Its all coming together Part Two
May 13, 2010
So in Part One I tried to persuade you that we are living in the transition between two scientific and technological epochs or to use Kuhn’s terms ‘scientific paradigms’. Epoch One lasted until 1930s when Turing published “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in reply to Godels work on his incompleteness theorem and set in train the start of formal exploration of cybernetics and artificial intelligence and its counter-point; the examination of the human mind using physical and mathematical means.
At that point in time (well, that generation) there was also a crux in mathematics and physics as the mathematics of complexity and quantum physics started to come to the fore. A new paradigm was born either side of WWII and it had nothing to do with steam power or communication networks. It was a change in the fundamental endeavour of science from automating and enhancing things that our bodies do (higher, faster, more accurately, stronger, bigger, further) towards doing things that our minds do (smarter, with more empathy, more responsibly, more beautifully, happier).
In understanding this we can start to understand how the current changes in communication networks, democratic engagement and the changing role of journalism fit together with wider technical and societal changes.
For example, if we accept that the internet represents a vast and near universally accessible library of all fact and opinion (which is questionable right now, but we’re closer now than ever before) then the role of the journalist is equatable to the role of the academic librarian or research assistant. Send them to seek and sooner or later they will find. Sounds like something to automate, yes ? Absolutely ! In fact lets start a company, call it Google and make cash off the back of advertising through it as millions of folk send out their own librarians to find the information that they want. Dead easy. Also at its most basic its a simple piece of maths in the ‘causal’ vein, but Google is a bit smarter and uses users to provide relativistic data in its performance so that the next search is incrementally more probable to meet the next users requirements. Up the ladder of sophistication we go.
What Google can’t do is generate opinion to kick its performance up the ladder. That is a function of mind. That is you telling the librarian “No, that’s not quite the sort of data I want. Bring me books with more blue on the cover”. Google’s vast size allows it to ape mind function, but it still us that dictate page rank in the end.
So there are different approaches towards this automation of mind.
There is the world of computation, where patterns are sought in vast data sets and those patterns linked to probability functions which relate to success or failure. Computation assumes that all answers are available somewhere in the information universe and that calculations are maps to find the answers. Where uncertainty exists a set of the most likely answers can be gathered and presented a la Wolfram Alpha.
There is the Google way of hiding behind stolen opinions and making believe that intelligence exists.
And there is the human way of just having more minds available operating with access to data that has a higher level of sophistication (its called education).
We don’t yet have a functional model of consciousness. We’ve been working on it for 70 years give or take, but we’re not there yet and there are doubts whether we yet have the tools to get there. My own suspicion is that just as the electronic age required a new physics and maths to advance, the age of the mind will too. We need to really understand quantum computing and strange effects like entanglement to get anywhere close to having the brute computing power of the human brain.
So again how does this affect journalism and democracy. Well for all the cost efficiencies of news aggregators, the multiplicity of voices in the ether means that journalism has two very different routes.
The first is as computer engineer designing search algorithms to seek out the juiciest data and re-present it a la carte. Quite frankly that role will not last long as available compute power rises. It is also the least sophisticated solution. Its cause and effect. ‘The data is now there, so lets go and get it’.
The second route is to abandon objectivity as core to definition of journalism. This is the more sophisticated route to take. Actually take the time and make the effort to have a valid opinion. Use the mind to its greatest advantage. Embrace plurality as a mode of expression. BUT you have to educate everyone to make sure that they too may have access to the same raw data and be able to understand it, in order to be able to critically assess your opinion.
So bloggers are a potential future, so are twitterers or whatever comes next, but only if we are smart enough to understand what is being said and why.
That’s all for now. I’m having a break from thinking in order to earn some money.
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
Bracketed Text
December 23, 2009
We had a view into the surreal world of UN negotiations last week at the COP15 climate talks in Copenhagen. It is rare to see texts as they are negotiated in this sort of international conference, the diplomats are usually more discrete and the games more cloak and dagger than they are played out in public.
This month we saw texts as they were negotiated and the phenomenon of ‘the bracketed text’ became common currency. What these texts refer to are points of negotiation, so in this case [1C][1.5C][2C] would refer to a level of temperature rise that would be acceptable under the terms of that version of the text.
To me what is interesting here is the negotiation of a future reality that bears little relation to a definite physical reality. There is political reality (that’d be 2C), there is scientific reality (that’d be 1.5C) and there is an ideological reality (1C). In and around the conference we saw world leaders, commentators and activists who subscribed to one or other of the realities presented in the text.
A binding agreement that attempted to achieve the 1C target would lead to a very different world to that of a 2C target. We don’t know what any of the three worlds would look like, so which real is real ?
The screen-life ironic
December 3, 2009
I think that maybe I’m a bit of a weirdo.
There are aspects of life that most people consider private, closed to debate, embarrassing, secret, even forbidden. I haven’t a clue what they are. Does that mean that I am a deviant from the social norm ? I’d say not unless we understand what the social norms are saying about what life should be.
Lets start with an easy one;
I don’t find watching trashy movies embarrassing. In fact I love bad effects, cliched dialogue, non-sensicle plots and ham acting. To me that is real life. I can imagine floating through space with a plastic-faced alien who magically speaks English.
Ken Loach and the whole ‘gritty urban realism’ thing isn’t my life. I can’t imagine wanting to imagine being trapped in a loveless marriage in a towerblock in Burnley. I’ve nothing against Burnley I just can’t imagine wanting to be there. I don’t have a pregnant teenage daughter and a crack addicted pit bull. That’s not realistic to me, it’s just depressing. I’m not being anti-intellectual or dismissing the plight of the inner cities, I’m failing to be entertained by entertainment.
