Metaversal Mining

As I work towards my PhD I’m trying to develop an understanding of where new journalism fits into our new networked society. I think that its starting to come together, but its a bit deeper than I thought that it would be.
Here is my theoretical framework so far;

There are several parallel themes in society and technology. They cross and interact and, to a certain extent, some workers are getting confused about what they mean and how they will work together in the future.
These themes are specifically; the development of the internet and integration of networked living into more general societal settings, the collapse of business models that support conventional print journalism and so support the 4th estate model of democratic journalism, the rise of the open database/open government model, the rise of empirically or evidence supported policy-making (as opposed to ideologically motivated policy-making), the role of science in policy-making, the media portrayal and public understanding of science, the rise of advanced numerical neuroscience and (finally) the rise of the individual as a politically relevant actor.

Lots there, but we can simplify things.

First if we use the Kuhnian notion of scientific paradigms we can do two things. The first is to separate scientific advance into two core paradigms ‘Automation of Body’ and ‘Automation of Mind’. ‘Automation of Body’ is virtually all scientific and technological endeavour until Alan Turing proposed a computational mechanism that theoretically might be able to replicate the function of the human mind. ‘Automation of Mind’ is the development of mechanisms that enable mind function to be off-loaded or enhanced. At this point we must be careful of the distinction between mind function and brain function, but there is a relatively simple philosophical question that enables us to tell if a specific action falls into ‘Mind’ or ‘Body (which includes brain)’.
Ask yourself ‘Do my memories count for anything in this task’. If the answer is yes, then we are dealing with a mind function, if no then its a brain/body function. Its shorthand, but it seems to work most of the time. The reason why is something to do with how we form opinions and make memories, because we don’t do it in isolation from our prior experience or emotional responses. I may spend some time developing this idea.

So we can separate science into ‘Automation of Body’ and ‘Automation of Mind’. So what ?
Well, it allows us to analyse whether standard computational, mechanical, chemical or physical techniques can be applied to the problem or whether the more advanced mathematics of complexity and probablility, itterative evolutionary design or quantum mechanics need to be invoked.

Here we come to a second, probably more familiar, layer of Kuhnian scientific paradigm. I’m calling these three physical paradigms ‘causal’ (with broad parallels to Newtonian mechanics), ‘relativistic’ (parallels to Einsteinian physics) and ‘probabilistic’ (similar in ethos to Quantum Mechanics). I believe that we can use these three scientific paradigms to analyse the way that people understand their physical and social interactions.

By this I don’t mean that we can use quantum physics to describe how people understand shopping (sorry Sokol, not playing that particular game). What I mean is that we can have different modes of understanding depending on our situation. For example lets take a statement ‘war causes poverty’. It implies a direct causal relationship and I would call this a causal relationship. However we could say that ‘war causes more poverty’. This would be a relatavistic statement and would usually have qualifier “war causes more poverty than …”.
Lets go for a third statement ‘war usually causes more poverty’. This is a probablistic interpretation since it uses the language of probability to express uncertainty.
I don’t think that there is any doubt that the probabalistic statement is more factually accurate than the causal, but if we didn’t know that there are vast profits to be made by some in supplying the materiel for war the statement would not make sense. We could say that it is also a more advanced and nuanced argument showing a higher degree of sophistication.

So again. So what ?
Because so much of what we call news is a representation of our physical and social universes the way that it is reported embodies much of our personal understanding of that universe. That understanding can be in terms of simple causal relationship (e.g. Katrina flooded New Orleans), in terms of value judgments (e.g. World Better Off Without Saddam) or probabilistic interpretation (e.g. Climate Chaos Likely). We’re sort of flirting with linguistics here, but I trying not to.

So that’s the basics;
We have a two-layer understanding of science and technological progress, with the movement towards ‘Automation of Body’ underlying most of our time as mankind and only recently the movement towards ‘Automation of Mind’ has got started though mathematically it started in the 1950s and we have been working on the technology to be able to pursue it since then.
There is currently a great deal of misunderstanding about the dividing line between mind and body, with many workers, in the physical sciences especially, overestimating the reach of the numerical understanding of the universe. We are only now really starting to understand brain function using fMRI and other techniques but as we get closer to that goal we will inevitably get closer to the ‘Automation of Mind’ paradigm and we are starting to see the confusion as our understanding start to cross over between the two. We’re not there yet.

That all appears to have no relevance to new journalism, democracy or political engagement.
Untrue.
If we consider evidence-based policy making as a desirable outcome, facilitated by open discussion and access to all available data then value judgments must, per force, be relegated in importance within government.
With the movement towards open databases, e-government and the like much of what currently constitutes journalistic endeavour can be automated, and if the current objectivity fetish persists journalists will, and indeed should, be programmed out of the loop because they will only introduce their own value judgments. (At this point we can talk about Herman & Chomsky and the impossibility of objective reporting within a corporate media framework, but this false concept of ‘journalistic objectivity’ works just as well within a game theoretic framework, and maybe even within a fairly humdrum psychological interpretation).

So ‘Automation of Body’ must result in the elimination of human journalists as purveyors of opinion ? Well yes & no, but only if journalism insists on objectivity as a core goal and value. This has not always been the case. back in the 1800s, journals used to be recognised as opinion pieces rather than factual accounts. The blogging movement may be an equivalent to a return to the opinion piece. Few commentators would say that bloggers are a fountain of truth. And here we start to see echos of Habermas’ Public Sphere.

End of Part One