Posts Tagged ‘civil discourse’
“If you want to understand today you have to search yesterday”*…
The redoubtable Brewster Kahle on the dangerous ephemerality of civil discourse in our digital times…
Many have now seen how, when someone deletes their Twitter account, their profile, their tweets, even their direct messages, disappear. According to the MIT Technology Review, around a million people have left so far, and all of this information has left the platform along with them. The mass exodus from Twitter and the accompanying loss of information, while concerning in its own right, shows something fundamental about the construction of our digital information ecosystem: Information that was once readily available to you—that even seemed to belong to you—can disappear in a moment.
Losing access to information of private importance is surely concerning, but the situation is more worrying when we consider the role that digital networks play in our world today. Governments make official pronouncements online. Politicians campaign online. Writers and artists find audiences for their work and a place for their voice. Protest movements find traction and fellow travelers. And, of course, Twitter was a primary publishing platform of a certain U.S. president.
If Twitter were to fail entirely, all of this information could disappear from their site in an instant. This is an important part of our history. Shouldn’t we be trying to preserve it?
I’ve been working on these kinds of questions, and building solutions to some of them, for a long time. That’s part of why, over 25 years ago, I founded the Internet Archive. You may have heard of our “Wayback Machine,” a free service anyone can use to view archived web pages from the mid-1990’s to the present. This archive of the web has been built in collaboration with over a thousand libraries around the world, and it holds hundreds of billions of archived webpages today–including those presidential tweets (and many others). In addition, we’ve been preserving all kinds of important cultural artifacts in digital form: books, television news, government records, early sound and film collections, and much more.
The scale and scope of the Internet Archive can give it the appearance of something unique, but we are simply doing the work that libraries and archives have always done: Preserving and providing access to knowledge and cultural heritage…
While we have had many successes, it has not been easy… companies close, and change hands, and their commercial interests can cut against preservation and other important public benefits. Traditionally, libraries and archives filled this gap. But in the digital world, law and technology make their job increasingly difficult. For example, while a library could always simply buy a physical book on the open market in order to preserve it on their shelves, many publishers and platforms try to stop libraries from preserving information digitally. They may even use technical and legal measures to prevent libraries from doing so. While we strongly believe that fair use law enables libraries to perform traditional functions like preservation and lending in the digital environment, many publishers disagree, going so far as to sue libraries to stop them from doing so.
We should not accept this state of affairs. Free societies need access to history, unaltered by changing corporate or political interests. This is the role that libraries have played and need to keep playing…
A important plea, eminently worth reading in full: “Our Digital History Is at Risk,” from @brewster_kahle @internetarchive.
* Pearl S. Buck
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As we prioritize preservation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that MGM released the first in what would be a long series of Tom and Jerry cartoons (though neither character was named in this inaugural outing, and one of the animators referred to them as Jasper and Jinx… Tom and Jerry were their monikers from the second cartoon, on). The basic premise was the one that would become familiar to audiences: “cat stalks and chases mouse in a frenzy of mayhem and slapstick violence.” Though studio executives were unimpressed, audiences loved the film, and it was nominated for an Academy Award.
Find Tom and Jerry at The Internet Archive.
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”*…
But in what does the “continent”– our community– consist? Further to yesterday’s piece on Epicureanism, Noah Smith argues that the internet has changed what “community” means…
… I think the kind of communities we inhabit has simply changed. In the past, our communities were primarily horizontal — they were simply the people we lived close to on the surface of the Earth. Increasingly, though, new technology has enabled us to construct communities that I’ve decided to call vertical — groups of people united by identities, interests, and values rather than by physical proximity… for most of history, most of the people you interacted with most of the time were the people who lived near to you — your horizontal community.
