Category: Media

Fake Fears, Legit Fears . . . and Fears of the Undefinable

Happy? Thanksgiving?

Yes, it’s still a beautiful world in  many respects.  So as we head into the holidays with visions of impeachments dancing in our heads, let us rejoice that: we are not in a nuclear war; Donald Trump has not assumed dictatorial powers; William Barr is about to resign in disgrace;* Adam Schiff has not been assassinated (as of this writing); Russia has not annexed the whole of Ukraine; New York City is still above sea level; more than a dozen elephants remain in the wild;  Ruth Bader Ginsburg lives on; and Artificial Intelligence has still not determined that it’s worth taking over this messy, irrational, bigotry-infested world. 

You have much to be thankful for. You can be thankful that, despite much Fox News/National Enquirer-generated fake news, we do not have on our southern border hordes of raping, thieving, murderous people  itching to invade the U.S. and take away our jobs; Ukraine is not hacking our elections although Russia has and is; a non-negligible number of Americans actually understand the value of the rule of law; wind turbines do not cause cancer;  the mainstream media are not Enemies of the People; vaccines do not cause autism; Hillary Clinton is not running a child sex ring; a majority of Americans actually do believe that guns kill people; George Soros has no plan to undermine the American political system.

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Hijacking the Reading Circuit: Are Screens Robbing Children of Comprehension?

Too much, too fast, too fragmented. Is there more to it?

Ever since the internet began to deluge our brains with an unceasing flow of information—meaning both raw data, and raw data given structure in the act of “informing”—intellectuals have been sounding alarms over the impacts on our thinking processes. There is a consensus, even among boosters of new data-heavy technology, that we need to take  a hard look at those impacts and what they portend for the future of our society.

Nicholas Carr devoted a book to the subject in 2010, entitled The Shallows. His book begins with Carr’s self-observations on how his internet information-gathering practices have infused his thinking with a shorter attention span, lack of follow-through on reading material, and a propensity to jump to shaky inferences based on short, superficial snippets of information.  He makes the case that these phenomena have spread throughout internet userdom (now, most of our society), to the detriment of deep comprehension and wisdom.  (I’m not sure Carr used the word “wisdom”—it might sound a little sententious, and I read the book years ago—but if he didn’t use it I doubt he’d object to my imputing the idea to him.)

Carr—and many others preaching similar messages —puts an emphasis on  distraction as the main threat to deeper thinking.  How can you concentrate on any one train of thought when there are so many intercommunicating trains crowding the station, tempting you to hop on board via hyperlink?  And take you to yet another crowded station with yet more bright and shiny hyperlinks?

How right is he?  Is Carr’s examination of The Shallows too shallow?

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“They don’t understand how it works.” Information Technology and the Queasy Underbelly of Democracy

Politicians low on the tech learning curve

Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, and chief architect of the Trump-assisting “defeat crooked Hillary” campaign, commenting on his testimony before the (U.S.) House Intelligence Committee, said “They’re politicians, they’re not technical. They don’t understand how it works.”

The exploits of Cambridge Analytica in suppressing votes and unleashing torrents of misinformation and flat-out falsities upon the data rivers of social media got (as usual, excellent) coverage by The Guardian in this piece dated March 21, 2018: Cambridge Analytica’s Assault on Decency For more on Nix, the Facebook data breaches, and the “crooked Hillary” campaign.

This echoes a theme emerging from previous U.S. Congressional hearings dealing with social media: politicians are way out of their depth in advanced information technology. As Nix, says, they simply do not understand how it works.

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Public Interest Algorithms and the Jungle of Earth Two

Public Interest Algorithms: An idea whose time has come, and  will quickly be shelved by free-market ideology

Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has proposed a technical measure to defend against the trend of social media to divide us: Public Interest Algorithms.  See this in the Brookings Institution website: Wheeler on Public Interest Algorithms

Tom Wheeler is a very smart guy, so why has he poisoned his concept by branding it as a public interest initiative?  In an era when free-market ideologues hold sway over the intransigent core of Republicans in Congress, and Silicon Valley is jam-packed with libertarians, anything that smacks of public interest is derided as an instrument of the Nanny State.  If you can’t legislate restaurants to stop providing super-sized soft drinks to their customers (a clear public health hazard), how are you going to keep at bay the Sultans of Social Media who will fight tooth and nail against public interest algorithms tampering with their business models?

A current Senate hearing on Russian meddling with U.S. elections via social media finds Facebook and Twitter PR spinners making conciliatory noises while at the same time holding fast to their narrative of social media as the best outlets for the freest flow of information ever conceived of by the human race.  The problem with this narrative is the unbounded nature of the “flow.”  It’s not like a stream that gathers the contributions of multiple tributaries and flows in a direction (toward the truth or at least a wide consensus). It’s not even like a river that has overleapt its banks in a flood, since a flood, too, still has a recognizable shape and direction.  It is a deluge pounding down anywhere and everywhere, a Hurricane Harvey hovering over continents. The “public interest” is a drowning victim.

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Coping in the Data Ocean

Our Oceanic Data Environment and the Paradox of Choice

What is it like to be a bat? is the  title of a paper by Thomas Nagel in the Philosophical Review in October 1974 that is widely quoted and discussed among philosophers.  But you don’t have to be a philosopher to see that the question goes straight to the mystery of consciousness. Is the consciousness of a bat anything like ours? What about a wolverine, a gecko, a sea urchin?

How does an  animal’s environment shape its consciousness? You’d expect that the consciousness of a wandering albatross, who spends months at a time on the wing without ever touching land, has to be wildly different from that of a mole who spends most of its time underground in the space of half an acre.

For more on wandering albatross flight, see this will blow your mind

It’s all very well to imagine yourself a wandering albatross. It sounds like a glorious life, untethered by our bonds to mere stationary places and to people who do not soar thousands of miles at a stretch.

But, what is it like to be a fish?

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Fake News Ain’t the Half of It

“Fake News” is getting a lot of heat these days from some of us who actually believe that truth is better than untruth—those of us who are being forcibly dragged into the “post-truth” era.

As if “post-truth” were something new. Actually, we’ve been drifting into the post-truth fog for quite some time now.  In Virtual Unreality, Charles Seife (2014) chronicles the many ways in which the digital revolution and its star attraction, the Internet, have been masking, warping, and turning upside-down our perceptions of the world and even each other.  A pedestrian example is how easily one can manipulate one’s Facebook persona into one loosely based on, and more attractive than, the original—more good-looking, more cool, more talented, more sociable, more with it.  As the joke goes, “on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog,” and no one knows whether what you’re feeding them is bullshit.

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