The question is what is ironic here ?
(Just so there’s no misunderstanding, throughout this post I will be using the word ‘ironic’ in the dramatic sense of multiple meanings, rather than the more popular, comic sense of wry humour)
Is it that as someone who is considered in the top quartile intellectually (smug) I like ‘poor quality’ entertainment ? Or is it that precautionary tales told without irony are considered entertainment ? The thing is the nearest programming that I can think of as equivalent to the high-brow precautionary tales of urban realism in the ‘low rent’ end of the market is ‘You’ve Been Framed!” which is unashamedly pitched as entertainment. I bet you never saw Ken Loach and You’ve Been Framed as sharing a common gene 
I have no problem watching real people being hit in the face with a tennis ball, I might even laugh once I’ve got over the wince reflex. I just don’t feel the same way about urban realism. I can’t relate to it. Its not as if I haven’t lived in some pretty rough areas in South Manchester. Places where small riots go unreported and firebombings are not unknown. While I was there we had an armed home invasion where my friends and I barricaded ourselves into our living room for our own protection until the armed response unit got there, another time the police used my bedroom as a surveillance post during a spate of local burglaries, and yet I’m not entertained by re-enactments of grimness.
Terrible things happen in the world all the time and sometimes I even do something about them, but that doesn’t mean that I want to pay to watch them. Twist them around a bit and I’m fine. Make the pedo a wicked witch, make the thug a sith lord and set it all in Oz. I don’t care. At least show that some imagination has gone into it, then I may find it entertaining. Then I might find it relevant to my life. I’m Homer Simpson in A Star is Burns
Does that mean that I can only deal with representations of the real world if presented to me ironically ? Or that involve sporting equipment and pain ? No, of course not. I watch the news. I engage in debate.
The acceptable social norm is for me to be a concerned and engaged citizen. Actually its not really. Its to be a vocally concerned and physically unengaged individual. But we say its the first because it sounds like we care. It is acceptable for me to sound like I care. The norm is hypocrisy.
So is the social norm itself ironic ? or am I just disappearing up my own post-modern ass ?
Twitterstorms
October 31, 2009
Unashamedly focussed on a single news article this one, but it is very close to my heart and my area of academic interest.
Read this link to a story at The Guardian, think about it then get back to this blog if you want to.
OK. So we understand the concept. A technologically and socially adept set of first adopters have a tool that is globally visible, but exclusionary since not everyone can use it and not everyone can read or write meaning in 140 characters. What the article doesn’t mention is that twitter is also socially exclusionary since not everyone can use their phones at work, not everyone can afford to access it, some people sleep at different times and it is language specific (discourse is in the local language).
Right now, as the article correctly identifies, the twitterati are dominated by younger, liberal-minded, outward looking, technically and media savvy people. There is not a full representation of political and social diversity. You have to pay your way into the scene by learning ‘the language’ and buying the service and, of course, spending time interacting.
I’ve tried it, same as I tried Facebook and MySpace. They all take a great deal of effort to maintain at a level where you gain credibility (or friends or followers or disciples or whatever) outside your existing social circle. Whats different with micro-blogging is the speed and fluidity that the few million users can jump on and off emotive topics and the willingness that they have to transfer those emotions to offline actions.
Don’t have any delusions about the changing of minds happening within the twittersphere. No sane person changes an opinion that is already formed based upon a 140 character message or two. However what it could motivate is action on extant opinion.
Like the guy at the pub who suggests the curry. We all like curry, we’re all hungry after a few pints, we just hadn’t considered a curry tonight, but it sounds like a good idea. Lets do it.
Of course there could be downsides to this rapid response. To stretch the curry analogy; we’d be £20 lighter the next morning (we have spent time, money and effort participating in the twitterstorm) and may have a bad stomach (the results of the twitterstorm may not be what we personally wanted).
So there are risks attached to crowd-sourced actions based upon reactions to events. In that it is similar to democracy, but it is a very skewed democracy where information access is asymmetrical and the demos is selected.
Most times in a democracy the group takes collective responsibility for collective action until such time as it is no longer immediately relevant who suggested that action. If we can find out who initiated an action within a day or an hour of that action, what does that say for the quality and breadth of debate in such a speedy ‘democracy’ ?
I like to think about actions which I know will have consequences for others before I take them. I am analytical and make no apologies for that, but in the blink of an eye a twitterstorm seems to be able to effect superficial change. What does that say to me as someone who prefers to think for a day or two before I act ? Are my opinions irrelevant ? Is analysis dead and the wisdom of the crowd the only way forward ? Do we really believe that only emotion-led opinions are worthy of action ?
Hyperbolae of course. No-one is suggesting that everyone be given a twitterset and asked to opine on every option their elected government has, you’d be completely overloaded. As an individual in such a society you’d have to automate the routine decisions to reflect your already formed opinion, or tacitly approve through abstention.
We’re rapidly approaching the point where that automation is possible, but what about the opinion ? Do we set it through software user preferences ? Do we let a program learn our opinions by watching our real-world actions ? How would we sanction a program that failed to express our true opinion ?
I’ll leave you with this. I already automate my news gathering through an RSS aggregation tool. Its the only way that I can keep on top of the international scale topics that I look at. But that means that it excludes other news without consulting me. Am I forming my opinion ?