Horizontal communities can often be stifling and repressive, because they impose community norms on people with a diverse array of occupations, temperaments, and backgrounds. Sinclair Lewis’ novel Main Street is a great depiction of the ever-present, crushing conformity pressure of small American towns in the 1910s. But that social pressure was nothing compared to the pogroms, inquisitions, and genocides that enforced religious, cultural, and racial homogeneity in many of the world’s horizontal communities — and which still do, in some parts of the world.
When the people around you pressure you to be the same as them, you can use exit, voice, or loyalty — you can knuckle under and conform, you can fight back and rebel, or you can simply leave and find some place that you fit in better. A lot of immigration to the U.S. was driven by misfits looking for communities where they didn’t stick out as much. In the latter half of the 20th century, Americans themselves sorted into different parts of the country in order to create pockets of local political homogeneity.
In fact, our use of the word “community” to describe racial, religious, and sexuality groups is probably a relic of an ugly pattern of history, in which minorities were forced to live in circumscribed, segregated areas — Chinatowns, ghettos, the Castro in San Francisco — either by law, or by mass violence that made them unwelcome elsewhere…
But then the internet came along, and everything changed. Suddenly we stopped being isolated and started being social again, through the windows of our laptop screens and phone screens. There was a whole world of human interaction waiting there for us — forums, social media feeds, chat apps, online games, and so on. Suddenly we were surrounded by people all the time — or at least, their written words, and perhaps once in a while their pictures or videos or voices.
Constant internet usage allowed us to organize a far greater percentage of our human interaction around vertical communities. It let us find the people we identified with and interact with them, rather than being forced to interact with whoever was close to us on the map. We could surround ourselves with other anime fans, or other Muslims, or other economists, or other trans people — and we did. What were once notional bonds of connection that existed mostly in our minds became Facebook groups and subreddits and loose networks of Twitter contacts. And those spaces developed their own norms, rules, customs, and institutions, because now, thanks to the internet, it was easy to do that…
The identity-based “communities” that people talk about are thus no longer simply shorthand for a notion of cultural or political affinity with distant people, or for a fading memory of segregated neighborhoods. They’re thriving online verticals — archipelagos of online spaces where people can go to talk about what it means to be gay, or Jewish, or Pakistani. And like the small towns of Sinclair Lewis’ day, these vertical communities have the ability to use social ostracism to punish those who deviate from consensus norms and political objectives.
At the same time, horizontal communities didn’t completely vanish. We still educate our children in physical space (more or less), meaning we still have to deal with other children’s parents in a local community. Local government policies rule many of the aspects of our lives that are still offline — food, public safety, housing, transport — and this means we have to go to city planning meetings and school board meetings and various other community forums to hash out our differences with people who don’t share our interests or our identities. We now live in a world where our communities exist in three dimensions — the familiar hodgepodge of local humanity in two dimensions, and our self-sorted online spaces in a third.
And this dichotomy presents an enormous challenge to our institutions… for now and for the foreseeable future, our public goods are provided locally, but our social interaction happens in the cloud. In theory, this could be a dangerous recipe…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Vertical Communities” from @Noahpinion.
* John Donne
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As we find our folks, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933 that The Lone Ranger debuted on Detroit’s WXYZ radio station. Created and written by station-owner George Trendle and Fran Striker (who went on to create the Green Hornet and Sgt. Preston of the Yukon), they aimed create an American version of Zorro. Though (or perhaps because) they worked with no real knowledge of Texas in the period, their creation became an American icon, succeeding on radio, television, in comic books, film shorts, feature films, books, and newspaper strips.
“The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do”*…
André Forget with an appreciation of an all-too-timely classic…
One hundred years ago, a young American journalist named Walter Lippmann published a book called Public Opinion. Though it is one of the most important books of the twentieth century and still acknowledged as a foundational text in the study of social psychology, media, and propaganda, its centenary has passed, for the most part, unacknowledged. This is ironic, because its central question—put simply, “How can a truly self-governing society function under the conditions of ‘mass culture’?”—has rarely been more relevant. Our current debates about disinformation and the pernicious effects of social media could be rather more productive if the participants would bother to read Lippmann—not because Lippmann provides any workable solutions, but because his analysis of the extent of the problem is so clear-eyed.
