reading for students and researchers in media, communications, the social sciences and beyond.
Creativity and Advertising develops novel ways to theorise advertising and creativity. Arguing th... more Creativity and Advertising develops novel ways to theorise advertising and creativity. Arguing that combinatory accounts of advertising based on representation, textualism and reductionism are of limited value, Andrew McStay suggests that advertising and creativity are better recognised in terms of the ‘event’. Drawing on a diverse set of philosophical influences including Scotus, Spinoza, Vico, Kant, Schiller, James, Dewey, Schopenhauer, Whitehead, Bataille, Heidegger and Deleuze, the book posits a sensational, process-based, transgressive, lived and embodied approach to thinking about media, aesthetics, creativity and our interaction with advertising.
Elaborating an affective account of creativity, McStay assesses creative advertising from Coke, Evian, Google, Sony, Uniqlo and Volkswagen among others, and articulates the ways in which award-winning creative advertising may increasingly be read in terms of co-production, playfulness, ecological conceptions of media, improvisation, and immersion in fields and processes of corporeal affect.
Philosophically wide-ranging yet grounded in robust understanding of industry practices, the book will also be of use to scholars with an interest in aesthetics, art, design, media, performance, philosophy and those with a general interest in creativity.
The Mood of Information explores advertising from the perspective of information flows rather tha... more The Mood of Information explores advertising from the perspective of information flows rather than the more familiar approach of symbolic representation. At the heart of this book is an aspiration to better understand contemporary and nascent forms of commercial solicitation predicated on the commodification of experience and subjectivity. In assessing novel forms of advertising that involve tracking users' web browsing activity over a period of time, this book seeks to grasp and explicate key trends within the media and advertising industries along with the technocultural, legal, regulatory and political environment online behavioural advertising operates within. Situated within contemporary scholarly debate and interest in recursive media that involves intensification of discourses of feedback, personalization, recommendation, co-production, constructivism and the preempting of intent, this book represents a departure from textual criticism of advertising to one based on exposition of networked means of inferring preferences, desires and orientations that reflect ways of being, or moods of information.
The ever-evolving nature of the digital media is quickly re-writing the rulebook of advertising a... more The ever-evolving nature of the digital media is quickly re-writing the rulebook of advertising and marketing. Using technological innovations and our online habits, advertisers have a variety of new promotional opportunities at their disposal that bring products and services to the public's attention. This book examines the cultural, commercial, creative and regulatory practices of advertising in these digital environments.
From viral campaigns and in-game advertising, to audience profiling and dataveillance, this book gives a comprehensive exploration of digital advertising. It traces the growth of digital media uses, starting with its use as fringe advertising media and moving beyond the pop-up to become a dominant global advertising media form. Taking a look at the advantages, disadvantages and ethical dilemmas of using digital media, the text encourages readers to consider their own ideas about the field. The chapters combine industry and critical perspectives alongside inspiring example material and interviews with senior figures in the international advertising industry. Analysing key theories and emergent trends in the field, Digital Advertising explains complex ideas in a truly accessible way.
Privacy decision making can be surprising or even appear contradictory: we feel entitled to prote... more Privacy decision making can be surprising or even appear contradictory: we feel entitled to protection of information about ourselves that we do not control, yet willingly trade away the same information for small rewards; we worry about privacy invasions of little significance, yet overlook those that may cause significant damages. Dichotomies between attitudes and behaviors, inconsistencies in discounting future costs or rewards, and other systematic behavioral biases have long been studied in the psychology and behavioral economics literatures. In this paper we draw from those literatures to discuss the role of uncertainty, ambiguity, and behavioral biases in privacy decision making.
1. Introduction 2. Strangely revealing 3. The poetics of advertising 4. A Playful combinations 5.... more 1. Introduction 2. Strangely revealing 3. The poetics of advertising 4. A Playful combinations 5. Sensational dimensions 6. I'm with stupid: vivid living, transgression and dirt 7. Creativity and the Counter-Enlightenment 8. Embodying culture 9. Concrescence and the unfashionably new 10. Excessive media 11. Conclusions
This chapter assesses programmatic advertising. Programmatic advertising is characterised by sens... more This chapter assesses programmatic advertising. Programmatic advertising is characterised by sensitivity to time, location, interests and the ability to reach individuals across a variety of screen types. Here the advertising process is increasingly automated and has the capacity to target people in relation to what they are doing at a given moment in time. Automation applies not only to targeting, but the creation of adverts themselves. To explore recent trends in advertising I draw from developments in finance, liquidity and high-frequency trading. This is less about metaphor, but more that programmatic logic unmistakably derives from the automated price sorting of commodities in contemporary financial markets. This renews and clarifies long-standing critique of the audience-as-commodity. As the chapter proceeds to unpack, the principle of liquidity also has an experiential and phenomenological dimension that is redolent of what Google phrases in terms of 'micro-moments'. This is a realisa-tion of programmatic logic as advertising seeks to intelligently interact with a person's life context in real-time.
