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
Life logging and loosing yourself
May 2, 2010
In response to a couple of recent pieces on identity by Jeff Jarvis and one by Gary Wolfe of Wired on living by numbers.
It should be becoming obvious by now that I’m quite pragmatic about technologies, especially those that purport to replace mind function with mathematics, and these two threads are kind of along the same lines. Interesting, but not quite right. In fact Wolfe’s piece is quite wrong in some ways, but typical of the cyber-utopian and really getting very dull these days. We’ve had the net 20 years and its still a shiny box to be prayed to for some people. Get over it Wolfe and actually think about what you are saying ! Your words are more important than the technology.
Case in point; Wolfe’s piece describes a number of different strands to the general social and technological movement towards quantification and couples them with communication. Fine. No problems with that analysis. Automated diaries, blood sugar monitoring, chips in the soles of our shoes recording physical exercise, etc, etc, all feeding data into a set of databases that may or may not be accessible by other people to react to. A method of capturing all that time that is wasted without noticing it. A way to streamline activity. Be more productive. Really ?
Quote (of those subjecting themselves to self-tracking);
“they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.”
Apart from the obvious internal contradiction, I wonder whether Wolfe questioned what it is about self-tracking that appeals to the American psyche (as his pieces seems to imply). What it is about systematically removing the spontaneous actions from everyday life that is seen as a positive ? To me its disturbing that a dominant global culture seems so eager to stop thinking and to export the idea that contemplation is no longer a valid goal in itself. Does that imply that Americans believe that understanding of self can only come with unceasing, unidirectional activity. Not only that, but a piece of mathematics is in a better position to tell you what you need than your own mind. Do you trust yourself so little ?
Of course there are good things about the life logging movement. Medical diagnostics is probably the best example, but the good things will tend to be the physical. Try as hard as you can to avoid trying to replicating mind functions. Please ? For me. Just this once.
This is where we cross into the issues around identity that JJ has been looking at. Online identity is something that I’ve dealt with professionally for the best part of a decade and I have to say, technically its no longer an interesting issue. However it is an interesting social and philosophical issue as we spend more and more time immersed in worlds made of other peoples imaginings.
The crucial thing to remember is that we cannot control how other people see us in a world where we can sprout wings and fly off to Brazil in a second. Identity as a projection of self is no longer irreducible if your existence is mediated. So while there is value in being able to prove that you are who you say you are in a transactional sense, there is less and less value in communicating who you are in a personal sense. Question; what is a hate crime in 2nd life ?
Scientific Method as Strasberg’s Method
March 3, 2010
We’ve been hearing a great deal about science in the media in the context of climate change and new energy sources lately, and the quality of some scientific work has been called into doubt, and there have been calls for an increased understanding of science to try and stop misrepresentation by the media, blah, blah, blah. This call for dialogue between the fields of arts and sciences is happening on more and more occasions as science gets more difficult and mass media becomes less patient. Anyone still remember CP Snow ? So why don’t we look at things a slightly different way ?
Science is media
That sounds a bit odd, but philosophically science is a mechanism by which we try to understand the physical reality that we inhabit and mass media (especially news journalism) is also a mechanism to help understand the world around us. Their methods are different but their core goals are the same – enhanced understanding of reality.
So lets look at some recent science through a media lens. In fact let’s get PoMo on its ass !
Marshall McLuhan in ‘The Medium is the Massage’ posits that you perform the message that you wish to communicate. It doesn’t matter if that is verbally, ethically, artistically, mathematically or physically, what you do and how you do it IS what you say. On the other side of the coin if your performance does not tie in with your message the audience undergoes cognitive dissonance and the message is garbled, contradictory and ineffective.
Strasberg’s Method Acting technique is a great example of this. The actor does everything in his power to become the character in order that his whole performance reflects the experience of that being, in so doing the words and the physical body perform as one and, hopefully, the role is played well. The actor doesn’t actually become the character, that would be impossible, but he will take on or construct every aspect of that character that he can discover.
So if we take the recent CRU email scandal (yes, scandal), we have a set of scientists who perform their science under the scientific method which involves openness, respect for others results and views, self-criticism, peer-review and data validation. Over the years they have told us ‘trust us, we’re the best, we do good science’, in effect we’re following the scientific method, and now we find out that their performance is not backed up by their method. We thought that we were seeing the real thing, or at least a good approximation of the real thing with the scientists suffering for their art, but we were sold a poor performance. A shallow frontage. Its like finding out that a character that Al Pacino plays never actually liked coffee but Pacino forced a re-write because he couldn’t go without his morning joe.
