I am lucky. When I was little I was the youngest of four — two boys and two girls because of that my parents would choose movies and TV shows based off of what they thought the whole group could enjoy. I ended up watching a healthy dose of everything from superhero movies (R.I.P. Chadwick) to movies with action packed car scenes and there were a few Disney princesses sprinkled in between. I grew up thinking, not just from my parents, but from the media I consumed, that humans could do anything. Only later did I start to discern that certain types of humans were more so portrayed as being superheroes.
That realization not only affected the way I viewed myself, but it also affected the way I viewed others consciously and subconsciously. If it weren’t for having a strong community around me as well as having a weekly TV consumption threshold imposed by my parents, I am not sure where my confidence level would be.
Some may think that understanding content consumption is frivolous, but contrary to previous thought there are now multiple studies suggesting that the brain is malleable well beyond early adulthood. We understand the importance of content consumption for young children, which is one of the reasons why parental controls have become so important, but many researchers are now able to prove that content consumption affects the brain of any person, regardless of age. This is illustrated in studies such as ‘The Fox News Effect’ published by the Quarterly Journal of Economics, ‘Digital Media May Be Changing How You Think’ published by Dartmouth and ‘The Power of TV…’. Right now there are estimates that the average teen has seen over 200,000 acts of violence on television by age 18 and as of late 2018 the Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that other than working and sleeping, Americans are more likely to be watching TV above doing anything else. These statistics and papers if nothing else, showcase the power of media.
This is the reason why I started looking into a way to provide more information, to anyone who wants it, about the content they consume. I am building a database of movies that passes both the Duvernay and Bechdel Tests with the end goal of using this database to create a machine learning tool that can help any person identify if a piece of content passes the tests or not, without them having to watch it themselves. In order to have the most accurate tool possible thousands of pieces of content need to be manually rated so we can train and deploy the algorithm.
A list of the movies already rated are in the table below. If you are interested in this project or just have a few moments to rate a movie you recently watched please complete this survey ©.
The idea provide knowledge about what they are watching and how the content they consume may or may not be influencing how they view and/or treat others. I see so many more use cases for an AI algorithm that does this work, but would love to hear from you.
What would you love to know about a movie, Youtube video or web series prior to watching it?