Communication in the Age of Suspicion: Trust and the Media, 2007
The concept of trust is central to studies of e-commerce as it is arguably the largest barrier to... more The concept of trust is central to studies of e-commerce as it is arguably the largest barrier to the wider adoption of online commerce in terms of purchasing goods. While the vast majority of consumers do not hesitate to give out credit card details over the phone, in stores and elsewhere, many consumers are averse to giving out credit card details and personal information over the Internet (Armstrong, Barr, Coutts, Coutts, Knowles and Moore, 2003). To explore consumers’ lack of trust further, this chapter is structured into three sections. These are: social ontology, trust and its relationship to technology; dataveillance and theoretical implications of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies; and real-time feedback and the commercial environment of instantaneity.
The danger with news, especially television broadcast news, is that it is regarded as wholly real... more The danger with news, especially television broadcast news, is that it is regarded as wholly real, devoid of manipulation and transparent. Whilst a critical media audience understands that immediacy, liveness and authoritatively stated presentations are manipulable and edited, constant vigilance and attention to content and framing is required in the theatre of news reportage to avoid succumbing to the reality effect of actualité – particularly when it is live. Taking a Derridean deconstructive stance, we explore the constructed polarisation of the War Body during Operation Iraqi Freedom 2003 (19/03/03 – 02/05/03) in a range of 24/7 news broadcasts, taking into account a continuum of presentational formats ranging from the pre-planned event to the unplanned and live event.
Empathic media is a collect-all term to refer to affect-sensitive technologies employed to make i... more Empathic media is a collect-all term to refer to affect-sensitive technologies employed to make inferences about emotions, feelings, moods, perspective, attention and intention. Frequently making use of artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches, they are increasing in capability and diversity of application. This report draws upon (a) over 100 interviews with industrial, political, security, legal and NGO stakeholders; (b) a UK survey (n=2068); and (c) a workshop with relevant stakeholders to explore scope for ethical guidelines. Overall the research finds that there is overlap between stakeholders on how best to manage the emergence of these technologies, but this is not currently being achieved. It concludes by identifying beneficial uses of these technologies, but also an ethical and regulatory lacuna. Mindful of dangers of regulating early, the report nonetheless recommends regulatory attention. It also urges relevant sectors of the technology industry to recognise that there is self-interest in collective consideration and action regarding negative societal implications of tracking emotional life.
On Friday September 16th 2016, myself and Gawain Morrison, CEO and co-founder of emotional market... more On Friday September 16th 2016, myself and Gawain Morrison, CEO and co-founder of emotional marketing and technology consultancy Sensum, hosted an event to debate and develop ethical guidelines for those working with technologies that capture information about emotions. This includes sentiment analysis, facial coding, voice analytics, wearables and other means of gathering online and bodily data about emotions. Reasons for collecting and using data includes health, marketing/advertising/research, creation of biometrically engaging games (via eye-tracking, heart rates and skin responses), new screen-based forms of entertainment (such as thrillers that respond to expressions and emotional feedback), in-store retail, education and surveillance.
The Personal Data & Trust Network at Digital Catapult, London, kindly sponsored this workshop.
To help build the do’s and don’t regarding professional use of data about emotions, workshop participants came from a variety of backgrounds. People from large technology companies, start-up and medium-size firms, regulators of advertising, psychologists, academics interested in privacy, and people from civil society groups generously gave up their afternoon. Speakers included aforementioned Gawain Morrison, Matt Celuszak (CEO of CrowdEmotion), Javier Ruiz Diaz (Policy Director of Open Rights Group) and Simon Rice (Group Manager for Technology of the Information Commissioner’s Office). This is a report of the event and its findings.