…
Lippmann’s book stands as the first attempt to comprehensively explain how individual psychology, political and social movements, and the mass media both create and unravel shared experiences of reality. The argument he lays out is fairly straightforward: Most of what we think we know about the world has been filtered down to us through external sources, and this information creates a sort of mental map, a collection of simplified representations of the world that help us navigate it more effectively. Inevitably, the accuracy and detail of our maps is directly related to our individual needs and interests—my mental map, for example, contains a great deal of information about Canadian literature, and almost none about how my computer works—but even the things we think we know are mostly just agglomerations of facts we’ve taken on trust from people and institutions relaying them at second- or third-hand. My confidence in saying that reality as I understand it corresponds to the real environment around me is a barometer of my faith in the sources of my information.
The mental maps we carry in our heads determine how we will act in the world, though they will not determine the outcomes of our actions. If I believe that Alaska has white sand beaches, I might book a holiday in Anchorage, but I will probably be disappointed after I arrive. While personal experience can help us correct misconceptions, not everyone can have personal experience of everything that affects their life, so the more abstracted from our personal experience a problem becomes, the more we will need to rely on the guidance and expertise of others. But these guides and experts are also finite individuals who must rely, in turn, on guidance and expertise from other sources, and the information they provide is shaded by their own prejudices and interests, as well as the inevitable distortions and elisions involved in any process of simplification and transmission…
If Lippmann is basically right—and it seems difficult, then as now, to argue that he isn’t—then the implications for democracy are troubling. When we invoke the rule of “the people,” we are invoking an abstraction, because the public body is in fact made up of an endless array of sets and classes and interests, cultivated and then pandered to by opinion-mongers and press barons who inflame the worst impulses of their audiences in order to create a steady market for their content. This is the opposite of the sort of feverish conspiracy about how the press works that cranks of all kinds have stipulated. If there is a larger purpose at work, it is generally of the most venal sort, often directed by nothing more than the need to present an opinion opposite to that of one’s competitor. If you squint, something like consensus may emerge during one moment of crisis or another, but it is usually illusory, and always fleeting.
…
Arguments about the relationship between freedom and information are present in the founding of modern democracy. A decade before the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Britain, the rebel John Adams had argued that “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” But the president John Adams sang a different tune when “general knowledge” became a threat to his administration. Seen from a certain angle, the Sedition Act of 1798 is the U.S. government’s first attempt to combat disinformation. The relationship between a truly free press and functional democratic government has been strained from the beginning, and if the tension between the two seemed particularly fraught in Lippmann’s age, it wasn’t for the first or the last time…
Walter Lippmann’s seminal work identified a fundamental problem for modern democratic society that remains as pressing—and intractable—as ever: “Public Opinion at 100,” from @ayforget in @BulwarkOnline. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
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As we contemplate civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that The (New York) Sun ran an editorial entitled “Is There a Santa Claus?” Written by Francis Pharcellus Church in response to a letter from 8 year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, it is now remembered best by one of its lines: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
“The things right in front of us are often the hardest to see”*…
Fake news, like conjuring, plays on our weaknesses — but, as Tim Harford explains, with a little attention, we can fight back…
Why do people — and by “people” I mean “you and I” — accept and spread misinformation? The two obvious explanations are both disheartening. The first is that we are incapable of telling the difference between truth and lies. In this view, politicians and other opinion-formers are such skilled deceivers that we are helpless, or the issues are so complex that they defy understanding, or we lack basic numeracy and critical-thinking skills. The second explanation is that we know the difference and we don’t care. In order to stick close to our political tribe, we reach the conclusions we want to reach.