For the record and as a former scientist I find the actions of the CRU scientists abhorant, but human (I never lived up to my own view of what a scientist is, which is why no longer call myself one, though I still perform the role of scientific critic). For me the affair doesn’t detract from the credibility of climate science as a whole, but its disturbing that their performance was more Lee Majors than Lee Strasberg.
They need to get their method back.
The Virtual Revolution – An Overview
February 21, 2010
Its been an interesting experience seeing the net through another’s eyes, or in the case of this short series of programmes – an number of other peoples eyes.
If you’ve read the other posts in this series you’ll know my views on the specific topics raised, but I thought that I’d just put a little piece together on what I thought of the work as a whole.
It wasn’t bad. It was wrong in places, naive in others, superficial in yet more, but as an accessible work summarising 20 years of the biggest shared technological endeavour of my lifetime it was OK. Seven out of ten.
It was remarkably short of forward looking content, but then it was a historical piece rather than a forecasting piece. It was also short on deeper analysis of what the technological trends say about us as people and as a species, but then we are only really now starting to find ways of looking at that. And on that point I’ll promote the Web Behaviour Test in order to maximise the data that they can gather.
It characterised me as a Web Leopard;
Fast-moving – Web Leopards like you are adept at getting information from the internet very quickly. Your speed is a trait you share with real-world leopards, which are among the fastest land animals.
Solitary – Leopards live alone, fending for themselves in isolated home ranges. Similarly, the Web Leopard likes to go it alone when looking for information, rather than rely on social networks, or other sites where the users create the content.
Specialised – Web Leopards are best suited to performing one task at a time rather than multitasking. The real-world leopard is similarly specialised, being perfectly adapted to silently tracking its prey before pouncing.
So now you know; I’m a fast-moving, predatory loner with a narrow view, big teeth and an attractive pelt. So much for the internet 
The Virtual Revolution – Part Four
February 21, 2010
Part Four – Homo Interneticus sees the good Doctor approaching some of the more interesting questions regarding the internet, though she still doesn’t really do any digging into the whole shared cognition/nature of reality connundrum which is one of my current favorites.
So just to go through some of the points raised;
Has Facebook change the nature of friendship ? It turns out that no, its just re-branded it.
Your friends and social group are still the same number and mostly the same people that they would have been without the software.
Which begs the question; why is it so successful if it offers no new reach to your social circle ?
Prof Robin Dunbar casually dropped the bomb that apart from the 150-ish people that you can claim as your clan/social circle/address book everyone else on your friends list is probably just a voyeur. So has Facebook replaced the soap opera as the acceptable face of curtain twitching ? Find your own surrogate family to watch out of interest, only now its not the Duckworths or the Fowlers. In the UK we’ve seen soap opera viewing figures decline by 50% over the last 10 years or so, it’d be interesting to know how much is direct replacement activity.
Update – No, not soap operas, reality TV shows. Those surplus friends are our own personalised Big Brothers.
We had Sherry Turkle (great name !) talking about the consumption of the private person as a result of the action of ubiquitous sharing of thought and activity, and about feeling obliged to openness in the networked society.
I’m not sure what to think about that comment. I’m not sure if that is simply a misunderstanding of the type of openness that the net engenders or an attempt to big up the profession of the psychologist (of which she is one) as professional listeners, or am I confusing them with psychiatrists ?
For myself I’m only open to the degree that I want to be. I feel no compunction about not answering personal questions if asked on the web. I don’t volunteer my deepest and darkest secrets. I treat this form of mediated interaction as I would a conversation in a pub, and assume that the interested will continue to read and the rest will slope off to the bar and find a more apposite conversation.
Information overload and associative vs linear data storage/retrieval was the next big topic. One that is close to my heart. Here the programme missed a big opportunity in not addressing one of the fastest moving sectors of quantitative neuroscience and its philosophical implications for fields as diverse as democracy & law and the nature of the mind. I’m not going to delve into all that right here right now, that’s for a later date. Suffice it to say that the Obama web campaign is small fry if a mathematical model of mind can be shared.
I’m going to follow up with a bit of reading around Vannevar Bush and Prof David Nichols because I don’t know their work.
In her summary the doctor passed two comments that I’ll paraphrase as;
At its best the internet may be an equivalent to the serendipity of the city – meaning that the melting pot of ideas and beliefs that has produced most of modern world’s innovation in science, technology, art and commerce is there to be had in a free and open web. I agree utterly and completely, its just a shame that in its efforts for global reach it has become fragmented and balkanised, as subsumed by commercial and political interests as any piece of prime real estate.
And second; the the web has the power to liberate humanity. I’m not sure what from though, presumably the commercial and political interests, but it might be more interesting if it were to free us from the constraints of our own inhibitions and provide an opportunity to evolve our thoughts past division and towards unity. The global mind as it was suggested.