I presented on the fake news phenomenon as part of an invited panel. It received media coverage f... more I presented on the fake news phenomenon as part of an invited panel. It received media coverage from trade press:
In 2017, the UK's Fake News Parliamentary Inquiry for Dept. of Culture, Sport and Media invited s... more In 2017, the UK's Fake News Parliamentary Inquiry for Dept. of Culture, Sport and Media invited submissions. This submission, with Andrew McStay (Bangor Univ.) is on Fake News: Media Economics and Emotional Button-Pushing.
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Books by Andrew McStay
- Provides a clear account of the social benefits and drawbacks of new media trends and technologies such as emoji, wearables and chatbots.
- Demonstrates through empirical research how ‘empathic media’ have been developed and introduced both by start-ups and global tech corporations such as Facebook.
- Helps readers understand the potential implications on everyday life and social relations through examples such as video-gaming, facial coding, virtual reality and cities.
- Calls for a more critical approach to the rollout of emotional AI in public and private spheres.
Combining established theory with original analysis, this book will change the way students view, use and interact with new technologies. It should be required reading for students and researchers in media, communications, the social sciences and beyond.
Elaborating an affective account of creativity, McStay assesses creative advertising from Coke, Evian, Google, Sony, Uniqlo and Volkswagen among others, and articulates the ways in which award-winning creative advertising may increasingly be read in terms of co-production, playfulness, ecological conceptions of media, improvisation, and immersion in fields and processes of corporeal affect.
Philosophically wide-ranging yet grounded in robust understanding of industry practices, the book will also be of use to scholars with an interest in aesthetics, art, design, media, performance, philosophy and those with a general interest in creativity.
From viral campaigns and in-game advertising, to audience profiling and dataveillance, this book gives a comprehensive exploration of digital advertising. It traces the growth of digital media uses, starting with its use as fringe advertising media and moving beyond the pop-up to become a dominant global advertising media form. Taking a look at the advantages, disadvantages and ethical dilemmas of using digital media, the text encourages readers to consider their own ideas about the field. The chapters combine industry and critical perspectives alongside inspiring example material and interviews with senior figures in the international advertising industry. Analysing key theories and emergent trends in the field, Digital Advertising explains complex ideas in a truly accessible way.
Papers by Andrew McStay
- Provides a clear account of the social benefits and drawbacks of new media trends and technologies such as emoji, wearables and chatbots.
- Demonstrates through empirical research how ‘empathic media’ have been developed and introduced both by start-ups and global tech corporations such as Facebook.
- Helps readers understand the potential implications on everyday life and social relations through examples such as video-gaming, facial coding, virtual reality and cities.
- Calls for a more critical approach to the rollout of emotional AI in public and private spheres.
Combining established theory with original analysis, this book will change the way students view, use and interact with new technologies. It should be required reading for students and researchers in media, communications, the social sciences and beyond.
Elaborating an affective account of creativity, McStay assesses creative advertising from Coke, Evian, Google, Sony, Uniqlo and Volkswagen among others, and articulates the ways in which award-winning creative advertising may increasingly be read in terms of co-production, playfulness, ecological conceptions of media, improvisation, and immersion in fields and processes of corporeal affect.
Philosophically wide-ranging yet grounded in robust understanding of industry practices, the book will also be of use to scholars with an interest in aesthetics, art, design, media, performance, philosophy and those with a general interest in creativity.
From viral campaigns and in-game advertising, to audience profiling and dataveillance, this book gives a comprehensive exploration of digital advertising. It traces the growth of digital media uses, starting with its use as fringe advertising media and moving beyond the pop-up to become a dominant global advertising media form. Taking a look at the advantages, disadvantages and ethical dilemmas of using digital media, the text encourages readers to consider their own ideas about the field. The chapters combine industry and critical perspectives alongside inspiring example material and interviews with senior figures in the international advertising industry. Analysing key theories and emergent trends in the field, Digital Advertising explains complex ideas in a truly accessible way.
The Personal Data & Trust Network at Digital Catapult, London, kindly sponsored this workshop.
To help build the do’s and don’t regarding professional use of data about emotions, workshop participants came from a variety of backgrounds. People from large technology companies, start-up and medium-size firms, regulators of advertising, psychologists, academics interested in privacy, and people from civil society groups generously gave up their afternoon. Speakers included aforementioned Gawain Morrison, Matt Celuszak (CEO of CrowdEmotion), Javier Ruiz Diaz (Policy Director of Open Rights Group) and Simon Rice (Group Manager for Technology of the Information Commissioner’s Office). This is a report of the event and its findings.