There is truth in both these explanations. But is there a third account of how we think about the claims we see in the news and on social media — an account that, ironically, has received far too little attention? That account centres on attention itself: it suggests that we fail to distinguish truth from lies not because we can’t and not because we won’t, but because — as with Robbins’s waistcoat — we are simply not giving the matter our focus.
What makes the problem worse is our intuitive overconfidence that we will notice what matters, even if we don’t focus closely. If so, the most insidious and underrated problem in our information ecosystem is that we do not give the right kind of attention to the right things at the right time. We are not paying enough attention to what holds our attention.
The art of stage magic allows us to approach this idea from an unusual angle: Gustav Kuhn’s recent book, Experiencing the Impossible, discusses the psychology of magic tricks.
“All magic can be explained through misdirection alone,” writes Kuhn, a psychologist who runs the Magic Lab at Goldsmiths, University of London. Such a strong claim is debatable, but what is beyond debate is that the control and manipulation of attention are central to stage magic. They are also central to understanding misinformation. The Venn diagram of misinformation, misdirection and magic has overlaps with which to conjure.
[There follows a fascinating unpacking of the relevance of misdirection to to misinformation…]
We retweet misinformation because we don’t think for long enough to see that it is misinformation. We obsess over bold lies, not realising that their entire purpose is to obsess us. We see one thing and assume it is another, even though we are only deceiving ourselves. We will argue in favour of policies that we opposed seconds ago, as long as we can be distracted long enough to flip our political identities in a mirror.
And behind all this is the grand meta-error: we have no intuitive sense that our minds work like this. We fondly imagine ourselves to be sharper, more attentive and more consistent than we truly are. Our own brains conspire in the illusion, filling the vast blind spots with plausible images.
But if you decide to think carefully about the headlines, or the data visualisations that adorn news websites, or the eye-catching statistics that circulate on social media, you may be surprised: statistics aren’t actually stage magic. Many of them are telling us important truths about the world, and those that are lies are usually lies that we can spot without too much trouble.
Pay attention; get some context; ask questions; stop and think. Misinformation doesn’t thrive because we can’t spot the tricks. It thrives because, all too often, we don’t try. We don’t try, because we are confident that we already did…
Simple, but profoundly important, wisdom: “What magic teaches us about misinformation,” from @TimHarford. eminently worth reading in full. (Originally appeared in the Financial Times Magazine, from whence the illustration above.)
Related: the Barnum (or Forer) Effect
* Apollo Robbins, world-famous pickpocket and illusionist
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As we dissect disinformation, we might spare a thought for Oscar Hammerstein; he died on this date in 1919. As a newly-arrived immigrant to the U.S., Hammerstein worked in a cigar factory, where he discovered ways to automate the rolling process. He patented his innovation and made a fortune– which he promptly reinvested in his true passions, music and the arts. Possessed of a sharp sense of design and an equally good acoustical sense, he built and ran theaters and concert halls, becoming one of Americas first great impressarios… a fact worth honoring, as history tends to overlook “Oscar the First” in favor of his grandson, Oscar Hammerstein II, the gifted librettist/lyricist and partner of Richard Rodgers.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”*…
The number of American university students selecting history as their chosen four year degree has been on the decline since the 1970s…
Tanner Greer (@Scholars_Stage) considers four possible reasons– and what they portend: “The Fall of History as a Major–and as a Part of the Humanities.”
(Image at top: source)
* George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905
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As we ponder the practicality of the past, we might we might celebrate a major contribution to the study of history; it was on this date in 1799 (or close; scholars agree that it was “mid-July” but disagree on the precise day) that a French soldier in Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign discovered a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles north of Alexandria.
The stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts inscribed by priests of Ptolemy V in the second century B.C.– Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Egyptian demotic. The Greek passage proclaimed that the three scripts were all of identical meaning– so allowed French Egyptologist Jean Francois Champollion to decipher the hieroglyphics… and opened the language of ancient Egypt, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly two millennia.
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